This Week in Books: The Landlords of Literature
Walter de la Mare would have been posting on AO3.
Dear Reader,
I was trying to decide what book by Joyce Carol Oates to buy. I thought I’d go for A Garden of Earthly Delights, the first in her Wonderland Quartet, only to discover that she’d done a massive Henry James–style rewrite in 2003. If I want to read the edition that was a finalist for the National Book Award (as apparently each book in the Quartet was), then I’ll have to buy it used.
This kind of literary ownership is on everyone’s minds at the moment, what with Elizabeth Koch shaking our perception boxes so hard she shifts the fragile contents of our broken brains, and Roald Dahl’s estate trying to trick kids into thinking he was a nice guy. Like any sort of property, literature has its landlords, I guess. Making decisions we all just have to go along with!
Lincoln Michel, in that last link, points to grotesquely extended copyright as the issue with the Dahl saga. It got me thinking about Walter de la Mare’s first novel, Henry Brocken: His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance, which I read about it Michael Dirda’s practically proselytizing essay on Walter de la Mare. (I was converted! You will be converted! I now firmly believe: we have all got to be reading more Walter de la Mare!) In the book, Henry Brocken wanders into the realm of fiction, The Eyre Affair–style, and hangs out with literary heroes like, well, Jane Eyre, who, “unhappy in her marriage to Rochester, is flirtatious and confessional.” So… I was, you know, doing the math… Henry Brocken was published in 1904. Jane Eyre was published in 1847. Charlotte Brontë died in 1855. As of right now, copyright extends for 70 years after an author’s death. Folks, in these conditions, he couldn’t have done it. Walter de la Mare would have been posting on AO3.
George Sand and her set took a different tack—instead of meeting literary characters in their books, they just became literary characters instead. They all fictionalized each other in so many veiled takedowns and defensive maneuvers—as Raymond N. MacKenzie explains, there are four different fictionalized firsthand accounts of the George Sand–Alfred de Musset affair—that the effect spiraled outwards through space and time, and people continue to write fiction about all of them to this day. George Sand herself is now more of a character than any character from one of her books. (Name three facts about the character Indiana—better yet, name a novel by George Sand besides Indiana!) If you were doing a Henry Brocken today, you’d probably have your protagonist meet George Sand.
Uh, what was I saying, before I got carried away by George Sand again? Oh right. Literary ownership. It’s getting, I guess, worse. Stronger. We need to find ways to evade it. Like squatting. Or just saying “no” very icily when your landlord says they want to raise your rent. (I’ve heard this sometimes works.) I wonder… in this era of autofiction, could you just… write your own fictional Karl Ove Knausgaard? And be like, no no, this isn’t a copyrighted character from his books, this is a character based on the real Karl Ove Knausgaard… I can see it being the first step into a kind of escalating literary guerilla warfare… A sort of Maoist fiction reform… Take back the characters for the people!
Well, yeah. No books newsletter next week, I’m taking a break.
—Dana
1. “Devilish Agencies at Work” by Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books
Michael Dirda writes about Walter de la Mare. In-print editions of his work include Out of the Deep and Reading Walter de la Mare.
In the 1920s and 1930s Walter de la Mare was considered one of Britain’s major literary figures, a triple threat as poet, storyteller, and anthologist… [H]e once wrote, “This workaday actuality of ours—with its bricks, its streets, its woods, its hills, its waters—may have queer and, possibly, terrifying holes in it.” Read him at length and you’re likely to agree with the critic Diana Waggoner, writing in The Hills of Faraway (1978), that de la Mare was “the most beautifully melancholy fantasist of the twentieth century.”
2. “Trop Dandy” by Raymond N. MacKenzie, London Review of Books
Raymond N. MacKenzie writes about two novels based on the authors’ relationships with the poet Alfred de Musset—This Woman, This Man by his lover George Sand and This Was The Man by Louise Colet, with whom he was obsessed. Both are newly translated by Graham Anderson for Dedalus Books.
… [Musset] wrote poems for [Sand], one praising Indiana, and sent her sketches. There was no talk of love. On the contrary, he told her how fine a thing it was that they could be friends with no danger of falling in love – when it comes to love, he wrote, there’s a whole Baltic Sea between us. This was written on 24 July. In one of the century’s finest volte-faces, the very next day he wrote: ‘My dear Georges, I have something stupid and ridiculous to tell you ... I’m in love with you.’
3. “Who Poisoned Pablo Neruda?” by Ariel Dorfman, The Atlantic
Ariel Dorfman writes about new findings regarding the death of Neruda.
According to Neruda’s family, a new forensics report conducted by a group of international experts has concluded that he was poisoned… [T]here were rumors that he had been killed by an agent of General Augusto Pinochet’s secret police, but I dismissed them over the years as unfounded, because, I asked myself, why would the military go to the trouble of assassinating someone who was already dying?
4. “The Marquis de Sade’s Filthy, Pricey 40-Foot Scroll of Depravity” by Kevin Birmingham, The New York Times
Kevin Birmingham reviews Joel Warner’s The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History (Crown).
“How many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness or use that star to burn the world!”
…In 37 days, [Sade] wrote 157,000 words on a 40-foot scroll while imprisoned in the Bastille, creating, he bragged, “the most impure tale ever written since the world began.” 120 Days of Sodom chronicles four months of depravity involving multiple victims in a remote castle. Sade wrote in secret, by candlelight, covering the scroll in microscopic script. When he was suddenly transferred to a mental asylum days before revolutionaries stormed the Bastille in 1789, he hid his unfinished scroll in a crevice of his cell wall.
…In 2014, it became central to what was either, Warner writes, “a decade-long, continent-spanning, billion-euro con” or a conspiracy of officials and cultural elites…
5. “A Paradise With No Country” by André Naffis-Sahely, Poetry
André Naffis-Sahely reviews Homero Aridjis’ Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence (New Directions).
Somewhere, at some moment a deranged Godzilla and a maddened Batman pitched nuclear strikes at one another. All of it was brief. The Apocalypse shall be the work of man, not of God.
6. “Posthumous Existence” by Jack Skelley, Los Angeles Review of Books
Jack Skelley interviews Anahid Nersessian about Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (University of Chicago).
“At one point, [Keats] moved to Winchester, and when he happened to be in London for a few days, he wrote this incredibly sad letter postmarked September 14, 1819, to tell Brawne he couldn’t come see her in Hampstead because it wouldn’t be ‘paying a visit, but venturing into a fire.’
“In Keats’s odes, this painful and persistent sense of unease — a mixture of longing, repulsion, fear, guilt, and an irresistible fidelity to the truth of the whole experience — is masterfully sublimated, woven into a crosshatch of opposing forces that hold the poem in perfect suspension.
“…He has a lot of very rich and dynamic fantasies about being completely annihilated.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The End of the World Review to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.