The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  A good introduction to the life of Whitman is the article by Mark Van Doren in the Dictionary of American Biography (1936), and the well-written Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman (1980). Walt Whitman: Complete Prose & Selected Prose and Letters, Emory Holloway, ed., is in an attractive Nonesuch Press edition (1938, 1964). Whitman’s poetry and “Democratic Vistas” are in many anthologies and paperback reprints; The Complete Writings of Whitman (10 vols., 1902; 1965). A good selection, with helpful notes: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1 (4th ed., 1979), pp. 1850–2032. For background, the reflective Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (1962), and the chatty Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), New England: Indian Summer 1865–1915 (1940). Whitman has been the butt of passionate criticism from different sides: George Santayana attacked him as the poet of “barbarism,” Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1951); D. H. Lawrence contemned his “empty Allness. An addled egg,” (Studies in Classic American Literature, 1953).

  Chapter 63. In a Dry Season. Begin with the perceptive Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984). To test the range of Eliot’s thought, enjoy his elegant acerbic prose: Selected Essays (1917–1932) (1932); After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934); Essays Ancient and Modern (1936); Selected Prose (1953), a Penguin book. Find his poetry in Collected Poems, 1909–1935 (1936), Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), The Waste Land and Other Poems (1940). His plays: Murder in the Cathedral (1935; film script, 1951), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950). We gain some perspective on his ideas from his Harvard thesis, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1964). Varied perspectives: Elizabeth Drew, T. S. Eliot, The Design of his Poetry (1949); F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (3d ed., 1958, with a chapter by C. L. Barber); Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949). Especially illuminating: Valerie Eliot, ed., The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Draft Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (1971). Ezra Pound continues to challenge biographers who try to appreciate his literary achievement without denying his wild and vicious social views. Readable recent efforts: Peter Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and his World (1980), with illustrations; John Tytell, Ezra Pound: the Solitary Volcano (1987); Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (1988). The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954) are collected and introduced by T. S. Eliot. For Pound’s poetry: Selected Poems (1928, 1933), edited with an introduction by T. S. Eliot; Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (new ed., 1957), a New Directions paperback; The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1948).

  Part XII: The Wilderness Within

  Along with the discovery of hidden dimensions of experience by pioneers like Charles Darwin, James G. Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, among others, came the inwardness of modern man. (See my The Discoverers, Chapter 76.) It is significant that some of the most influential American thinkers of the early twentieth century—for example, William James and John Dewey—pursued these paths of inward discovery. These writers, too, focused on the concrete experiences of the individual person, and did not seek refuge in metaphysics. But it is easier to describe the symptoms than to explain the causes of this trauma (and feast) of inwardness that we find among the creators of Part XII. Again we are better able to see the what and the how than the why. Much of the literature about literature is an effort to explain and describe this new focus of the Vanguard Word and cast it into a definition of “the modern.” One of the more influential and prophetic of these interpretations of modern literature was Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle (1931; with introduction by Hugh Kenner, 1991). For another American perspective: Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (1991).

  Defining “modernity” has intrigued and challenged literary critics: Ricardo J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism (1985); Frederick R. Karl, Modern and Modernism, The Sovereignty of the Artist 1885–1925 (1985), which relates writers to painters. Some have sought a definition in the character of particular writers: Julian Symons, Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature 1920–1939 (1987); Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988). Or in selected writings: the admirable The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature (1965), edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr.; Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., 1976), a richly varied critical anthology, a Penguin book. For brief essays on particular arts and artists, see Kenneth McLeish, Penguin Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century (1985), and for writers, Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (Jean-Albert Bede and William B. Edgerton, eds., 2d ed., 1980). And for the context of modern criticism: M. H. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (1989).

  Chapter 64. An American at Sea. Begin with Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (1950, 1976). There is a special interest in Raymond M. Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921, 1968) as the first full-length biography. For factual detail, see Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (1951, 1967), and for a personal interpretation, Herman Melville (rev. ed., 1963) by the versatile Lewis Mumford. An ample collection of documents, letters, and photographs: Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville (2 vols., 1951, 1969). For the development of Melville’s ideas: Ellery Sedgewick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (1944, 1972), and a subtle study of his relationship with his eminent contemporaries, F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941, 1979). Melville’s writings have often been reprinted, individually and in sets. A special delight is the Modern Library edition of Moby-Dick, elegantly designed, with Rockwell Kent illustrations. Again, D. H. Lawrence has something to tell us about Melville that others never thought of or did not dare to say: Studies in Classic American Literature (1951, Anchor paperback), Chapters 10 and 11. An excellent selection of Melville’s letters, short stories, and verse is in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1 (4th ed., 1979), pp. 2032–48. The standard scholarly edition of Melville’s writings is in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition (1968–), edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tansolle. For the social scene: Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947).

  Chapter 65. Sagas of the Russian Soul. The recent disintegration of the Soviet Union encourages us to reflect again on the ways of creators in an oppressive society. The great Russian writers whose works in translation have become classics of Western literature—Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, and the others—were products of a society ruled by czarist autocracy. The literature about Dostoyevsky rivals that on Shakespeare or Goethe, and his well-chronicled life gives us vivid insights into a writer of fertile imagination reacting in that society—with rebellion, acquiescence, sycophancy, and escape into religious orthodoxy. Selecting among the numerous lives, begin with Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Dostoyevsky: His Life and Art (2d ed., 1957); Dostoevsky: Works and Days (1971); and Ernest J. Simmons, Feodor Dostoevsky (1969); Anna G. Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences (1975). See also Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1989; translation from the Norwegian). For interpretive essays: Nikolai Berdyayev, Dostoevsky (1957); André Gide, Dostoevsky (1949 with an introduction by Arnold Bennett); Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades (1947); W. Somerset Maugham, Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954); Ernest Simmons, Dostoevski: The Making of a Novelist (1940); Stefan Zweig, Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky (1930). The standard edition in English is The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky (12 vols., 1912–59) translated by Constance Garnett, whose translations have been the most widely used in reprints of individual novels, for example in the Modern Library and Bantam paperbacks. Thomas Mann has provided a cautionary introduction, “Dostoevsky—in Moderation,” to The Short Novels of Dostoevsky (1945) where he concludes, “ ‘Be careful! You will write a book about him.’ I was careful.” A widely acclaimed new translation of The Brothers Karamazov (helpfully annotated), by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky, is available in paperback in Vintage Classics (1991). New discoveries and new ed
itions of Dostoyevsky’s notebooks for the separate novels, edited by Edward Wasiolek and others, continue to appear. For the wider perspective: James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe (1966); Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (1974); the journal of a Russian Tocqueville, Marquis de Custine, Empire of the Czar (1989); D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature … to 1900 (1958); Henry Gifford, The Novel in Russia (1964); Marc Slonim, An Outline of Russian Literature (1959); The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader (Clarence Brown, ed., 1985), a Penguin paperback.

  Chapter 66. Journey to the Interior. For the life of Kafka, begin with Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (1985), and Anthony Thorlby, Kafka: A Study (1972). Max Brod’s Franz Kafka (2d ed., 1960) offers the view of a friend. See also Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka: Pictures of a Life (1984); Kafka’s Letters to Felice (E. Heller and J. Born, eds., 1972), Letters to Ottla and the Family (H. Binder and K. Wagenbach, eds., 1982). Kafka’s Diaries (1910–1923), edited by Max Brod, are in Penguin Books (1972); Kafka’s novels and stories are separately available in several editions. The best collections are The Basic Kafka (Erich Heller, ed., Pocket Books, 1979); The Complete Stories and Parables (Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., Quality Paperback, 1981). There has as yet been no complete edition in English of all Kafka’s writings, but see The Penguin Complete Novels of Franz Kafka (1983). Of special interest: Franz Kafka, Amerika (1946; Preface by Klaus Mann, Afterword by Max Brod). The critical literature grows, for example: J. P. Stern, ed., The World of Franz Kafka (1980); Frederick R. Karl, Franz Kafka, Representative Man (1991), with copious detail relating the writer to his age.

  Chapter 67. The Garden of Involuntary Memory. After Proust’s own writing only a bold author would venture comparison by writing his biography. George D. Painter has done it well in his Marcel Proust: A Biography (2 vols., 1978, 1989). And for shorter lives: Ronald Hayman, Proust (1990); André Maurois, The Quest for Proust (1950), The World of Marcel Proust (1974). See also Selected Letters of Marcel Proust, 1880–1903 (Philip Kobb, ed., 1983); Harold Pinter, The Proust Screenplay (1978). The standard translation of A la Recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) is the elegant work of C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Remembrance of Things Past (1922–31), revised in 1981. For the relation of Proust’s neuroses to his art, see George Pickering, Creative Malady (1974).

  Chapter 68. The Filigreed Self. Since much of Joyce’s writing is autobiographical, the biographer must compete with his subject. The task is superbly performed by Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; rev. ed., 1982). And do not miss the engrossing and revealing love story: Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (1988). Shorter studies on aspects of the life: Ezra Loomis Pound, Pound/Joyce (1968), letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce with Pound’s essays on Joyce; Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years (1958; notes by Richard Ellmann, preface by T. S. Eliot); Herbert S. Gorman, James Joyce: His First Forty Years (1974); Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1960), a vivid account by someone who was there, with the author’s portrait of Joyce; Richard Ellmann, Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1986). The best introduction to the writings: Harry Levin, James Joyce, a Critical Introduction (rev. ed., 1980), and The Portable James Joyce, including collected poems, Penguin Books (1976), Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses (with the decision by Judge John M. Woolsey) are in Modern Library. A “corrected text” of Ulysses (1986) is in Vintage paperback. Finnegans Wake is a Penguin book. For light on Joyce’s way of writing: Finnegans Wake, facsimile of the Buffalo Notebooks (Danis Rose, ed., 1978). For aid in reading Joyce: Matthew Hogart, James Joyce, A Student’s Guide (1978); Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1932); Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1961); Anthony Burgess, ed., A Shorter Finnegans Wake (1968). A sample of the criticism: Thomas E. Connolly, ed., Joyce’s Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques (1962); C. George Sandulescu and Clive Hart, Assessing the 1984 Ulysses (1986), a publication of the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco.

  Chapter 69. “I Too Am Here!” A richly detailed biography is by her nephew, Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf (2 vols., 1972). For a shorter life: P. Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (1978). See also Louise De Salvo, Virginia Woolf: the Impact of Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (1989); Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939 (1975), and his edited version of Virginia Woolf’s own account of herself, A Writer’s Diary (1973); extracts from her diary, Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being (1976), unpublished autobiographical writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind. For an excellent selection, The Virginia Woolf Reader (1984), edited by Mitchell A. Leaska; Virginia Woolf: Selections from her Essays (1966). Virginia Woolf’s individual works are conveniently available in Harcourt Brace Harvest paperbacks or in Penguin Books. For background, see the brilliant Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (1977), an Anchor paperback; Karen Peterson and J. J. Wilson (1976), Women Artists; Alan and Mary Simpson, eds., I Too Am Here … Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1976), a vivid portrait of another talented woman writer struggling to be herself.

  Chapter 70. Vistas from a Restless Self. Begin with the incomparable John Richardson (with Marilyn McCully), A Life of Picasso (1991), Vol. 1, 1881–1906, copiously illustrated. Briefer lives: Alfred H. Barr, ed., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (1946, 1980); Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (3d ed., 1981); Pierre Daix, Picasso (1965). Picasso’s life has been a storm center of works by adorers, critics, competing artists, and former mistresses: Ingo F. Walther, Pablo Picasso: 1881–1973, Genius of the Century (1986); William Boeck and Jaime Sabartès, Picasso (1955), illustrated; Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (1989); Fernande Olivier, Picasso and his Friends (1933, 1964); the muckraking Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (1988); M. McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences (1981). For some arresting insights: Gertrude Stein on Picasso (Edward Burns, ed., 1984), or Gertrude Stein, Picasso (1933, 1938, 1984), a Dover paperback; André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask (1976). For background: Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1980), Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (1946), edited by Carl Van Vechten; Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (1968); Daniel H. Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (1949); Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters (1913; 1970).

  Epilogue: Mysteries of a Public Art. An anecdotal history of the early days of movies: Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture (1926; 1964), can be updated and corrected by David Cook, A History of Narrative Film (2d ed., 1990). A discriminating account of the beginnings: Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies (1957), a New American Library paperback. For the technology: Robert Conot, A Streak of Luck (1979), a biography of Thomas Edison. A brilliant account of how movies affect the audience: Jon Boorstin, The Hollywood Eye: What Makes Movies Work (1990), amply illustrated. A readable full-length biography of Griffith: Richard Schickel, D. W Griffith: An American Life (1983). For sidelights on the man: L. Arvidson (Mrs. D. W. Griffith), When the Movies were Young (1925); Harry M. Geduld, ed., Focus on D. W. Griffith (1971), with revealing biographical documents; Lillian Gish, Mr. Griffith, the Movies, and Me (1969); F. Silva, Focus on “The Birth of a Nation” (1971). Eisenstein’s life is recorded in the filmmaker’s fragmentary autobiography, Immoral Memories (1983), to be filled out by Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (1960), a Grove paperback, and in Harcourt Brace Harvest paperback. See also Leon Moussinac, Sergei Eisenstein (1970), with documents. Eisenstein’s writings are stirring even when dogmatic: Film Sense (1942) and Film Form (1949), edited by Jay Leyda; Notes of a Film Director (1958); Film Essays (1968). For adventures in film theory: Ernest Lindgren, The Art of the Film: An Introduction to Film Appreciation (1948); V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting (1954), with an introduction by Lewis Jacobs; George Bluestone, Novels into Film (1957); Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art
(1969); Bela Balazs, Theory of the Film Character and Growth of a New Art (1970); Ralph Stephenson and Guy Phelps, The Cinema as Art (rev. ed., 1989). For the development of film art in relation to stage, studio, and audience: A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Origins of Early Film: David Garrick to D. W. Griffith (1987); Lewis Jacobs, The Emergence of Film Art (2d ed., 1979); Gilbert Seldes, The Public Arts (1956); Russell Lynes, The Lively Audience, A Social History of the Visual and Performing Arts in America, 1890–1950 (1985); Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (1988).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Since this book is a kind of autobiography, it has profited from my opportunities to read at leisure and to visit the art galleries and architectural monuments of Europe and the Mediterranean. I owe these opportunities in the first instance to the generous advantages many years ago of a Rhodes Scholarship and to the Oxford calendar of long vacations. And more recently I owe them to my experiences of teaching and lecturing in universities in the United States and in Europe, Japan, and India. The monuments and works of art here described, almost without exception, I have visited and seen more than once. During the last fifty years I have had the special advantage of the inspiration and companionship of my wife (and editor) Ruth F. Boorstin, who has shared these sights and visits. And my reflections on literature, first stirred by my college tutor, F. O. Matthiessen, during these years have had the benefit of her guidance, stimulus, and encouragement. As this book is intended to be not a mere exposition but an invitation, I hope it may entice readers to the source, the works of the creators, a journey always enriched by the right companion.