Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

World War I in Literature

Jean Dumoulin, one of the diggers sent into a series of tunnels in the Argonne known as Satan’s Lair in February, 1916, is clearing rubble along the entry to an old mine shaft when he finds what he considers to be “another stiff.” Minutes later in the Meurisson Alley Field Hospital, Dr. Michel Denis examines the body, and the man opens his eyes.

With no memory of who he is or what has happened to him, the man becomes known as the Mole, and Denis and others try to piece together his story. Captain Réviron thinks the man is a deserter and should be court martialed. Denis believes he has lost his memory and maybe even his mind because of shell shock. The Mole himself insists he is irrevocably dead and an Other is pulling his strings when he writes in a gray journal details about a French diplomat, spies in the Prussian empire, and scientists who are just beginning to understand the workings of the human mind.

https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Mole-Bob-Van-Laerhoven/dp/4824126436

For this author’s book review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-shadow-of-the-mole/

The Shadow of the Mole is an award-winning novel by Belgian/Flemish author Bob Van Laerhoven, who writes regularly about conflict or political and societal unrest. With The Shadow of the Mole and the subsequent Firehand Files, Van Laerhoven explores what has come to be known as the Forgotten War—World War I.

 The Forgotten War

It was called the Great War, the Good War, the War to End All Wars.

World War I was the first conflict to span the European continent and involve North America and the Far East—pitting the Central Powers of Germany (Austria Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey) against the Allied Powers (Britain, France, Italy, Romania, Russia, Japan, and the United States).

It also was the first to use advanced mechanized weapons—tanks, airplanes, machine guns.

From its beginning in June, 1914, to its end on November 11, 1918, World War I cost 16 million lives--9 million military men and 7 million civilians--permanently disabled 7 million fighting men, and caused 37 million casualties https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/world-war-i-history

 The war precipitated the collapse of four monarchies—Austria Hungary, Germany, Russia, and Turkey—sparked the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and fascism in Italy and Germany, and forever changed industrial production and women’s place in the workforce.

 Yet it is largely forgotten. Many can’t name a single battle, recognize the names of heroes of the time—flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker (highlighted in the 1945 film Captain Eddie) starring Fred McMurray https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037575/) and infantryman Alvin York (memorialized in Sgt. York, the film starring Gary Cooper https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034167/).

Recent films have shown a spotlight on the conflict. Sam Mendes’ tribute to his grandfather’s WW I war stories—1917—followed the path of two British lance corporals as they race to deliver a message that will call off a planned attack by the Devonshire regiment and protect 1600 British infantry lives. The film grossed $384 million and was voted one of the best films of 2020. The 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front reimagined the 1929 novel by Erich Maria Remarche that trailed a 17-year-old German soldier across battlefields and in trenches while armistice talks ensued. The film was voted won of the top five foreign films by the National Board of Review and won the San Diego Film Critics’ Society Best International Film award.

 The number of portrayals of WW I nevertheless pales in comparison with those of WW II.  While about 130 films have been made about WW I, more than ten times that number have been made about WW II, including 250 before war’s end. In 2023 45 novels about WW I were listed on Goodreads compared to 100 about WW II on Amazon. Twenty-eight TV series have focused on the First World War. The same number of series on the Second World War were produced in one decade—2010.

 The lack of interest is perhaps understandable. The precipitating action and reasons for going to war in 1914 were murky, especially for the US: an assassination of the heir to the Austria Hungary Empire by a Serbian nationalist. The morality and presence of villains Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as well as the direct attack in Pearl Harbor made entry into war by the US a clear cut necessity little more than 30 years later.

The nature of the battles themselves is also a factor. WW I was a step-by-step grind over mud-soaked territory from deeply dug trenches up and overland and toward barbed-wire frontlines.

WW 2 spanned the air and the seas, the dessert of North Africa and blacked out streets of London, the bitterly cold steppe near Stalingrad and the jungle heat of Iwo Jima.  

World War I and Literature

 What’s known as the modernist revolution in literature predates WWI. In 1908 poets and authors began experimenting with radical and utopian themes, newer forms of expression that focused on inner thoughts rather than outward actions, paid more attention to mood than sentiment, and opted for free verse instead of standard rhyming patterns.

 WW I introduced particularly dark themes and methods of expression. Chaos replaced idealism as writers broke from the past to respond to a changing world and explore the characteristics and failings of modern society. Works during the war years were often anxious, angry, and cynical, bleak and pessimistic.

 Perhaps most telling was the shift inward. Points of view were introspective, characters spoke through streams of consciousness or interior monologues, thoughts were expressed as they passed through the mind, beliefs about absolute truth were replaced by disillusionment and distrust of the channels of power—both government and religion.

 

Modernist Authors

 

Among the authors most often cited as WW I modernists are:

 Richard Aldington. His Death of a Hero (1929) reveals a soldier’s post-war struggles with daily life. “The casualty lists went on appearing for a long time after the Armistice - last spasms of Europe's severed arteries.” https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/94230.Richard_Aldington

T. S. Eliot. Wasteland (1922) stuns in its description of the devastation of war—

                                April is the cruelest month, breeding

                                Lilacs out of dead land, mixing

                                Memory and desire, stirring

                                Dull roots with spring rain

 Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms (1929) recalls his own experience fighting for the Italian army. “I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord and there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was.” https://www.litcharts.com/lit/a-farewell-to-arms/themes/war

 Wilfred Owen. Anthem for Doomed Youth (1917) portrays the horrors of war where men “die as cattle” amid the “monstrous anger of guns” and corpses lie “face downward in the sucking mud, wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled.”

 Siegfried Sassoon. Memories of an Infantry Officer (1930) humbles the distant observers of war--

                                You smug-faced crowds with kindling eyes

                                Who cheer when soldier lads march by

                                Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

                                The hell where youth and laughter go

 Rebecca West. The Return of the Soldier (1918) emphasizes the persistence of traumatic memory. “He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier’s hard tread upon the heel. It recalled to me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No Man’s Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead.” https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-return-of-the-soldier/quotes

Authors of Today

Some of the most recent novels set during WW I shed light on previously untold aspects of the conflict. The Porcelain Moon tells of the 140,000 Chinese people who were brought to Europe to serve as laborers in farms and factories.

Canary Girls recalls the Thornshire Canaries Ladies’ Football Club and the Football Battalion of the war years.

In Memoriam tells of young boarding school men’s involvement in the war and the love they shared with one another.

Almost a paean to the works of the early 1900s is The Shadow of the Mole. Named the best literary historical novel of 2022 by the Historical Fiction Company, the novel conveys the brutality and traumatic effects of war on mind and body. As author Van Laerhoven observes: “Delusions, shell shock, neurasthenia, constitutional fragility…are those names and theories, just to hide the naked fact that war was an all-consuming and putrefying disease in itself devouring its young, a gangrene of the mind.”

 

World War I literature and shell shock—next time on Time Stamp.

 

Sources:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Bad_Moon_Rising.html?id=tJw6EAAAQBAJ&source=kp_author_description 

 https://www.history.com/news/how-world-war-i-changed-literature 

 https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/english-literature/literary-devices/first-world-war-fiction/#:~:text=Impact%20of%20the%20First%20World%20War%20on%20English%20fiction,-In%20English%20fiction&text=Many%20authors%20and%20poets%20who,the%20internal%20struggles%20during%20warfare. 

 https://www.history.com/news/how-world-war-i-changed-literature

Out of the wasteland: the First World War and modernism. The evolution of modernist literature was intimately bound up with the shock and devastation of the war

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/out-of-the-wasteland-the-first-world-war-and-modernism-1.2190829

HomeLiteratureLiteratures of the World

https://humanities.byu.edu/writing-the-war-to-end-the-war-literary-modernism-and-wwi/

How World War I Changed Literature, by AMANDA ONION, UPDATED: MARCH 27, 2023 | ORIGINAL: APRIL 26, 2018     

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Forensics in a Nutshell

Theresa Ryan is worried about her sister Maggie. She’s seen neither hide nor hair of Maggie for weeks. So she’s come to the boarding house where her sister is living on Copp’s Hill, Boston. Hearing no response to her call from the front door of the building, Theresa rushes up the stairway, only to come to a dead stop. The door to Maggie’s room is open, two empty chairs sit at the foot of the mussed but empty bed, dirty glasses lie on the floor. Attracted by the sound of running water, Theresa enters the bathroom, stumbling over an empty bottle, and shivers when she sees Maggie in the bathtub, fully dressed while water from the faucet falls onto her open blue eyes. Theresa shudders as the floor rattles and cracks open, the building shakes, and the room falls apart under the weight of a wave of thick, sticky liquid that smells like baked beans.

Dr. George Burgess “Jake” Magrath, medical examiner for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, hurries to Commercial Street at the base of Copp’s Hill. A massive industrial accident has released tons of molasses onto city streets, crashing buildings to the ground, burying men, women, and children, and leading to “unexplained deaths” he has the responsibility to explain. With him is a woman determined to provide help—his long-time friend Mrs. Frances Glessner Lee.

Together, Jake and Fanny pull together the details of the accident—The Great Molasses Flood of 1919—the crime scene around Maggie’s death and the identity of the killer in Molasses Murder in a Nutshell. Molasses is the first in a new mystery series by Frances McNamara, known for her Emily Cabot books. The book recalls the actual Molasses Flood and introduces readers to the important forensic work conducted by Glessner Lee and Magrath. The book and the mystery series build on a quote from Lee about forensics: “The investigator must bear in mind that he has a two-fold responsibility—to clear the innocent as well as to expose the guilty. He is seeking only facts—the Truth in a Nutshell.”

1919: the Boston Molasses Flood and the Year of Violence and Disillusion - U.S. Studies Online | U.S. Studies Online (usso.uk)

 At about half-past noon on January 15, 1919, sounds of disaster reverberated down Commercial Street opposite Copp’s Hill in Boston’s North End—a sharp, metallic roar followed by rumbling, hissing, and finally the boom of an explosion that sent a 15-foot-high wall of molasses speeding at 35 miles an hour into commercial buildings, houses, the local firehouse. The thick sticky liquid snapped electric poles and the solid steel supports beneath the elevated train platform, knocked some buildings off their foundations, trapped, swallowed, and drowned pedestrians, residents, and horses. Though the wave of liquid quickly receded, it took days for rescue workers to find the missing and weeks to clean out the muck. In the end, the incident killed 21 people and injured 150.

The molasses, destined eventually for the manufacture of munitions, had been stored in a massive 50-foot-high, 90-foot-wide steel tank built and operated by Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of U. S. Industrial Alcohol. The accident, initially blamed on anarchists by USIA, was the result of negligence. Experts in court cases proved the tank’s steel walls were too thin, rivets were faulty and cracked under pressure, and warnings were ignored. One of those experts was Dr. George Burgess Magrath, medical examiner of Suffolk County, Massachusetts. He had been among the first responders on the scene and set up a field hospital and temporary morgue. He later testified about the causes of death: bodies crushed by debris, suffocation or drowning from molasses in their lungs.

Forensics Failures

At the time of the Molasses Flood, the individual responsible for investigating suspicious deaths in most jurisdictions was a coroner. But an extensive study of New York City coroners from the inception of the coroner system in 1898 to 1915 found that not a single one was qualified or trained to perform his duties. Only 19 of 65 coroners had been physicians, 18 were undertakers, seven were politicians, six were real estate dealers, two were plumbers, and two were saloon keepers. Among the rest were an auctioneer, butcher, musician, milkman, and wood carver. (Bruce Goldfarb, 18 Tiny Deaths, Sourcebooks, Naperville, IL, 2020)

Most conducted a superficial examination, if they did any at all. Many certified causes of death were patently absurd: The cause of death of one man was certified by a coroner as a thoracic aneurysm despite the fact that he had been holding a revolver and had a bullet wound in his mouth. (18 Tiny Deaths)

Police were not only untrained for forensic investigations, they often destroyed evidence at the scene—walking through blood, moving the body, handling the supposed weapon. Detectives were not much better: Nearly 25 percent of the detectives in Cleveland were considered to have the mentality of boys no older than 13. (18 Tiny Deaths)

Boston was the first city to establish a formal medical examiner’s office in 1877. The first person to hold the job of medical examiner was a physician, Dr. Francis A. Harris. The second was Dr. George Burgess Magrath, a specialist in pathology and instructor in legal medicine at Harvard Medical School who incorporated the latest and most advanced systems of death investigation after spending a year in London and Paris. (18 Tiny Deaths)

Gathering, interpreting, and presenting evidence from crime scenes were still highly problematic. A landmark 1928 study, The Coroner and the Medical Examiner, faulted legal medical education, noting “In not a single school is there a course in which the student [of legal medicine] may be systematically instructed in the duties…which may arise as the result of crime or accident.” (18 Tiny Deaths)

Glessner Lee and Magrath changed all that. Glessner Lee endowed the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard and supported the professor of legal medicine, Dr. George Magrath, beginning in 1932. In 1937, Dr. Alan Richard Moritz was named chair of the department.

The Nutshell Studies

In 1944, Glessner Lee decided to develop an intensive one-week seminar in the medical aspects of crime detection for the individuals most often called to crime scenes first—state troopers. The problem? Providing first-hand experience of crime scenes or tools that mimicked what they would see in the field.

Glessner Lee’s solution? 18- by 18-inch, doll-house-like wooden boxes or dioramas that presented crime-scene details in three dimensions. The first was based on an actual case—a man repeatedly had threatened to commit suicide by placing a noose over his neck, mounting a crate or box, and waiting for his wife to convince him to step down. Then, one day, the crate broke, and he hanged himself.

Glessner Lee created 18 dioramas, known as the Nutshell Case Studies. One called Kitchen. The corpse of a woman in front of a gas stove, gas jets open, doors locked, newspapers stuffed around the door frames. But: half-peeled potatoes indicated the woman was preparing dinner, a can of soda on the table and ice trays on the floor suggested the woman was preparing a drink for a visitor. Suicide? Maybe not.

Nutshell Studies: This amazing woman changed forensics with her miniature crime scenes (mookychick.co.uk)

 Directly related to McNamara’s Molasses Murder is the Dark Bathroom diorama, inspired by a series of bathroom murders in England. A woman’s fully dressed body lies face-up in a bathtub, water streaming onto her face.

Nutshell Studies: the extraordinary miniature crime scenes US police use to train detectives (telegraph.co.uk)

(Photos of the Nutshell Studies and details about their construction may be found in: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, by Corrine May Botz, The Monacellli Press, New York, 2004.}

In the seminars, police attended lectures about causes of death and the difference between blunt and penetrating injuries and an autopsy and interacted with the dioramas. Each police officer had 90 minutes to observe two of the dioramas and develop reports on them. As Glessner Lee explained, the diorama were not meant to serve as cases that needed to be solved. Rather, they were “exercises in observing, interpreting, evaluating and reporting,” illustrating the most basic requirement of crime scene investigation—resisting the temptation to jump to conclusions. (18 Tiny Deaths)

Outside of the seminar classroom, the dioramas have been featured in national magazines, beginning with an article in Life magazine in 1946 and The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom by Perry Mason author Erle Stanley Gardner. The Nutshell Studies themselves are still used to train police officers.

 

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Great-Molasses-Flood 

https://www.history.com/news/the-great-molasses-flood-of-1919 

https://www.boston-discovery-guide.com/great-molasses-flood.html 

https://time.com/5500592/boston-great-molasses-flood-100/ 

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/15/685154620/a-deadly-tsunami-of-molasses-in-bostons-north-end 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Great-Molasses-Flood 

htts://www.history.com/news/great-molasses-flood-science 

 Goldfarb, Bruce: 18 Tiny Deaths, Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2020.

Botz, Corinne May: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2004.

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

A Noir Classic Revisited

Self-appointed “Preacher” Harry Powell comes to Cresap’s Landing, West Virginia in 1932, where he ingratiates himself, characterizing the battle between good and evil by enfolding and twisting the fingers of his left hand labeled with the letters H A T E against those of his right hand labeled L O V E. He soon woos and weds the recently widowed Willa Harper and moves into her home with her two children—ten-year-old John and five-year-old Pearl.

But he is not the god-fearing man he claims to be. He shared a jail cell with Willa’s husband Ben before the man was executed for killing two security guards during a robbery and is hell-bent on finding the $10,000 in stolen money that was never recovered, aiming to kill anyone who gets in his way.

The chase that sends John and Pearl fleeing down the Ohio River with Preacher not far behind is the focus of the world premiere stage adaptation of The Night of the Hunter presented by Chicago’s City Lit Theatre, a 35-year-old theatre company with a rich history of stage adaptations. At the time it was formed, City Lit was the only theatre in the county devoted to staging adaptations of literary material. Its latest production recalls the iconic film that ironically was a box-office bomb when released in 1955. City Lit Theater Company

The Night of the Hunter

The Night of the Hunter is ranked among the top ten noir films of the 1950s, trailing the likes of A Touch of Evil, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Heat, The Sweet Smell of Success, D.O.A., and The Asphalt Jungle. https://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/the-15-best-noir-films-of-the-1950s/ It has been rated as one of the greatest movies of all time by Empire magazine in 2008 and Sight and Sound magazine in 2012, finishing in the top 100 films in both those years and then rising to the 25th best film in 2022. The American Film Institute places the film at number 34 on its list of 100 year…100 Thrills and its villain, Harry Powell, as number 29.

It’s been cited for beauty as well as terror, rated as number 2 among the 100 Most Beautiful Films by Carhiers du cinéma in 2007 and as number 90 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments. (The Night of the Hunter (film) - Wikipedia) And The US Library of Congress in 1992 selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry because it is considered to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” (The Night of the Hunter A Biography of a Film, Jeffrey Couchman)

Yet the film failed miserably at the box office. Its premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Des Moines filled all 1700 seats on July 26, 1955, but openings in other cities attracted fewer than 20 people and it “ground to a standstill” after that, soon ending up on twin bills with a B-grade Westerns (The Night of the Hunter A Biography of a Film, Jeffrey Couchman)

The film is just out of sync, Jeffrey Couchman points out. It was released at a time when moviegoers were getting used to spectacular, glossy, big-screen film productions the likes of The Robe, Oklahoma, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Even though some smaller scale, black and white films were popular at the time, The Night of the Hunter didn’t fit into any conventional category. It has elements of a thriller, horror film, and noir, but at the same time it is stunningly beautiful and poignant, as shown in scenes of Willa’s dead body trapped in the family vehicle while river currents drive waves of sea weed.

But its perceived weaknesses at the time of its release turn out to make it a universal work of art. As Roger Ebert wrote in 1996, "what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films of the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, [director Charles] Laughton gave it a timelessness... It is one of the most frightening of movies, with one of the most unforgettable of villains, and on both of those scores, it holds up... well after four decades." (Ebert, Roger, November 24, 1996; "The Night of the Hunter (1955)". Chicago Sun-Times. 

From Book to Film

The Night of the Hunter is based on the book of the same name, written by Davis Grubb and published in 1953. The book fictionalizes the life of Harry Powers, a Depression-era serial killer who used lonely hearts advertisements to meet women so he could steal their money and later kill them. After his arrest in 1931 in West Virginia, police found four rooms under Powers’ garage that contained bloody clothing, strands of hair, and singed pages from a burned bankbook. A ditch behind his house uncovered the bodies of two women and two children. (Harry Powers - Wikipedia (bing.com)

Author Grubb created the itinerant character Harry ‘Preacher’ Powell whose fingers bear the tattooed letters L O V E and H A T E, who travels to Cresap’s Landing to find the missing $10,000 his cellmate Ben Harper told him about, kills Willa and stalks her children John and Pearl.  (Reverend Harry Powell - Wikipedia) The book made The New York Times bestseller list in March, 1954, was condensed for Reader’s Digest, and sold to independent film producer Paul Gregory.

Grubb’s novel had many of the scenes that would become iconic in the film—Preacher’s tattooed fingers, Willa’s submerged corpse in the family Model T, the children running to the river and escaping on a skiff. (The Night of the Hunter A Biography of a Film, Jeffrey Couchman)

In the hands of director Charles Laughton and producer Gregory, The Night of the Hunter became even more nourish.

Noir …

The immensely popular noir class of Hollywood films was first categorized as black film or black cinema by a French critic in 1946. These films capitalized on over-the-top post WW I German expressionism and stories from gritty crime novelists of the time like Dashiell Hammett (known for the PI Sam Spade) and Cornell Woolrich (known for the idea behind Hitchcock’s Rear Window).

Noir is distinguished by film techniques. Noir films are black and white with low, dramatic lighting creating sharp and harsh shadows, camera angles that tilt, sharpen, or distort images, and props, such as mirrors, that magnify or intensify shadowy effects. The films are shot in cities and zero in on alleyways, narrow lanes, slick pavements. They have dark moods (mystery, paranoia, disillusionment) and certain character types (the flawed man with a past anti-hero, the manipulative villain, the femme fatale) and themes (murder, morality, suspense). (The Art of Film Noir, Updated: Dec 18, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/art/film-noir)

 … or Not?

The Night of the Hunter is and is not noir. It has the same noirish looks: a shaft of light illuminating John and Pearl in the basement of their home with Preacher hovering a few steps overhead, a close up of Preacher’s tattooed hands on a railing, a bed lamp’s rays highlighting churchlike eaves, an outline of young John in a darkened barn as he peers at Preacher’s silhouette on a horse in the distance. And the mood is darkly relentless as Preacher stalks the children.

But there is no anti-hero or femme fatale or ambiguity about what has happened, who did it, and why and no moral ambiguity. Unlike the choice between his love and the duty Sam Spade owes his dead partner Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon, the plot in The Night of the Hunter is clear—flee from the predator. It’s a simple story of good and evil, not a complex one that challenges conventional values. (The Night of the Hunter (1955): Not Noir – FilmsNoir.Net (art.blog)

The Night of the Hunter just doesn’t fit in any one category. It reveres those of good faith who abide and endure, yet it was highly criticized at the time of its release by the Catholic Legion of Decency who listed it as one of the films that were Morally Objectionable in Part for All in 1955, and the Protestant Motion Picture Council concluded it would be offensive to most religious people. It was considered too horrifying for children yet youngsters are often mesmerized by the sights and sounds.

Noir, not noir. Thriller, not thriller. Horror, not horror. That may be the strength of The Night of the Hunter--its uniqueness. As Dave Kehr wrote in 1985: "Charles Laughton's first and only film as a director is an enduring masterpiece—dark, deep, beautiful, aglow... The source of its style and power is mysterious—it is a film without precedent and without any real equals." Kehr, Dave, October 26, 1985: "The Night of the Hunter". Chicago Reader  

 

Sources:

The Night of the Hunter A Biography of a Film, Jeffrey Couchman)

https://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/the-15-best-noir-films-of-the-1950s/

Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments. (The Night of the Hunter (film) - Wikipedia)

(Ebert, Roger, November 24, 1996; "The Night of the Hunter (1955)". Chicago Sun-Times. 

(Harry Powers - Wikipedia (bing.com)

(Reverend Harry Powell - Wikipedia

The Art of Film Noir, Updated: Dec 18, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/art/film-noir)

(The Night of the Hunter (1955): Not Noir – FilmsNoir.Net (art.blog)

Kehr, Dave, October 26, 1985: "The Night of the Hunter". Chicago Reader  

The Original Hillbilly Horror Movie: The Night of the Hunter - expatalachians

Night of the Hunter Photo Gallery 20 (morethings.com)

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Hunter-Biography-Film/dp/0810125420

 


Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

New England Gothic--Today and Yesterday

In the summer of 1947 a “trespasser” in Cairy Hollow approaches the vestiges of the cottage that once belonged to seamstress Bess Dalby. His eyes track flickers of candlelight as an old woman moves through the house, his feet stumble as the door opens, his wish to learn the story behind the demise of the nearby Cairy Hollow mansion falters, yet he enters the cottage and hears about the power that destroyed the house and the wild souls that possess it now.

That story begins and ends on a single day--October 31, 1925--the day Civette Middleton and her beau Richard Marlow will announce their engagement and plans for marriage. At Bess Dalby’s cottage, a pair of ravens drop from the roof to the earth and take the form of the Raven Ladies known as Mirth and Sorrow. A spiraling weathervane joins them as a small man dressed in the manner of a strolling player and calling himself Captain Balefire.

Angry that they will be losing the shelter of the mansion and determined to keep Cairy Hollow to themselves, the three hatch a plot--to transform Bess’ pumpkin-headed scarecrow into the handsome, charming Sir Adrian Bramwell, sweep Civette off her feet, and spirit her away so she cannot take possession of the household. Their actions and the consequences are revealed in the recently published Nothing Gold Can Stay, a reimagining of “Feathertop,”a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and an example of what author Mary J. Carter calls New England Gothic.   

Nothing Gold Can Stay: Carter, Mary J: 9781509250653: Amazon.com: Books

For this author’s review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/nothing-gold-can-stay/

 Gothic Literature

Mystery, terror, the presence of the supernatural, hauntings from the past, demons, demonic possession, ghosts, evil spirits--the things Gothic fictional dreams are made of--are even more vividly alive today than when they first appeared in fiction in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s tale of the discovery of a medieval manuscript in The Castle of Otranto. (Gothic fiction - Wikipedia)

It may be hard for modern aficionados to believe, but Gothic fiction was so pervasive in the 1790s that Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained: “I am almost weary of the Terrible” after reviewing novels “in which dungeons and old castles and solitary houses by the sea side and caverns and woods and extraordinary characters and all the tribe of horror and mystery have crowded in on me.” (Gothic fiction - Wikipedia)

Yet renowned authors of the past such as Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Edgar Alan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson are now joined by modern masters of the Gothic--Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison. (Intro to New England Gothic - The Gothic Library)

Early on, Gothic’s roots sprouted in Europe among imposing English medieval castles, French opera house phantasms, remote Irish aristocrats, and Spanish legends and soon spread to the environs of Imperial Russia. In the US, the genre took two paths: Southern Gothic--a deep dive into the corruption behind the facade of respectability; and New England Gothic--a walk through a foreboding backwoods environment that carries the detritus and sordid history of the Salem witch trials. (Gothic fiction - Wikipedia)

 Nathaniel Hawthorne

 Nathaniel Hawthorne is considered to be the father of New England Gothic. (Intro to New England Gothic - The Gothic Library) Born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804, Hawthorne had direct connections to both sides of the Salem Witch Trials; he was the great-great grandson of the trial judge John Hathorne and was related to two of the accused witches and one of the accusers.

Haunted and ashamed by these relationships, Hawthorne wrote: “I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth removed.” (The Custom-House, an introductory sketch to the Scarlet Letter)

 It’s also been said that Hawthorne added the w to his last name to distance himself from these ancestors in 1830. (The Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne ( Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, September 15, 2011 )  

 https://www.nocloo.com/nathaniel-hawthorne-biography/

 Hawthorne began writing short stories while at Bowdoin College, Maine, in 1821, and self-published his first novel, Fanshawe, in 1825. Twenty-five years later, his most enduring works were published: The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter.  (Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert McNamara, Updated on January 22, 2018)

Hawthorne wrote nearly 50 short stories, including “The Great Stone Face” and other tales from his visits to New Hampshire’s White Hills. Among his writings are “Young Goodman Brown,” considered to be “as deep as Dante” by Herman Melville in its exploration of human nature’s dark side. “The Birthmark” and “The Minister’s Black Veil” explore two sides of the human face--one with a blemish a woman’s husband insists must be removed and one inexplicably and suddenly hidden behind a mask (https://interestingliterature.com/2021/04/best-nathaniel-hawthorne-novels-and-stories/).

It was difficult for Hawthorne to get his stories published early on. It wasn’t until 1850 with the publication of The Scarlet Letter that his writing was recognized. Though his writing style was considered “old-fashioned” even in his day, Hawthorne’s work deeply influenced Herman Melville as he was writing Moby Dick, and when he died in 1864, The New York Times described him as “the most charming of American novelists and one of the foremost descriptive writers in the language.” Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Feathertop

Hawthorne’s “Feathertop” short story, published in 1852, describes Mother Rigby’s transformation of a scarecrow into a man who will woo the daughter of Judge Gookin, Polly. (Feathertop)

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/feathertop-nathaniel-hawthorne/1014392212

https://www.amazon.com/Feathertop-Nathaniel-Hawthorne/dp/1499616139

 Though only 24 pages in length, “Feathertop” has sparked many iterations. The story was turned into silent films in 1912 and 1916 and television programs in 1955 and 1961. The first television production starred Natalie Wood, the second was a musical with Jane Powell, Hugh O’Brien, and Hans Conried. An expanded version of the story, including additional characters and motivations, was turned into the play called The Scarecrow in 1908. A movie version, called Puritan Passions, was released in 1923, and the play starring Gene Wilder and Blythe Danner was again aired in 1972. The story was set to music as an opera in 1945 and more recently in 2006, and a video musical, also called The Scarecrow, was released in 2000. (Feathertop)

Listopia ranks other scary scarecrow stories: Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge, The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight, by R. L. Stine, The Wide Game by Michael West, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World by Thomas Ligotti, and Tatterdemon by Steve Vernon among them.

 Nothing Gold and Feathertop

Nothing Gold Can Stay is far more layered and complex than its inspiration “Feathertop.” Fantastical creatures Mirth, Sorrow, and Captain Balefire are multidimensional--cunning, calculating, often merciless in their determination. Human characters are flawed and regretful, lamenting past actions and, even more important, inaction.

But in the end, the stories are similar. They employ witchcraft and sorcery to set their characters’ plans in motion and manipulate people, places, and things to advance objectives. They highlight cupidity and the ease with which individuals may be fooled by appearances and trappings.  While playing upon fears of a human-like figure meant to fool and scare animals away from cornfields, the two stories end up poignantly, eliminating frippery so the unsuspecting as well as the implicated must strip away the make-believe and leading readers to marvel at the innovation and mourn the loss of innocence.

As Mother Rigby rues at the end of “Feathertop,” “My poor, dear, pretty Feathertop! There are thousands upon thousands of coxcombs and charlatans in the world, made up of just such a jumble of wornout, forgotten, and good-for-nothing trash as he was! Yet they live in fair repute, and never see themselves for what they are. And why should my poor puppet be the only one to know himself and perish for it?” (“Feathertop”)

 

Sources:

History of Massachusetts Blog: The Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, September 15, 2011  

 Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, New England's Most Prominent Novelist Focused on Dark Themes

Robert McNamara, updated on January 22, 2018

Fantastic Facts About Nathaniel Hawthorne, Karin Crompton | Sep 22, 2022

Feathertop

OnlineLiterature.com

Feathertop: A Moralized Legend

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), From Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales & Sketches

 

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Searching for Kurt Vonnegut

When he was a much younger man (“two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago”), Jonah started collecting information for a book he called The Day the World Ended, a recollection of the things Americans had done the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

First on Jonah’s list of Americans was Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the A-bomb. But Felix is already dead, his body found in a rocking chair after testing his potent scientific discovery--ice-nine.

Jonah consequently turns to Hoenikker’s three children--Newt, Franklin, and Angela--and associates such as Dr. Breed.

Jonah’s journey leads him to ponder basic questions of science, such as:

The secret of life--protein, a bartender tells him.

The single thing that stands in the way of military invincibility--mud, a Marine general says.

The “seed” crystal that causes atoms to freeze--ice-nine, says Dr. Breed.

Re-search--something scientists found once but have since lost and are now re-searching for it, an elevator operator says.

And to wonder about religion. Jonah quotes the first sentence in the books of the Bokonon religion: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

Jonah is the lead character in the Lifeline Theatre production of Cat’s Cradle, the latest in the theater’s efforts to create plays that explore, interpret, and reimagine books and other literary works.

Cat's Cradle - Lifeline Theatre

As a walk on the dark side of science and technology and America’s role as science and tech leader, the play couldn’t be more relevant. “Science and technology will always move forward, but humans must consider the consequences of progress. Challenging the American ego is still at the forefront of our discussions today in 2023,” said play director Heather Currie.

As irreverent burlesque and lampoon, the play lets laughter lead to insight. “Satire still helps us laugh when looking at the dark parts of being human. At the heart of this story is…who are we as humans, and how can we do better?” she added. Casting Announced For Lifeline Theatre's Adaptation Of Vonnegut's Classic CAT'S CRADLE (broadwayworld.com)

And it leads many of us to take a long look at Kurt Vonnegut. “The return of Cat's Cradle is an opportunity for us to revisit Vonnegut's story and explore its themes and relevance for a new generation,” said Lifeline Artistic Director Ilesa Duncan.  (Cat’s Cradle runs through September and into October. Cat's Cradle - Lifeline Theatre)

Kurt Vonnegut--Early Chicago Connections

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1922 and spent most of his life in New York City. He did, however, live in Chicago for two years just after he returned from fighting in Europe in WW II. Vonnegut was one of about 50 members of the 106th Infantry Division who fought in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge, were captured by German soldiers, and imprisoned in a POW camp near Dresden. During the fierce Allied bombing of the city in early 1945, Vonnegut survived by hiding in an underground meat locker. Days afterward, he and other POWs were forced to search the city ruins for survivors and remove dead bodies until they were evacuated and eventually released. https://www.nvam.org/

Vonnegut enrolled in the University of Chicago’s anthropology program in 1945 but left two years later without finishing his master’s degree thesis. In the 1960s he resumed work on the thesis, called Fluctuations between Good and Ill Fortune in Simple Tales, but still did not receive the degree. U of C professors rejected the thesis, saying that he “had not done any work that qualified as ‘anthropology.’ Interestingly, the university granted the master’s degree in 1970, accepting Cat’s Cradle as a substitute for a formal thesis.  Kurt Vonnegut in Chicago: Some Footnotes – Chicago Magazine

While in Chicago, Vonnegut wrote for the City News Bureau and chronicled the experience in Slaughterhouse Five, noting that he earned $28 a week as a police reporter and covered the courts, police stations, Fire Department and Coast Guard on Lake Michigan, connecting “to the institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran under the streets of Chicago.” (Slaughterhouse-Five)

Current Chicago Current Connections

Vonnegut was featured last year as one of the Chicago-based American Writers Museum’s American Voices exhibit and podcast.  The November, 2022, post explores Vonnegut’s perspective on war and the meaning of life, citing:

 “When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon,
‘It is done.’
People did not like it here.”--From “Requiem,” in A Man Without a Country (2005)

The museum also highlights Vonnegut’s ubiquitous “So it goes”: “They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in the war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes.”--From Slaughterhouse Five

In a recent AWM podcast The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five, author Tom Roston wonders whether Vonnegut had PTSD by looking at Vonnegut’s published writings as well as drafts of the novel Slaughterhouse Five and conducting interviews with those close to him--family and friends--and those who study his work. Episode 72: Tom Roston - The American Writers Museum

The Writer's Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five a book by Tom Roston (bookshop.org)

In 2016 the National Veterans Art Museum added 50 screen prints of Vonnegut sketches to its permanent exhibit collections. The exhibit includes sketches Vonnegut produced for books, such as Slaughterhouse Five, The Sirens of Titan, and Breakfast of Champions. Museum Curator Ash Kyrie writes on the museum’s website about Vonnegut and the exhibit, reflecting on his own war experience: “The complex and alienating experience I then had coming home from Iraq speaks largely the same as a Vietnam, Revolutionary, or Trojan war veteran had returning after their respective conflicts. Leave the dates out of it and the stories begin to look similar, from Homer's The Odyssey to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, to the experiences of contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

“Vonnegut's wit and deceptively simple line drawings breathe fresh life into these timeless narratives. His humor and artistic license reveal just as much as a battle tale redux. As the writer Isabel Allende once stated, “What's truer than the truth? The story.” https://www.nvam.org/vonnegut.html

https://www.nvam.org/vonnegut.html

Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle and His Own Words

As Jonah delves into Dr. Hoenikker’s last days, he learns that the theoretical solution to eliminate the bane of the Marine Corps--mud--actually exists. And he worries about it. If a Marine drops a seed of ice-nine into the nearest puddle, what happens? It would freeze.

And the pools and streams feeding the puddle? They would freeze.

And the rivers and lakes the streams fed? They would freeze.

And the oceans that…? They would freeze.

And the rain when it fell? It would freeze.

“And that would be the end of the world!” (Chapter 22)

Vonnegut’s views on nature and science were prescient and cautionary. In an imaginary letter to Earthlings of 2088, he wrote in 1988:

“The sort of leaders we need now are …those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appear to be Nature’s stern but reasonable terms:

1.       Reduce and stabilize your population

2.       Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

3.       Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

4.       Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

5.       Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

6.       Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean and stupid.

7.       And so on. Or else. (Vonnegut: Fates Worse than Death, G. P. Putnam, 1991.

 About that Cat’s Cradle

How to Play The Cat's Cradle Game (with Pictures) - wikiHow

The Cat’s Cradle string game is one of the oldest and most common games played by children around the world. It takes on many names. It is known in Africa as The Spider’s Web, in the Americas and Asia as Cat’s Cradle, and in Japan as Kapkap. It also takes on many different symbolic meanings. In Inuit culture, it represents the Northern lights, and in Asia, it represents life’s difficulties. Its most common themes are connectedness, power and control, and the cycle of life. (What Does the Cat’s Cradle Symbolize? Unraveling the Meaning Behind this Intricate Game, August 4, 2023 by Danis Taufiq)

 In Vonnegut’s novel, Felix Hoenikker fashions a cat’s cradle out of string and shows it to his son, singing “Rockabye catsy, in the tree top. When the wind blows, the cray-dull will rock. If the bough breaks, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come cray-dull, catsy and all.” (Chapter 7)

Later, observers are debating the significance of Newt’s painting of the cat’s cradle:

One says it’s hell.

Newt’s sister Angela thinks it’s ugly, but she notes, she doesn’t know anything about modern art.

Jonah suggests the picture represents the meaningless of it all.

Newt concludes: “It’s garbage--like everything else.”

The beauty of Vonnegut’s work and Cat’s Cradle, is meaning resides with the reader.

Sources:

Casting Announced For Lifeline Theatre's Adaptation Of Vonnegut's Classic CAT'S CRADLE (broadwayworld.com)

Cat's Cradle - Lifeline Theatre)

https://www.nvam.org/

Kurt Vonnegut in Chicago: Some Footnotes – Chicago Magazine

Episode 72: Tom Roston - The American Writers Museum

https://www.nvam.org/vonnegut.html

(What Does the Cat’s Cradle Symbolize? Unraveling the Meaning Behind this Intricate Game, August 4, 2023 by Danis Taufiq)

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

The Play’s the Thing

Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens visit Knebworth House in Hertfordshire as guests of playwright and author Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton in August, 1856. Other invited guests include literary figures and actresses, all of whom have roles, on or off stage, in one of Bulwer-Lytton’s plays to be performed as a charity event in the manor house. Uninvited is Bulwer-Lytton’s wife Lady Rosina, recently released from a lunatic asylum.

While actors are reciting their lines in dress rehearsal of the play, a shot rings out, and a man is killed. Bearing the costume assigned to Bulwer-Lytton, the dead body at first is thought to be the lord himself. But it turns out to be his secretary, Tom Maguire.  (For the rest of this author’s review for the Historical Novel Society, see: Summer of Secrets (A Gaslight Mystery 3) - Historical Novel Society.)

https://www.amazon.com/Summer-Secrets-Gaslight-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B08T1W6BGB

 Summer of Secrets is the third (and the first read by this author) in the Gaslight Mysteries series by Cora Harrison that follows Dickens and Collins as amateur sleuths who gather together and analyze clues to crimes. The most recent in the five-book series appears this November; the first was published in 2019. (THE GASLIGHT MYSTERIES – Cora Harrison).

Harrison has authored other mystery series: Reverend Mother, set in 1920s Cork; Burren Mysteries, in medieval Ireland; and the Victorian-era London Murder Mysteries for children. (http://coraharrison.com/tag/irish-fiction/)

The Gaslight series builds on historical and literary fact. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins not only were writing associates, they were close friends. After the two were introduced by a mutual friend in 1851, Collins began to contribute to Dickens’ weekly magazine Household Words, formally joining the staff in 1856. From 1959 to 1861, he wrote regularly for Dickens’ subsequent periodical All the Year Round. (Wilkie Collins - Wikipedia)

Dickens supported Collins and his work, publishing Collins’ first story, A Terribly Strange Bed, for Household Words in 1852, collaborating with Collins and other writers on the story A House to Let in 1858, and serializing the novel that would make Collins famous--The Woman in White-- from November 1859 to August 1860 in All the Year Round. Dickens also may have been inspired to write A Tale of Two Cities by the Collins’ 1855 story Sister Rose set during the French Revolution. (WILKIE COLLINS AND CHARLES DICKENS (wilkie-collins.info)

The two most often collaborated on theatrical productions.

Dickens’ Amateur Theatrical Productions

From the time he was presented with a toy theater as a young boy, Charles Dickens was captivated by the theatrical world. While attending Wellington House Academy at age 12, Dickens and other boys staged several plays, including The Dog of Montargis, Cherry and Fair Star, and The Miller and His Men, a production that so realistically crashed the onstage mill to pieces with firecrackers police were once called to the schoolhouse door. (Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph, Edgar Johnson, 1952, https://archive.org/details/charlesdickenshi01john/page/26/mode/2up. )

Dickens’ formal amateur theatrical productions began in 1842 after the success of three productions he led in Montreal. Dickens’ portrayal of Captain Bobadill in Ben Johnson’s Every Man in His Humour in London that same year led to one, perhaps apocryphal, anecdote: "Ah, what an actor you would have made, Mr. Dickens, if it just hadn't been for them books." (http://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/dickens/)

Soon after Dickens and Collins met, they began acting in or co-writing high-end plays. In May, 1851, the two acted in Not So Bad as We Seem, written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and staged before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.  

Dickens and Collins collaborated on The Frozen Deep, a play based on the expedition by Sir John Franklin that was last seen in the Arctic in July, 1845. In addition to serving as manager of the production, Dickens assumed the role of Richard Wardour, one of a small crew of shipmates sent in search of help after their sailing ship was immobilized by ice. Also on that crew was Frank Aldersley, played by Collins, a romantic rival and object of Wardour’s revenge.  

https://picnicwit.com/timeline/18001899/garden-party-picnic-in-london-chgarles-dickens-and-richard-albert-smith-1857/

The Frozen Deep was a hit. Dickens got rave reviews for his performance; the run of the play was extended for six months; and Queen Victoria requested a private performance for the royal family on July 4, 1857.  Three benefit performances were staged at New Free Trade Hall in Manchester with professional actors, including the actress Ellen Ternan, the woman Dickens is said to have loved for the rest of his life. (Charles Dickens on Stage: Amateur Acting and Public Readings (charlesdickenspage.com)

Collins’ own first play, The Lighthouse, was enthusiastically received by Dickens and produced by his Tavistock House theatrical company in 1855. Based on the 1853 short story Gabriel’s Marriage, the play was set in December, 1748 at Eddystone Lighthouse and starred Dickens as head light keeper. After running for four nights at Tavistock House, the play was then staged at Royal Olympic Theatre. An American version opened in New York in January, 1858. Revivals were performed at Boscombe Theatre in the 1870s and 1880s. The play also was translated into French.

The play No Thoroughfare, written by both Collins and Dickens, was presented at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End in 1867. After 200 performances there, the play went on tour. (Wilkie Collins - Wikipedia, WILKIE COLLINS AND CHARLES DICKENS (wilkie-collins.info)Top of Form

·Merely Players

Joining Dickens and Collins on stage were many notable writers and artists, including:

Mark Lemon, known for launching and editing the satirical weekly Punch, was also a well-regarded actor who, with Dickens, performed Bulwer-Lytton’s Not So Bad as We Seem in 1851. (Mark Lemon - Wikipedia)

Augustus Egg, an actor and costume designer. He played ship’s cook John Want in Dickens’ 1857 production of The Frozen Deep. With Dickens, he formed the Guild of Literature and Art to support struggling artists and writers. He also filled the lead role in Bulwer-Lytton’s Not So Bad as We Seem. (Augustus Leopold Egg - Wikipedia)

John Leech, a caricaturist, most notable for Punch, and illustrator of Dickens 1843 A Christmas Carol.  (John Leech (caricaturist) - Wikipedia)

Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, a prominent painter particularly of sea- and landscapes, and scene painter at the Royalty Theatre in London as well as the Colburg theatre in Lambeth, Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, and Charles Dickens’ theatrical playhouse at Tavistock. (Clarkson Frederick Stanfield - Wikipedia)

John Forster, literary and dramatic critic, friend and member of Dickens’ literary circle. (John Forster (biographer) - Wikipedia)

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, writer and politician who served as a Member of Parliament from 1831 to 1866 and Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1858 to 1859. As a writer, he is credited with such phrases as “the almighty dollar” and “the great unwashed” as well as convincing Dickens to change the original ending of Great Expectations. (Edward Bulwer-Lytton - Wikipedia)

Rosina Doyle Wheeler who married Bulwer-Lytton in 1827 and separated from him four years later. She later wrote and published Cheveley, or the Man of Honour (1839), a scandalous work of fiction that satirized her husband and what she considered to be his hypocrisy. She also wrote A Blighted Life, about her incarceration by her husband in an asylum for weeks. (A Blighted Life - Wikipedia)

Ellen Ternan, an English actress who, at the age of 18, became Dickens’ love interest as his marriage to his wife Catherine was disintegrating. Called by Dickens as his “magic circle of one,” she remained with Dickens until his death. (Ellen Ternan - Wikipedia)

Summer of Secrets: Folding Fact into Fiction

A week after arriving at grand Gothic Knebworth House with Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins is bored, at least until Lady Rosina Bulwer-Lytton bursts onto the scene.

knebworth house photos - Search (bing.com)

He has joined other Dickens’ friends--Punch editor Mark Lemon, journalist John Forster, and artists Clarkson Stanfield, Augustus Egg, and John Leech--and a mother-daughter pair of professional actresses at the home of Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton to present Bulwer-Lytton’s latest play, The Lady of Lyon, and raise money for the widow and children of an actor who recently died.

Lady Rosina storms into the library where the men have gathered, stage-whispering: “My goodness. What has he done to this library? Who, on earth, chose that carpet? And the books, the lovely books that belonged to his grandfather, they are smothered by all of those vulgar books.” Noting the volumes written by her husband, Lady Rosina, raises her voice: “What a lot of rubbish that man has written!” (page 5).

In the days that follow, Lady Rosina threatens her husband, brandishing a pistol; Bulwer-Lytton’s secretary, Tom Maguire, is assaulted by guests and later he assaults an actress, a play rehearsal is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot and the discovery of the secretary’s dead body on the dimly lit stage.

Summer of Secrets highlights the theatrical work of Dickens and Collins and friends. It also plants the seeds for Collins’ future works: The Moonstone, recognized as the first detective story and police procedural:

“It would be something quite unique, wouldn’t it?” Collins speaks about writing a fictional account of the murder at Knebworth. “Not just telling a story, but engaging with the reader, going hand in hand with him. Coaxing him to guess who did the deed” (page 78).

Author Harrison adds a twist on history, wondering whether Ellen Ternan was Dickens’ daughter, not his mistress. She notes that Dickens became incensed when hearing others impute that he was having an affair with Ellen. He also set up her as well as her mother in houses in England and France, and a biographer came to the conclusion that the relationship between Ellen and Dickens was not consummated.

Harrison also points to A Tale of Two Cities, which focuses on the love between a father and a daughter, a daughter and a heroine who physically resembles Ellen Ternan, and invites readers to weigh in at: www.coraharrison.com.

 

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Learning about Robert Oppenheimer

 The young grad student in physics, J. Robert Oppenheimer, is angry. He’s been held back by his professor, relegated to cleaning up the glassware he’s broken in the lab and therefore prevented from attending the lecture he’s been anticipating, a lecture by scientific luminary Niels Bohr. His reaction? Inject lethal potassium chloride into the shiny green apple that sits on his professor’s desk.

From there, the 2023 magnum opus film by Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer traverses four decades, hopscotching between classroom discussions about quantum mechanics with students at Cal Tech and Berkeley, work that transforms scientific theory into actual, threatening reality at the desert compound in Los Alamos, NM, fierce interrogation and damning witness testimonies gathered by an investigator in a narrow, windowless room, episodes of consuming passion and shattering grief, and all the while intensely focusing on the eyes, face, and profile of its subject: the Father of the Atomic Bomb.

Watch: Oppenheimer — on Directors' Library (directorslibrary.com)

The film is a welcome alternative to flash and dazzle film adventures that move from fight scene to fight scene with little or no storyline in between or set up mindless (for this audience of one, anyway) scenarios. That’s not to say these types of films are not enjoyable or at times flat-out LOL funny.

But Oppenheimer engages the mind, presenting complex philosophical and political historical realities as well as multi-layered relationships. Instead of leaving the theatre remembering snippets of filmed stunts, viewers leave Oppenheimer with questions about the man, the times, the science, the ramifications, the truths, and the lies.

While massive in scope and an often visual and auditory assault, Oppenheimer pays deeply personal, almost claustrophobic attention to Oppenheimer and his stoicism. He appears impassive while he watches the towering mushroom cloud, uncertain or confused by thunderous applause from Los Alamos Project colleagues days later, composed and almost quizzical while former friends provide damning testimony against him.

The historical novel Trinity takes the opposite approach. It presents seven different views of Oppenheimer through the eyes of seven different narrators:

An Army intelligence officer who trails Oppenheimer as he slips away from Los Alamos to San Francisco, where he meets, dines, dances, and spends the night with a dark-haired young woman.

A WAC at the Trinity test site who stands with Oppenheimer and sees the sky go completely white before “the earth under our feet lurched toward the mountains and the mountains tilted a foot to the right, and the trees leaped off the sides of the mountains.”

A friend who relives past memories with Oppenheimer only to learn later that he’s forgotten the unpleasant and painful ones.

A secretary at the Institute for Advanced Study who walks behind and takes dictation from Oppenheimer as he walks across campus and one day hears him tell what he considers to be his whole story.

A one-time neighbor who orders and reviews transcripts of the security hearings that asked witness after witness whether Oppenheimer could be trusted.

A student who hears Oppenheimer lecture about the connection between power and privilege and wonders what he has not yet comprehended.

A journalist who comes to believe that, in the days before his death, Oppenheimer still does not understand what little power he had over the processes he unleashed. ( Amazon.com: TRINITY: 9780062851970: Hall, Louisa: Books. For this author’s review of Trinity and other books, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviewer/k-m-sandrick/

The film and the novel lead to the same place: the desire to find out more about Oppenheimer and his times.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 2006 NY Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Bird, Kai, Sherwin, Martin J.: 9780375726262: Amazon.com: Books

The biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin explores Oppenheimer and his role during the Cold War. It has been praised for its scholarship and insights, “unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature.... It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.” —The New York Times

The film has been vetted on its own for accuracy, by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear technology and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Wellerstein notes, for example, that Oppenheimer did indeed try to poison his professor by injecting chemicals into the man’s apple while attending Cambridge in the 1920s, but Niels Bohr was not there or fingering the fruit at the time.  (After the incident, Oppenheimer was placed on probation and required to meet with a psychiatrist.)

Other facts: a thunder storm did delay the first test of an atom bomb in the New Mexico desert, and the explosion was at first silent--an intense blast of light, fierce wind and mushroom cloud appeared before any sound was heard. (For more about fact vs. fiction in the movie, see: 'Oppenheimer' fact v. fiction: A nuclear historian breaks down what the movie got right and wrong, Story by jmcgrath@insider.com (Jenny McGrath). 

Also true: the setting and nature of the hearings held in 1954 related to Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The FBI had, indeed, been tapping Oppenheimer’s phone yet refused to share tape recordings with him or his attorney, called him out repeatedly and humiliated him during the questioning, and revealed details about his affair with a former girlfriend while his wife was in the room, according to the hearing’s transcripts. (slate.com/culture/2023/07/oppenheimer-movie-historical-accuracy-communist-manhattan-project.html)

Louisa Hall’s Trinity

Author Louis Hall also was drawn to Oppenheimer by American Prometheus. In an interview with journalist Jennifer Croft in January, 2019, Hall notes that she “wanted to write a book about the difficulty of knowing other people, especially when the stakes are high: when we feel we have to understand someone ...but I was still looking for a form that would allow me to explore that difficulty…”

While reading about the hearings related to Oppenheimer’s security clearance, Hall was struck: “when his colleagues and friends and family members were called to testify on his behalf, or against him, and almost universally ended up admitting that they didn’t entirely understand the decisions he’d made, that despite years of friendship, even years of intimacy, they couldn’t be sure that they’d ever known him — I started to think that perhaps this was my form: a series of testimonials on the nature of a man who seemed to hold the keys to the most frightening new technology on the planet.” (On Oppenheimer: A Conversation with Louisa Hall on Her Novel, “Trinity” (lareviewofbooks.org)


A Journey of Discovery

With both film and novel leading to more questions than answers about Oppenheimer the man and the scientist, this author has begun a literary search, and the first few explorations reveal, certainly not surprisingly, complexity.

Biographies have characterized Oppenheimer as:

“A man who was put together of many bright shining splinters…[one who] never got to be an integrated personality." (Robert Oppenheimer. A Life Inside the Center)

“A dilettante [who] would not take his coat off and really get stuck in. He’d got the ability, but he hadn’t got the staying power.” (Robert Oppenheimer. Dark Prince)

A left-wanderer, if not a full-blown member of the Communist party (several sources)

Perhaps the only physicist who could have led the Los Alamos Project: “Oppie knew [what the staff’s] relationships with one another were and what made them tick. He knew how to organize, cajole, humor, smoothe feelings--how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so.” (Dark Prince)

And then there are Oppenheimer’s own words. Two books gathered a number of Oppenheimer’s addresses and lectures. Uncommon Sense presented material written by Oppenheimer between 1948 and 1966, some of which had not been published before. Atom and Void includes two sets of lectures, one series given in 1953, the other, nine years later. In them, Oppenheimer writes about:

The wealth and variety of physics, the natural sciences, and the life of the human spirit: “they are the elements of man’s sorrow and his splendor, his frailty and his power, his death, his passing, and his undying deeds.” (Atom and Void)

Science and scientists: “We understand, as we hope others understand, that … there is a harmony between knowledge in the sense of science, that specialized and general knowledge which it is our purpose to uncover, and the community of man. We, like all men, are among those who bring a little light to the vast unending darkness of man’s life and world. For us as for all men, change and eternity, specialization and unity, instrument and final purpose, community and individual man alone, complementary each to the other, both require and define our bonds and our freedom. (Uncommon Sense)

Scientific advancements: “we think the future will be only more radical and not less, only more strange and not more familiar, and that it will have its own new insights for the inquiring human spirit.” (Atom and Void)

The overall intellectual community: “We need to be open to other and complementary lives, not intimidated by them and not contemptuous of them (as so many are today of the natural and mathematical sciences). As a start, we must learn again, without contempt and with great patience, to talk to one another; and we must learn.” (Uncommon Sense)

If you’ve begun your own journey, please get in touch: kmsandrick@kmsandrick.com.

For this author, the journey precipitated by Oppenheimer and Trinity continues.

 

Sources:

Atom and Void, Essays on Science and Community, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Princeton University Press, 1989.

Uncommon Sense, J. Robert Oppenheimer. N. Metropolis, Gian-Carlo Rota, and David Sharp, Editors, Birkhauser, 1984.

Robert Oppenheimer Dark Prince, Jack Rummel, Facts On File, 1992.

Robert Oppenheimer, A Life Inside the Center. Ray Monk, Doubleday, 2012.

 

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Josef Mengele and Other Nazis in Exile in Argentina

 On June 24, 1949, Helmut Gregor disembarks the North King ship after a three-week Atlantic crossing from Genoa to Buenos Aires. He is nervous as he waits to pass through customs. He’d hoped--spent money in a bribe, in fact--to be met on the dock by a high-ranking member of the Argentine secret police, even if such honors weren’t usually accorded to one who’d only managed to rise to the level of captain in the SS.

But here he stands, even more worried now that a customs official is opening Gregor’s  small briefcase, the man’s eyes widening as he views hypodermic syringes, blood samples, microscopic slides of cell fragments, anatomic drawings, notebooks. These, for Gregor? The man who claims to be a mechanic?

An amateur, amateur biologist, Gregor mumbles. Just an amateur.

The customs official’s stomach complains. It’s approaching the lunch hour. Why delay it any further with this, the customs official decides, so he waves Helmut Gregor through. And Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz Angel of Death, begins the first day of the next 30 years of his life in exile, as chronicled in The Disappearance of Josef Mengele.

The literary work by Olivier Guez was translated and published in English in 2022. Released six years ago in France, the book received the prestigious Prix Renaudot literary award in 2017. https://www.amazon.com/Disappearance-Josef-Mengele-Novel/dp/1788735889. This author’s review for the Historical Novel Society appears here: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-disappearance-of-josef-mengele/

Deeply personal, Disappearance blends fiction with fact as it imagines Mengele’s thoughts, feelings, and dreams and traces the people, places, and events that populate his life in South America. At first buoyed by connections with other exiled leaders from the Third Reich--a decorated Luftwaffe pilot, an administrator of the T4 euthanasia program, and meetings with Argentine leader Juan Perón himself--Mengele enjoys friendships, success as head of a carpentry and furniture factory, and monetary support from his family in the 1950s. Threats that he may be betrayed for money, reports of his crimes in the press, and the nagging images of Adolf Eichmann on trial in Israel after his capture by agents of Mossad in Argentina in the 1960s foment suspicion and paranoia and spur Mengele’s withdrawal to labor on a farm in the back waters of Paraguay. Migraines, infections, bouts of colic, an arrest warrant from West Germany, and publication of Simon Wiesenthal’s The Murderers Among Us with a chapter on “The Man who Collected Blue Eyes” fuel volatile moods. Increasing isolation and illness take their toll, resulting in a haggard, unshaven shadow of a man who ekes out an existence until he dies by drowning in 1979.

Argentina and the Third Reich

Mengele was one of many former leaders of the Third Reich who escaped to Argentina after World War II. Recent information from Swiss bank accounts documents 12,000 Nazis who had immigrated to Argentina after the war. This is why so many Nazis fled to Argentina (yahoo.com)  Five who found their way to Tres Bocas delta and the River Plate in the late 1940s are profiled in the 2022 revised edition of The Real Odessa by journalist Uki Goñi:

Erich Priebke, who was responsible for the deaths of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves

Dr. Gerhard Bohne, one of the heads of the Third Reich’s euthanasia program

Josef Schwammberger, an SS commandant of three Polish concentration camps

Adolf Eichmann, head of the Office of Jewish Affairs that identified, rounded up, and deported Jews to concentration camps in Europe

Josef Mengele, who conducted medical experiments on children and sent up to 4000 women a day to death in the women’s camp at Birkenau

(The 2022 book, How Nazi War Criminals Escaped Europe, updates Goñi ‘s 2002 The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina.)

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Odessa-Criminals-Escaped-Europe-ebook/dp/B0BJ88DC2H

 While several South American countries welcomed former Nazis, Argentina actively recruited them, building on its past history and planning for the future.  

Although Argentina was technically neutral during the war, many wealthy businessmen and government leaders, including President Juan Perón, were early and continuing supporters of the Axis powers. Perón himself served as a military attaché to Benito Mussolini in the late 1930s. Why Were Nazis Accepted in Argentina After WWII? (thoughtco.com)

After the war, Perón hoped Argentina would occupy what he called the “third position” and operate as a powerhouse nation between the capitalist west and communist east. Juan Domingo Peron and Argentina's Nazis (thoughtco.com) Perón also sought the expertise of industrialists, inventors, military leaders, and scientists to bolster the country’s infrastructure by building dams, nuclear power plants, aircraft, and other ordnance.

The country set up escape routes across northern Europe that led down through Spain and Italy to ocean-going ships for another, strictly personal reason. Perón set out to save Nazi officials from prosecution as war criminals because of his beliefs and definition of military honor. In the memoirs he recorded on cassette tapes, he expressed his anger and resentment: “In Nuremberg trials…something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity. I became certain that the Argentine people also considered the Nuremberg process a disgrace, unworthy of the victors, who behaved as if they hadn’t been victorious.” (Goñi, Uki. The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina)

Ratlines

Formal escape routes, or ratlines, guided Nazis and other fascists out of Europe and into countries that served as havens, including not only Argentina but Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru in Latin America as well as Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. Ratlines (World War II) - Wikipedia

The first ratlines were networks that fostered immigration of European Catholics to Argentina beginning in 1942. By 1946, Spain was the center for ratlines that were leading escaping Nazis out of Europe via Vatican channels. The shift of focus from Catholic emigres to Nazis  came with the appointment of Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal as Vatican emissary to “visit German-speaking internees in Italy” in 1944. Later, Croatian priests operated a ratline for Albanian, Montenegrin, and Croatian war criminals through Genoa in 1946 and -47.  Ratlines (World War II) - Wikipedia

 Argentina’s own ratline or Odessa network was set in motion when war criminals and Nazi collaborators were flown in from Madrid to meet with President Perón in 1947. The network, as described by Argentine journalist Uki Goñi in The Real Odessa, included an immigration bureau in Switzerland that supposedly was created to recruit German “technicians” to lead and staff military projects but actually rescued individuals who were destined for Nuremberg war crimes trials. The network was vast, rescuing not only German Nazis but French, Belgian, Slovak, and Ustashia/Croatian war criminals, and thorough--providing each man with an alias, lodging, money, travel documents, and steamship tickets. (Goñi, Uki. The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina)

 The Real Odessa and the Odessa File

Goñi’s Real Odessa will take many readers back to the 1970s when English writer Frederick Forsyth published the novel The Odessa File and Jon Voight and Maximillian Schell starred in the film adaptation. The novel and film follow a young German reporter who is tracking down details from the diary of a Holocaust survivor in his search for the Butcher of Riga concentration camp. After talking with Simon Wiesenthal, the reporter concentrates on ODESSA, the Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen or Organization of Former Members of the SS.

 

Was ODESSA an actual, global network of high-ranking SS officers who helped war criminals protect their assets and escape to the West? The Unredacted website presents evidence on both sides of the question. https://theunredacted.com/odessa-the-nazi-ratline/

As noted in Unredacted, the name Odessa was found in Western intelligence reports, and well-regarded authors and investigators, such as Wiesenthal, believe the organization existed (credit: Dutch national archives/wiki). But others, including former Nazis, say there was no large-scale organization of this type (only smaller networks). Even if there were, it would not carry a name bound to attract attention, like Odessa.

The Real Odessa acknowledges similar paths taken by Forsythe’s fictional reporter Peter Miller and Argentine journalist Uki Goñi. In the introduction to the 2022 edition of the book, Philippe Sands characterizes Goñi’s challenges--“long periods of silences, cover-ups, and squirrelling away of incriminating materials” in the post-war years--and his ability to find clues about what actually happened, run down new avenues of exploration, and piece together details in a meaningful whole. Goñi also shifts attention away from Europe and sheds light on actions taken by western governments and international organiations like the Vatican.

Sands writes: “What I took away from The Real Odessa, and what has informed my thinking ever since, is that no country or people has a monopoly on horror. Events that occur in a particular place and time invariably have roots and networks that are nourished across many spaces and eras. To understand a particular act it is necessary to cast a wider net, and to dig deep; nothing is ever only quite what it seems, and acts seen as decent by one community will be treated as far more nefarious by another.” He concludes: “With his book, Uki Goñi opened a door through which I and others passed, allowing us to gaze upon an iceberg. It is, as he tells us and we now know, but the tip.” (Goñi, Uki. The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina)

 Sources:

 How South America Became a Nazi Haven | HISTORY

Why Were Nazis Accepted in Argentina After WWII? (thoughtco.com)

Juan Domingo Peron and Argentina's Nazis (thoughtco.com)

This is why so many Nazis fled to Argentina (yahoo.com)

Josef Mengele | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)

Olivier Guez: The Disappearance of Josef Mengele review - the Nazi who was never found (theartsdesk.com)

 Goñi, Uki. The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron's Argentina. London: Granta, 2002.

Ratlines (World War II) - Wikipedia

How Ratlines Helped Thousands Of Nazis Flee Europe After WW2 (allthatsinteresting.com)

 The Nazi Ratlines: The system of escape routes for Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of WWII (thevintagenews.com) The Nazi Ratlines: The system of escape routes for Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of WWII (thevintagenews.com)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odessa_File_(film)

https://theunredacted.com/odessa-the-nazi-ratline/   

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Colleges, Universities, and LGBTQ in the Crosshairs in Florida--Again

 On May 15, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed three pieces of legislation that will significantly change the operation of the state’s colleges and universities. These laws restrict the teaching of topics related to systemic racism and sexism, expand the power of university boards and presidents to hire and fire professors, limit protections commonly applied to tenured faculty, and defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. DeSantis signs 3 bills bringing major change to Florida universities (tampabay.com)

DeSantis also recently signed legislation aimed at the LGBTQ community. Florida law now bans gender-affirming medication or surgery for transsexual minors, allows courts to issue warrants that will take custody of a child who is receiving such care, and prohibits teachers from teaching courses on sexual orientation and gender identity to students up to the eighth grade. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nebraska-abortion-ban-restrictions-gender-affirming-care-younger-than-19-gov-jim-pillen-signs-bill/.

Reactions among educators and LGBTQ individuals have been quick and fierce: Faculty at public colleges and universities speak of a “chilling effect” and the “scary time for education,” and many worry that LGBTQ Floridians increasingly will be bullied and otherwise put in harm’s way. DeSantis' anti-DEI education law has 'chilling' effect in Florida (nbcnews.com) DeSantis signs bills on pronouns, gender care, drag shows and more (msn.com)

This is not the first time educators and LGBTQ individuals have been targeted in the state of Florida. The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC), also known as the Johns Committee, more than 50 years ago conducted investigations to ferret out homosexual faculty and staff at the University of Florida, Florida State University, and the University of Southern Florida. Between 1961 and 1963, these investigations resulted in the dismissal of 39 professors and deans, the revocation of teaching certificates of 71 public schools teachers, and the interrogation and expulsion of scores of students for homosexuality. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee - Wikipedia

FLIC’s actions and more importantly its effects on the lives of a small group of educators and their families in Gainesville are brought to stunning life in The Committee by author and teacher Sterling Watson. As a graduate student at the University of Florida in 1969, Watson met professors who had been “harassed by the Committee” and realized “some were permanently scarred.” Watson does not base characters on anyone he knew but shows how typical, ordinary people behave when secrets are exposed and lives are not what they appear to be.   

The Committee by Sterling Watson, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com)

 For this author’s review, see: The Committee - Historical Novel Society

 The John’s Committee

The Florida Legislature in 1956 formed the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC) during the Second Red Scare. (The First Red Scare, or the time of fear and anxiety over the apparent rise of Communism or Socialism in the United States, ran from 1917 to 1920 when labor unions were organizing and populations were moving from rural to industrialized, urban areas. The Second Red Scare began in the early days of the Cold War with Russia and ended roughly in 1954. Also labeled as McCarthyism, the Second Red Scare was linked to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy who claimed Communists had infiltrated the U.S. government and routinely questioned his political opponents’ loyalty to the country. Red Scare | Definition, U.S. History, & Causes | Britannica https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-6?mediaType=Article.)

FLIC was commonly known as the Johns Committee, named after its first chair, state senator and former acting Florida governor Charley Eugene Johns, and conducted wide-ranging investigations of allegedly subversive activities by academics, civil rights leaders, and suspected Communist organizations.

After failing to find links between Communist groups and civil rights organizations, the committee shifted attention to homosexuals, believed at the time to be threats to national security as well as the sexuality and overall well-being of young people. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee - Wikipedia

While the Johns Committee was not originally authorized to investigate homosexuality on college campuses, it sent an investigator to the University of Florida in secret to track down rumors that homosexuality was linked to subversive activity or racial integration in 1958. (Closet Crusaders)

When given a mandate to continue these investigations in 1961, the Johns Committee moved aggressively, collecting more than 8000 pieces of so-called pornographic paraphernalia, remove students from class and interrogate them, rely on information from unreliable or vindictive sources, conduct and secretly record interviews in motel rooms, set traps for critics, and publish Citizenship in Florida, or the Purple Pamphlet that claimed homosexuality was “a skeleton in the close of society.” (Closet Crusaders). The Johns Committee’s work also extended beyond the actions taken by teachers or students in private to flag “intellectual garbage” in the classroom by such authors as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Mead, and J.D. Salinger. (Closet Crusaders)

The result of a single confrontation between committee investigators and a professor was shattering. Sigismond Diettrich, chair of the University of Florida’s geography department, was summoned by a committee member to a meeting on January 19, 1959. Grilled for nearly 90 minutes about allegations of homosexuality from an informant who had never witnessed any sexual behavior, Diettrich acknowledged encounters with consenting male adults. Two months later, after being summarily dismissed from the faculty, he ingested nearly 100 aspirin tables and planned to jump from the upper floor of a campus building. (Closet Crusaders)

 The Committee

A woman’s scream shakes Prof. Tom Stall as it drifts through the open window of his office in the English Department of the University of Florida, Gainesville, in August, 1958. The girl and a small group of students have gathered near the body of fellow professor Jack Leaf, lifeless on the sidewalk in front of Murphree Hall. “Did any of you see him…fall?” Stall asks. “Did you see anyone else up there? ... Did he say anything?”

Stall and others on campus soon discover Leaf’s real name--Red Leaf--and heritage as Native American, and a set of photographs of him and another man in the men’s room of a bus station.

Thus begins Sterling Watson’s novel The Committee in which English professor Stall finds himself caught in the middle--urged to discover whether other male faculty members are engaging in similar behavior to protect “the university, its integrity…its founding principles,” bolster his chances of becoming the next department chair, and at the same time keep the Johns Committee informed.

In the process, Stall witnesses the loss of harmony among academics as members betray, manipulate, and bear false witness, in order to protect their own interests. He and others face the realities of taking actions in the interest of the “greater good” or at minimum the “least offensive” and decide to defy what they believe to be an invasion of privacy or submit in the face of unrelenting pressure.

The question for readers: Is it justified to adopt the tactics of surveillance and confrontation and use them against the interrogators? Or does it mean you’ve succumbed and just become one of them?

 

The actions taken by the Johns Committee in the 1950s and the Florida legislature of today differ, as do the circumstances surrounding them. Yet the justifications are eerily similar. Sumter Lowry, a prominent anti-Communist, opponent of racial integration, and political candidate from Tampa, more than 50 years ago asked: “Why shouldn’t the people who are paying the bills have control over their state institutions?” (Closet Crusaders)

Before signing the recent bills into law, Gov. DeSantis acknowledged: ”It’s our view that, when the taxpayers are funding these institutions, that we as Floridians — and we as taxpayers — have every right to insist that they are following a mission that is consistent with the best interest of our people in our state. You don’t just get to take taxpayer dollars and do whatever the heck you want to do and think that that’s somehow OK.” DeSantis signs 3 bills bringing major change to Florida universities (tampabay.com)

Present-day legislation is vague and does not specifically call for the creation of a committee to oversee its implementation in schools across the state--at least not yet.

Sources

DeSantis signs 3 bills bringing major change to Florida universities (tampabay.com)

Ron DeSantis signs the so-called 'Don't Say Gay' bill : NPR

What the DeSantis agenda means for higher education in Florida | On Point (wbur.org)

Florida Legislative Investigation Committee - Wikipedia

When Florida had a committee to terrorize gay people - Vox

Red Scare | Definition, U.S. History, & Causes | Britannica

https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-6?mediaType=Article

James A. Schnur: Closet Crusaders: The Johns Committee and Homophobia, 1956-1965

 https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-6?mediaType=Article

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

The Voyage of the Rajah and Creation of the Rajah Quilt

Kezia Elizabeth Hayter is traveling on a small boat that will take her from Woolwich Dock to the Rajah sailing ship. With her are some of the 180 women convicts she will oversee on their three-month journey from London to Van Diemen’s Land in Tasmania. While on board she and 18 of the convicts will produce one of Australia’s most revered textiles--The Rajah Quilt. This is the beginning of her story told by author Hope Adams’ in the extraordinary debut novel Dangerous Women.

For this author’s review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/dangerous-women/

Dangerous Women slips back and forth in time from April, 1814, when 180 Englishwomen who had been convicted of petty crimes begin their journey to the other side of the world and three months later when one of the women is stabbed to death and an inquiry seeks to find the culprit. It tells the stories of three major characters--Kezia herself, Clara Shaw, a convict who drugged a fellow inmate and assumed her identity so she could travel on the Rajah, and Hattie Matthews who boarded the ship with her small son Bertie and succumbed to the vicious knife attack.

It is a retelling of the voyage of the Rajah that relies on documentation from ship’s logs to fictionally recreate historical figures--Kezia, Captain Charles Ferguson, and Royal Naval surgeon James Donovan, MD. The novel sheds light on the imprisonment and forced migration of women who had been convicted of crimes, such as stealing or receiving stolen goods, or women convicts who pleaded with a magistrate to be sent to Tasmania rather than serve out their sentences in overcrowded and unsanitary Newgate prison.  Rajah's Granddaughter: The Rajah Quilt – the Truth, and the Myths, Misconceptions and Exceptions. (rajahsgranddaughter.blogspot.com)

And it highlights the work of the “quilt worked by the convicts of the ship Rajah during their voyage to van Dieman’s Land is presented as a testimony of the gratitude with which they remember their exertions for their welfare while in England and during their passage and also as a proof that they have not neglected the ladies kind admonitions of being industrious." – June 1841 (Detail of the Rajah Quilt. (Image Credit: National Library of Australia Collection)

The Rajah Quilt

The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)

The quilt joins together 2815 pieces of fabric in a medallion or ‘framed quilt’ style that was a standard design for quilts made in the British Isles in the mid-1800s. The center section matches the border, both made of appliqué chintz. The center section, decorated with chintz birds and florals, is surrounded by 12 rows or bands of patchwork printed cotton. The outer edge is made of cotton which has been decorated with appliquéd daisies on three sides and flowery chintz on the fourth. It measures 3372 x 3250 mm, and the variations in stitching show that the quilt was made by many different “hands.” The quilt was sewn primarily by 18 women convicts on board the Rajah, but incorporated work by as many as 29 women.  The Rajah Quilt - National Quilt Register

After the Rajah arrived in Hobart on July 19, 1814, Kezia Hayter presented the quilt to Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the Lieutenant-Governor of Tasmania. In 1987 the quilt was found in a private textile collection in Scotland, and in 1989 the Australian Textile Fund purchased and donated it to the National Gallery of Australia.  The Rajah Quilt | Australia Yearly Meeting (quakersaustralia.info)

The Rajah Quilt | Australia Yearly Meeting (quakersaustralia.info)

The Women behind the Quilt

The woman directly overseeing the stitching of the quilt was Kezia Elizabeth Hayter. As matron on board the ship Rajah, she was responsible for keeping order among 180 women prisoners and their ten children. Kezia was one of many members of the British Society of Ladies for the Reformation of Female Prisoners and made the trip to Australia to help Lady Franklin form a similar society--the Tasmanian Ladies’ Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners--to improve the lot of women convicts in the Australian penal colony. Hayter, Kezia Elizabeth (1818-1885) (trc-leiden.nl) The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)

The woman who led the reform movement was Elizabeth Fry.

 NPG 118; Elizabeth Fry - Portrait - National Portrait Gallery

 A Quaker minister of the Society of Friends, Fry established the first national women’s organization in Great Britain--the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners--in 1817, five years after her first visit to Newgate prison. Appalled by the living conditions, she wrote to one of her children:  “I have lately been twice to Newgate to see after the poor prisoners who had poor little infants without clothing, or with very little and I think if you saw how small a piece of bread they are each allowed a day you would be very sorry.” Elizabeth Fry: The Angel of Prisons — East End Women's Museum (eastendwomensmuseum.org)

Newgate prison had many women prisoners in the 1700s and 1800s, largely because of declining living standards for rural women in England and Wales after the rise of the Industrial Revolution. A study of Living Standards of Women in England and Wales, 1785-1815: New Evidence from Newgate Prison Records shows that younger and younger women were being incarcerated. In 1795, the average age of a female convict was 37. By 1814, it was 22. Female Prisoners at Newgate and Elizabeth Fry - Geri Walton

The women in Newgate were crowded, with as many as 120 in a single ward, sleeping directly on the cold, stone floor, and many had no clothing. As Fry described: “the filth, the closeness of the rooms, the ferocious manners and expressions of the women towards each other, and the abandoned wickedness which every thing bespoke, are quite indescribable.” Female Prisoners at Newgate and Elizabeth Fry - Geri Walton

 In addition to advocating for improved prison conditions, Fry and the Society gave prisoners the chance to learn or improve skills, such as needlecraft, to not only give them something to do while imprisoned but offer them a way to perhaps make a living after their release by donating fabric, thread, needles, patchwork and other supplies. The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)

Fry also worked to improve the transport of women convicts to the penal colony in Tasmania, meeting with ships’ captains to assure women and their children would get adequate food and water, and she provided the travelers with sewing tools and fabric to use onboard such as 10 yards of fabric, seven balls of white and colored thread, black wool, needles, threads, scissors, pins, and nearly 10 meters of patchwork pieces. Female Prisoners at Newgate and Elizabeth Fry - Geri Walton The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)

Dangerous Women 

Women aboard the Rajah at first resent their sewing duties, “moaning and complaining:

“She’s taken my scissors…

“They’re not your bloody scissors…

“Why d’we have to do this anyway?...

“I can’t bear her…

“She’s smelly…

“Can’t thread this sodding needle, can I?...

“Blasted ship keeps moving around too much…” (page 122)

But after 100 days at sea, the activity has brought the women together. As Kezia reflects: “the very act of coming together every single day, of sitting quietly sewing, one next to another, of knowing that what they were achieving was something of beauty: that had made them more than a gathering of individuals…a sisterhood” (page 297)

At the end of the journey, Clara realizes: “We’re many small pieces, each of us different but now stitched together. A patchwork of souls.” (page 301)

As the National Gallery of Australia explains: “The Rajah quilt is one of Australia’s most important textiles, and a major focus of the NGA’s textiles collection. While it is a work of great documentary importance in Australia’s history, it is also an extraordinary work of art; a product of beauty from the hands of many women who, while in the most abject circumstances, were able to work together to produce something of hope.”

Dangerous Women honors those women. It pieces together the circumstances surrounding the knife attack that left Hattie bleeding and unconscious on deck and gradually reveals the story Clara has been hiding. More important, the story delves into the personal histories of convict women and the connections they make on board as they stitch one piece of fabric to the next, making the quilt and their relationships with one another a unified whole.

 Sources:

Home » Australian Quaker Narrative Embroidery Project »

The Rajah Quilt | Australia Yearly Meeting (quakersaustralia.info)

The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)

Elizabeth Fry: The Angel of Prisons — East End Women's Museum (eastendwomensmuseum.org)

Female Prisoners at Newgate and Elizabeth Fry - Geri Walton

Hayter, Kezia Elizabeth (1818-1885) (trc-leiden.nl)

Detail of the Rajah Quilt. (Image Credit: National Library of Australia Collection)

The little-known story of Australia’s convict women - Australian Geographic

Amazon.com: Dangerous Women (Audible Audio Edition): Hope Adams, Fenella Woolgar, Penguin Audio: Audible Books & Originals

 

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Revisiting the Brontës

As the house lights dim, a young woman speaks from the back of the theater. As she descends the stairway toward the stage, she introduces herself: She is Lucy Snowe, a 23-year-old woman left to fend for herself, with no family, connections, or prospects, who is striking out on her own in early 19th Century England.

At a theater four miles away, it is so blustery on the moors that the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, Mr. Lockwood, is nearly blown away while waiting for someone to answer his knock. He is grasping the door handle of his landlord’s farmhouse. He is waiting for Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights.

In the dull gray days of lingering winter, theatrical productions in Chicago have been leading observers to take a new look at the Brontës.

It’s not as if we haven’t been here before. Wuthering Heights has been adapted for the screen many times, with modern versions in 2015 and 2003, made-for-television movies and series in 1950 and 1967, and the classic 1939 rendition with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. There’s also a 1970 Villette TV series that appears to have been lost and the BBC series on Being the Brontës (All Wuthering Heights Adaptations, Ranked (According To IMDb) (screenrant.com), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04d3r2l.  

But the 2023 versions are not simple retellings, and they are decidedly different. One is inward, almost claustrophobic, the other has been called a wild, neo-futuristic, epic folk musical.  The one thing in common--each creates the opportunity to revisit the Brontës, the classic 1847 Wuthering Heights and 1853’s Villette. 

Lookingglass Theatre

Playwright Sara Gmitter wrote Villette for Lookingglass Theatre in 2014, more than 150 years after it first appeared in print, spurred by its timelessness, she noted in an interview with Ensemble Member Kareem Bandealy.

Because of unexplained problems with her family and resources, Lucy Snowe is on her own, in an unfamiliar city--London--and yet making her way to board a ferry that will take her across the channel to even less familiar circumstances--the town of Villette in Belgium. In her own words as narrator, Lucy “tells this story about a young woman whose present situation is so bleak that risking everything for the chance of a better life in a different country doesn’t seem like any risk at all,” Gmitter said. Today, Gmitter noted, “There are tens of millions of people who make that same calculation every day. The circumstances that cause their desperation are different but I do believe the feelings- the anxiety and the not-really-daring-to-hope determination are the same. So I hope today’s audience will recognize a lot of Lucy’s story as parts of their own story.” (Lookingglass Theatre Company - VILLETTE - "I hope today’s audience will recognize a lot of Lucy’s story as parts of their own story..." (Click to Read More) (audienceaccess.co)

The book is considered to be somewhat of an autobiography, chronicling Charlotte Brontë’s time in Brussels from 1842 to 1844 when she taught English in the Pensionnat Heger and fell in love with a married man. She returned to England after her friends had left and she grew increasingly lonely and depressed.  (https://www.thebrusselsbrontegroup.org/the-brontes-in-brussels/ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Villette).

In both play and book, the story is told in Lucy’s own words from her singular perspective: On her way to Villette, Lucy meets Ginvera Fanshawe, an 18-year-old who is not shy about touting her connections and prospects, begins to teach in Madame Beck’s School of Girls, falls for the hopelessly Ginvera-besotted Dr. John, and slowly develops a deep and abiding friendship with M. Paul Emanuel.

For more information about Lookingglass Theatre and its upcoming season, see: https://lookingglasstheatre.org/.

Chicago Shakespeare Theatre

Wise Children’s Wuthering Heights is the latest in the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre WorldStage Series, which imports some of the world’s great theater productions to Chicago and, in turn, shares Chicago Shakespeare’s own productions with international audiences. WorldStage has brought to Chicago theater companies from 22 countries across five continents, from Dublin to Moscow, Paris to South Africa. And Chicago Shakespeare has sent troupes to Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and South Korea. https://www.chicagoshakes.com/about_us/about/worldstage.

Wise Children first performed Wuthering Heights at the Bristol Old Vic in 2021. After touring in the UK through May, 2022, the play came to the US, with performances in New York and California before the run in Chicago from February 23 to March 12, 2023.

As with Villette, Wuthering Heights is a resonant story from the past, but it has particular relevance today. Producer Emma Rice recalls being horrified by seeing children in refugee camps as they wait for governments to decide what should become of them. Heathcliff is just such a child, she points out, when he’s found at Liverpool docks and taken to Yorkshire by the Mr. Earnshaw.

For her, “Heathcliff, and the way he’s treated by those around him, is the key to the story. On the surface it’s a love story, but deep down I think it’s about kindness and about the danger of not showing compassion to those in need.” She went on to say: “Wuthering Heights is a cautionary tale about what happens when we treat those in need as somehow less than ourselves. This is the driving force of my adaptation: cruelty breeds cruelty. Be careful what you seed.” (https://charleshutchpress.co.uk/emma-rice-shakes-up-cautionary-tale-wuthering-heights-as-epic-folk-musical/)

Wise Children’s production tells the same heartbreaking tale of obsession, betrayal, and revenge as Emily Brontë’s book. But it does so with a breathtaking presentation--a world-class musical score and actors, a chorus of actors that plays the moors, puppets, innovative movable sets, swirling background videos, and small black chalkboards that keep viewers on track. And it changes the underlying format. While the book has only one storyteller--the nurse Nelly Dean--the play tells the story from five different perspectives.

For more on Chicago Shakespeare’s 2023 season, see: Chicago Shakespeare Theater: Plays & Events.

Revisiting Wuthering Heights and Villette

At the time it was published, Wuthering Heights was labeled as coarse and disagreeable, brutal, filled with scenes of oppression and tyranny. One critic said it would never be generally read. But another had a much better take on the novel: It is impossible to begin and not finish. What critics said about Wuthering Heights (wuthering-heights.co.uk)

Upon publication, Villette was labeled as superior to Jane Eyre by the author of Silas Marner Georg Eliot, who wrote there was “something almost preternatural in its power.” And G H Lewes, Eliot’s partner, was effusive: “There are so few books, and so many volumes. Among the few stands Villette.” Claiming lesser authors were “reverberating the vague noise of others,” Lewes believed “Brontë spoke out boldly in a voice that was all her own.” Charlotte Brontë: Why Villette is better than Jane Eyre (telegraph.co.uk) Villette is still far lesser known than Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights.

Villette admittedly is difficult to read. Language is convoluted, movement sometimes doesn’t track from section to section or chapter to chapter, French phrases appear almost willy nilly. And Lucy herself is distant. The story is introspective; readers observe characters and action along with Lucy as well as her own reactions but don’t always understand or feel connected to her.

 Wuthering Heights likewise is difficult to read. But here the connection is almost too painful. Readers wince at the sudden bursts of physical violence and venom, shudder at the cruelty and mean-spiritedness, lament the ravages of Catherine’s madness, Isabella’s banishment, Heathcliff’s denigration of his son Hareton.

 Yet the books are compelling. Pages turn as readers rush forward to learn what happens next, gain insight on the insidiousness of social class in the Victorian era as it infects relationships between men and women, fathers and sons, families and servants, and denies opportunities to those who are not to the manor born.

 There is a continuing fascination with historical fiction that explores, if at the periphery, social class and almost romanticizes differences in stature--the romances that succeed despite difference in class, the efforts by women to circumvent the restraints. The power of Wuthering Heights and Villette is that they do not shirk, telling their stories as the circumstances of the time allowed, and yet they do not acquiesce. They present characters who do not succumb or smother under the pressure, but characters who overcome and learn to breathe on their own.

  Sources:

https://lookingglasstheatre.org/.

Chicago Shakespeare Theater: Plays & Events.

( All Wuthering Heights Adaptations, Ranked (According To IMDb) (screenrant.com), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04d3r2l.

 (Lookingglass Theatre Company - VILLETTE - "I hope today’s audience will recognize a lot of Lucy’s story as parts of their own story..." (Click to Read More) (audienceaccess.co)

(https://www.thebrusselsbrontegroup.org/the-brontes-in-brussels/ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Villette).

https://www.chicagoshakes.com/about_us/about/worldstage.

(https://charleshutchpress.co.uk/emma-rice-shakes-up-cautionary-tale-wuthering-heights-as-epic-folk-musical/)

What critics said about Wuthering Heights (wuthering-heights.co.uk)

 Charlotte Brontë: Why Villette is better than Jane Eyre (telegraph.co.uk)

Villette by Charlotte Brontë | Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (smartbitchestrashybooks.com)

www.amazon.com/Wuthering-Heights-Emily-Bronte/dp/150531349X/ref=asc_df_150531349X?tag=bingshoppinga-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=80607997944724&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4584207589743782&psc=1

Amazon.com: Villette: A Complete, Unabridged 1853 Edition with a Historical Annotation and Author Biography eBook : Brontë, Charlotte, Classics, Viking, Davis, Charlotte: Kindle Store

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

Missing Pieces of Sylvia Plath

February, 2023, marks the 60th anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath. Plath committed suicide one month after her seminal work The Bell Jar was published in the UK under the assumed name Victoria Lucas.

Only a few of her works appeared in print prior to her death. A handful of poems were published in magazines in the 1950s, and The Colossus and Other Poems in 1960.  Many of her writings were released later in the 1960s--Ariel and Uncollected Poems (1965)--as well as the 1970s--Fiesta Melons and Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1972), and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977)--and the 1980s, including her collected poems in 1989 and selected poems in 1985.  Sylvia Plath bibliography - Wikipedia

 Her work and her personal correspondence and journals attract interest even today. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, spanning 1950 to 1962, was published in 2000. Some of her letters were published in 2017 and 2018, and one of her short stories appeared in 2019. Sylvia Plath | Biography, Poems, Books, Death, & Facts | Britannica

But many of her writings have gone missing. She reportedly destroyed some of her letters and work. The draft of her second novel, tentatively titled Double Exposure, was lost, according to her husband Ted Hughes, around 1970. He also destroyed one of her notebooks “because [he] did not want her children to have to read it,” and said another notebook had simply vanished. What Happened to Sylvia Plath’s Lost Novels? - Electric Literature

What if three of Plath’s notebooks suddenly turn up? And they are a rough, hand-written early version of The Bell Jar? What would happen to them? And who would decide? That is the subject of a 2022 novel by Lee Kravetz--The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.

Elton and Jay Jay Dyce find a dusty metal lock box in the attic of an abandoned Victorian house in Boston they are renovating in 2019. Inside are three spiral notebooks, one bearing the letters V and L across the top. The pages are covered with blocks of printed letters and sweeping handwriting, some words crossed out, others underscored or circled.

A master curator for the St. Ambrose Auction House scans the pages and realizes she is looking at an early draft or transcription of The Bell Jar. On the cover of one notebook are the initials of the pseudonym Plath used for the book’s first printing: Victoria Lucas. A careful review by Boston University Professor of Literature Nicholas Jacob confirms the find as “the only handwritten version of Sylvia’s novel in existence,” and he wonders: “How is it no one knows this version of the manuscript exists?”

Author Lee Kravetz answers that question, telling the story behind the notebooks from three perspectives: that of the curator Estee, fellow poet and Plath rival Boston Rhodes, and Plath’s psychiatrist Dr. Ruth Barnhouse--over three time periods--2019, 1958, and 1953.

Kravetz reimagines Robert Lowell’s weekly poetry workshop, which included Plath and other so-called Confessional Poets, and patterns Boston Rhodes after Plath rival Anne Sexton.

Kravetz builds on his training as a psychotherapist to fictionalize Plath’s time in McLean Hospital after a breakdown and suicide attempt in 1953 and adds perspective on the shift in psychiatry from traditional Freudian to more human-centered forms of therapy. And he notes the connection between mental disorder and art. In an interview for Literary Hub, he emphasized: “all the literature shows that there’s no link at all… except in the case of one diagnosis: Bipolar disorder! It’s no coincidence that a majority of the Confessional Poets, including Sylvia, shared this diagnosis.” Lee Kravetz on Sylvia Plath, 1950s Psychiatry, and Confessional Poets ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

 While the notebooks in Confessions are wholly fictional, the possibility of finding heretofore lost or hidden manuscripts by Plath should come as no surprise. Her work often disappeared, whether by her own hand or those of Ted and his sister Olwyn Hughes who managed Plath’s estate after she died.

The Lost Manuscripts of Sylvia P.

Sylvia herself wanted to disguise or hide some of her work. Friends agreed that she did not want to affix her name as author of The Bell Jar when it was first published in 1963. She worried that the novel, which chronicled her breakdown in 1953 and included thinly veiled incidents involving her friends and family, would be painful to read, particularly for her mother. Sylvia Plath 'didn't want her mother to know she wrote The Bell Jar' | Sylvia Plath | The Guardian

The Bell Jar book by Sylvia Plath (thriftbooks.com)

Plath filled notebooks and covered loose sheets of paper with what her husband called the “day to day struggle with her warring selves,” and his sister Olwyn, executor of the Plath’s literary materials, acknowledged: “when you read her journals – there were some very dark things in there.” Interview: Olwyn Hughes, Sylvia Plath's literary executor | Sylvia Plath | The Guardian

While Hughes released the journals for publication in 1982, they were not complete. Portions of the journals were removed before publication, presumably at the request of Plath’s mother (Interview: Olwyn Hughes, Sylvia Plath's literary executor | Sylvia Plath | The Guardian).

Letters Home which collected Plath’s correspondence with her mother was first published in 1976 and rereleased in 1992. This compilation also was incomplete. It excluded letters or portions of letters that described Sylvia’s bouts of anger or complaints about her illness. Red Comet, Heather Clark, 2020.

  

Letters Home book by Sylvia Plath (thriftbooks.com)

Two other notebooks cover the last three years of her death, but neither is available. One was destroyed by Hughes, so, as he stated, Sylvia’s children would not have to read the ruminations it contained. The other just disappeared. (Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Annals of Biography, August 23 & 30, 1993 Issue)

Most notable is the absence of material involving Plath’s second novel. In the summer of 1962, Plath began work on a fictionalized account, similar to The Bell Jar, about an artist who discovers her husband has cheated on her with another woman. It’s known that Plath had completed a sizable portion of the book before her death, carrying the title Double Exposure. But those pages have vanished. The Mystery of Sylvia Plath's Lost Novel (thedailybeast.com)

Missing pages are just part of Plath’s legacy, it would seem. As Emily Van Duyne noted, “In the hunt for a deeper understanding of Sylvia Plath, things are always going missing.” Why Are We So Unwilling to Take Sylvia Plath at Her Word? ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)

Found or Stay Lost

In Confessions no one, including the heirs of Plath’s literary estate, has a claim on the notebooks because they were never listed as stolen by police.  While the books could be offered to a museum or other institution, a private auction is planned. Auctioning the books to the highest bidder is considered to be the best choice for the Dyce brothers who found them and the auction house that stands to gain a percentage of the sale as well as publicity. But that means the books will become trophies for a private buyer and kept away from scholars and the public, when, as Nicholas believes, “some things aren’t meant to belong to anybody.”

In the United States, the right to privacy is a personal right under common law and therefore ceases upon a person’s death. Writers may try to protect their privacy or the privacy of friends and family after their deaths, but their wishes are often ignored.

The poet Thom Gunn made it clear that he would not want his letters to be published after his death. Yet The Letters of Thom Gunn was published in March, 2022. George Orwell and T.S. Eliot did not want biographies to be written about them, yet more than 20 have been published about the authors. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, James Campbell notes a review of a Susan Sontag biography asking: ”Is it ever O.K. to violate the privacy that friends, dead or alive, assumed to be inviolate when they allowed you to know them?” Does a Great Writer Have a Private Life After Death? - WSJ

A play being performed at Raven Theatre in Chicago raises the issue of privacy in the digital age when a young man continues to face a damaging and often untrue digital footprint ten years after the fact. Home | Raven Theatre Chicago

Unlike residents of the European Union, the man is not able to have his personal information removed from search engine results. He and others in the United States do not have what EU has: the “right to be forgotten.” What is the right to be forgotten? | Right to erasure | Cloudflare

After death, there is no privacy, and today on the Internet, as the lead Raven Theatre actor in Right to be Forgotten says, “there is no starting over, because there is no forgetting.”

Sometimes, as Confessions explores, an author’s words are meant only for the eyes of a particular person or no one at all. Unfortunately, these words are not covered by a right to be forgotten.  

 

Sources:

Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, Slyvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Vintage Books, 1993.

Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath, Method and Madness, Schaffner Press, 1976.

Heather Clark, Red Comet, The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.

  

Time Stamp: History Book Releases, Reviews, and Reports

The New Old West

A strength of historical fiction is the ability to help readers understand lives as they were lived in the past. Historical fiction gives readers the opportunity to view events through the eyes of characters as they are experiencing them or begin to comprehend the daily challenges of a specific time period as characters endure.

The American Western is a uniquely popular historical fiction genre. Set on the frontier of the Western United States in the 1800s, tales of the Old West or Wild West often are adventures populated by desperadoes, gunslingers, and scattered lawmen who traverse barren, often hostile terrain, engage in gun flights, and interact with settlers, farmers, cattlemen, and Native Americans over issues of personal honor, frontier justice, revenge and retribution.

But Westerns are wide-ranging. There are grand-scale epics (The Wild Bunch, 1969, Django Unchained, 2012, or The Harder They Fall, 2021), sci-fi offerings (Westworld, 2016), horror tales (Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, 1966), and the outright weird (the steampunk Jonah Hex series).

Some aficionados worry that the Western is going the way of the buffalo. Stuart Rosebrook at the end of 2021 bemoaned the decline in the number of published westerns. “The canary in the coal mine of Old West history publishing is the waning number of Old West titles published annually by university publishers. I wish I had better news to report on this matter, but the time has come when most major academic houses are publishing fewer than 10 new traditional 19th-century titles a year,” he wrote. Western Books, Western Books & Movies

 And as for Westerns published by New York publishing houses? Rosebrook is “not sure if even Larry McMurtry or Elmore Leonard could get a contract from a major New York fiction house in 2022. It may be the end of the road for the literary Western novel in New York.”

 But then there are the recent numbers: The television series Yellowstone, starring Kevin Costner on Paramount, had 12.1 million viewers for the opening night of its fifth season last November, making it “the most popular scripted series episode so far in the new television season,” said Nielsen. ‘Yellowstone’ tops 12M viewers, becomes most popular scripted series - pennlive.com

 The man behind Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan, has other Western series on the air, including 1883, starring Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, and 1923 with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. At Disney+, hit Star Wars series The Mandalorian was inspired by Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns.  Why Are Westerns Still Popular? - Netflix Tudum

The Longmire series on A&E and later Netflix regularly drew more viewers than television icons Breaking Bad and Mad Men. While the overall number of Longmire viewers dropped from 6 million an episode in 2014 to 3.7 million in 2015, series per-episode totals were far higher than those for Breaking (2 million) and Men (3 million). Longmire (TV series) - Wikipedia

In other media, Josh Terry reported last December that “Red Dead Redemption 2, an ambitious 2018 video game where you can be a cowboy in the Old West, sold more than 39 million copies and may have inspired Lil Nas X to write his record-breaking and genre-smashing single “Old Town Road.” This year, Beyoncé’s Ivy Park Rodeo fashion line proved that the cowboy aesthetic is timeless, supremely cool and able to adapt with the times.”  Why Are Westerns Still Popular? - Netflix Tudum

Nuevo Mexico

Two book series are taking Western stories to their historical fiction roots in a particular period and place--New Mexico in the mid-1800s or Nuevo Mexico--and in the process bringing to light an environment and occurrences few, even those steeped in Western lore, may know much about.  

https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/179563349094/map-of-mexico-1836

 Loretta Miles Tollefson writes regularly about the New Mexico of the late 1800s and early 1900s, including book reviews, descriptions of historical events (such as Teddy Roosevelt’s visit to Albuquerque in 1903), and political factors that affected the region (the imposition of taxes in 1837 and a Supreme Court decision on land grants in 1887).  For more about her, see: About Me – Fiction and Fact From Old New Mexico (lorettamilestollefson.com).

 As she reports on her website, Miles Tollefson is focusing almost exclusively on historical fiction. After publishing two volumes of short stories and micro-fiction in 2018, she added the stand-alone The Pain and the Sorrow (2020), the fictionalized tale of the true story of a young woman who learns she has married serial killer Charles Kennedy set in the 1860s (The Pain and The Sorrow: A Novel of Old New Mexico - Kindle edition by Miles Tollefson, Loretta. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com) and three novels in the Locke Family series.

 The Locke Family Saga of novels begins with Not Just Any Man, published in 2018, with sequels Not My Father’s House following in 2019 and No Secret Too Small in 2020. The series follows Gerald and Suzanna as they make a home among the Sangre de Cristo mountains, raise children Alma and Andrew, deal with a personal past they’ve tried to keep hidden, and face an outbreak of rebellion against the New Mexican government in 1837 (Amazon.com: The Locke Family Saga: Three Novels of Old New Mexico eBook: Miles Tollefson, Loretta: Books).

 The latest from Miles Tollefson--There Will Be Consequences-- further develops the story of that rebellion.

Released in January, 2022, the book was reviewed by this author for the Historical Novel Society: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/there-will-be-consequences-a-biographical-novel-of-old-new-mexico/

There Will Be Consequences chronicles disputes among the leaders of New Mexico-the local governor, president, alcalde, and rebels--and a year-long period of violence ending with the death of the governor and execution of the rebel who replaced him.

As noted in the History Novel Society review, Miles Tollefson “brings the rebellion to vibrant life” by letting the principal historical figures speak for themselves, presenting the story as it affects each of them in their own words and observations.” Amazon.com: There Will Be Consequences: A Biographical Novel of Old New Mexico: 9781952026058: Miles Tollefson, Loretta: Books).

Long-time Western writer Rod Miller recently added to his own Old New Mexico series.  Miller writes extensively about the American West, writing articles for such publications as Saddlebag Dispatches, True West, Western Horseman, and American Cowboy. His historical books have won awards from Western Writers of America and Western Fictioneers. He is a four-time winner of the Spur Award, two-time winner of the Peacemaker Award, and winner of the Poetry Book of the Year from two organizations--Westerns International and the Academy of Western Artists. For more on Miller, see: About (writerrodmiller.com).

Miller’s New Mexican family series begins with Father Unto Many Sons in 2018 (paperback released in 2020) as the heads of two families head west: Lee Pate uproots his wife and sons from Tennessee because of his abhorrence of the institution and spread of slavery. In Arkansas, he meets the Lewis family, Mormons uprooted from Missouri by persecution they themselves endured because of their religious beliefs. Father Unto Many Sons: Miller, Rod: 9781432843441: Amazon.com: Books

The sequel, This Thy Brother released in 2022, reacquaints readers with the Pate and Lewis families as they adjust to the realities of the Santa Fe Trail and the desert Southwest. The book was reviewed by this author for the Historical Novel Society: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/this-thy-brother-five-star-western-series/

 The family relationships highlighted in Miller’s first book resonate in the second. Despite single-minded pig-headedness, jealousy, and resentment, brothers are still brothers, family is still family.  Unusual is the setting and its challenges: a rugged and yet-to-be secure trail for moving goods from Mexico to the U.S., nascent and chancy enterprises for buying and trading merchandise, frictions among Navajo, Ute, settlers and ranchers, and the Mexican Army. https://www.amazon.com/This-Brother-Five-Star-Western/dp/1432892762

Both Consequences and Brother depict New Mexico before the area became a U.S. territory (1850) and later a state (January, 1912), when Nuevo Mexico covered more than 200,000 square miles and included present-day New Mexico and part of Texas.

Conditions were poor for the residents of a little more than 25 Native pueblos and 100 settlements. Essential elements of prosperity--agriculture, commerce, and industry--were lacking because of the remote location and overall neglect by the central Mexican government.  [Source: H. Bailey Carrol and J. Villansana Haggard, Three New Mexico Chronicles (Albuquerque, 1942) , described by Pedro Bautista Pino, the province of New Mexico's representative in the Spanish parliament, in 1812.

“Mexico was too embroiled in its own problems to attend to those of New Mexicans.” The staples of Mexico’s economy--silver mining and textile manufacturing--were collapsing. Investors were no longer staking the Mexican government but taking their fortunes back to Spain. Taxes were making trade more profitable for American traders than Mexican merchants. Santa Fe National Historic Trail: Special History Study (Chapter 2) (npshistory.com)

Meanwhile, skirmishes between settlers and neighboring tribes were increasing not only in number but in property damage, injuries, and deaths and further eroding exports as well as herds of sheep and stocks of cattle.

Yet “officials in Mexico City were unable to address the mounting discontent among the people in the northern provinces, and failed to dispel the conviction expressed by the editors of El Fanal, that "the government does not pay as much attention to the edges of the Republic as to its center." Santa Fe National Historic Trail: Special History Study (Chapter 2) (npshistory.com)

The opening of the Santa Fe Trail, covering 934 miles from Franklin, Missouri, to Santa Fe, established the first legal trade route between the U.S. and Mexico in 1821, and brought much needed tools so New Mexicans could more easily build, farm, and hunt. Shipments of a wide range of goods from fabrics to buttons, clothing and shoes, to and from southern Mexican soon increased. But with them came steady increases in import duties.

 Santa Fe Trail. Travel the Trail: Map Timeline 1821 - 1845 - Santa Fe National Historic Trail (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)

Smoldering discontent and concerns about safety boiled over in 1837, soon after the new governor of Nuevo Mexico imposed a tax to support government operations and the region’s military garrison and rebels took up arms. 

This is the part of the west visited by authors Miller and Miles Tollefson. Through the experiences of their characters, readers ride along with a pair of Pate brothers as they accompany freighters moving cattle and wagons of goods between Santa Fe and Independence, Missouri, and travel with a mountain man to the Place Deep in the Rock where Anasazi once lived and Navaho now hide in barrancas and fire arrows on Utes and the white men below. Readers visit Daniel Lews’ Santa Fe Warehouse that manages the string of mercantiles from Albuquerque to Abiquiu and the Pate’s cattle and sheep ranch on the Pajarito Plateau, and they view the rebellion of 1837 from the perspectives of government officials and aides, religious leaders, merchants and traders, army men, and rebel leaders.

Sources:

 Santa Fe National Historic Trail: Special History Study (Chapter 2) (npshistory.com)

History of New Mexico - Wikipedia

The Santa Fe Trail, 1821-2021: 200 Years of Commerce, Conflict, & Culture (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)

Subdivisions of the First Mexican Empire, 1821. - Maps on the Web (zoom-maps.com)

Reno, Philip. "Rebellion in New Mexico - 1837." New Mexico Historical Review 40, 3 (1965). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol40/iss3/2, UNM Digital Repository.

Rio Grande National Heritage Area New Mexico: History and Culture/Northern New Mexico History (riograndenha.org)

Why Westerns Will Always Win. Between ‘The Harder They Fall’ and ‘The Power of the Dog,’ the genre is evolving and better than ever.  Josh Terry, Dec 27, 2021

 Why Are Westerns Still Popular? - Netflix Tudum

Best of the West 2022: Western Books

by Stuart Rosebrook | Dec 10, 2021 | Western Books, Western Books & Movies

 ‘Yellowstone’ tops 12M viewers, becomes most popular scripted series - pennlive.com

Longmire (TV series) - Wikipedia

Western (genre) - Wikipedia

List of Western subgenres - Wikipedia