There is, currently, only one authenticated photograph of Dickinson in existence – the well-known image of the poet as a teenager in 1847. But Amherst College believes an 1859 daguerreotype may well also be an image of the reclusive, beloved poet, by now in her mid-20s and sitting with her recently widowed friend, Kate Scott Turner. If so, it will shed new light on the poet who, by the late 1850s, was withdrawing further and further from the world.
The photograph is currently being evaluated by experts.
If you’ve been following this blog for the last few days, you probably noticed the considerable interest raised by my post on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, just a few inches below this on your screen. I wrote the post in response to reading Prof. Bruce Charlton’s e-book about Tolkien and The Notion Club Papers.
Today Prof. Charlton posted a piece responding directly to my suggestions. What surprises me most is that he places most of the blame for the rift between Lewis and Tolkien on Tolkien.
The critical rift in JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis’s friendship can probably be dated to early 1949, when Tolkien heard Lewis read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
This fact was forcefully brought home to me by Lars Walker’s blog posting at Brandywine Books.
Lewis later remarked that Tolkien disliked the book intensely, and Roger Lancelyn Green confirmed this from a meeting with Tolkien about the end of March 1949.
But if early 1949 was the critical incident, then we need to understand the background to the incident (and why it caused a rift) and also understand why the rift was not repaired.
This fondness for murderers suggests that, for all their differences and their mutual hostility, Mailer, Capote, and Vidal had something in common that separated them from most of the rest of us. Even as all of them adored the limelight, they were drawn to the dark side. If they weren’t, in the final analysis, great, or even particularly good, American novelists, perhaps it was, in large part, not because of a lack of raw talent but because they all felt, to some degree and for various reasons, alienated from ordinary Americans to a degree that made it impossible for any of them to write with sufficient empathy and understanding about their countrymen – except, perhaps, those who had killed in cold blood. To be capable of a perverse sympathy for psychopaths but incapable of contemplating ordinary American life without feeling contempt and condescension (and this last applies less to Capote than to the other two) is not the formula for producing enduring literature.
The Inklings Corner at the Eagle and Child Pub (the “Bird and Baby”), Oxford. It was here that the Inklings met for many years. Photo credit: Tom Murphy VII.
I posted some comments a few days ago about Prof. Bruce Charlton’s writings on Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers. I learned quite a bit reading what he wrote, and it even sparked a thought of my own, somewhere in that dank cauliflower of cholesterol that I call my brain.
It’s well known that Lewis’s and Tolkien’s friendship cooled in their later years. Tolkien was disappointed in the Chronicles of Narnia, complaining that Lewis had sunk to mere allegory. And when Lewis married Joy Davidman, Tolkien considered her rude, abrasive, and just another in a long string of parasites who took advantage of his friend’s generous nature.
About Joy Davidman I’ve got nothing to say at this time. But I think I understand now why Tolkien was so upset about the Narnia books. Continue reading Frodo without Sam→
A while back I was contacted by a young man named Colin Cutler, a student at Patrick Henry College. It had been suggested to him that I might be willing to serve as his mentor in a student writing project. He wanted to write a mythic treatment of the Christian gospel, in Anglo-Saxon/Viking style.
Recently he has published the story in book form, and he asked me to write an Introduction. You can read my Introduction below the fold. Continue reading Myth-making→
This is a remarkable way of writing. Most writers know roughly what they mean in their first draft, and in the process of revising and re-drafting they try to get closer to that known meaning. But Tolkien did the reverse: he generated the first draft, then looked at it as if that draft had been written by someone else, and he was trying to understand what it meant – and in this case eventually deciding that it meant something pretty close to the opposite of the original meaning.
I am a Tolkien fan, but not a Tolkien acolyte. Aside from the standard texts, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I’ve read The Silmarillion and a few other writings, but I never made it through The Book of Lost Tales, and I’ve never even tried The History of Middle Earth.
Prof. Bruce Charlton is hard core. I was directed to his blog, Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers, by our friend Dale Nelson, who has been in correspondence with him. Dale sent me a file of Prof. Charlton’s long blog post, A Companion to JRR Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers, which I read with some interest. You can find it at the blog right here and judge for yourself. Continue reading On the Notion Club Papers→
Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President (Salem Grove Press), argues that Barton “is guilty of taking statements and actions out of context and simplifying historical circumstances.” For example, they charge that Barton, in explaining why Jefferson did not free his slaves, “seriously misrepresents or misunderstands (or both) the legal environment related to slavery.”
In response, Barton says he cites his sources extensively so that critics can take up their arguments in their original context.
Somebody shared this on Facebook, and I thought it was just the thing for a book blog. The only known footage of author Mark Twain, taken by Thomas Edison in 1909.
Somebody noted in the comments that both Twain and his daughter Jean would be dead within a year.
What do we learn from this fragment? Well, Mark Twain walked a little funny. Also, Thomas Edison was a better inventor than cinematographer. Didn’t it occur to him that the middle daughter’s face, in the second scene, is mostly hidden behind that samovar, or whatever the thing is? Then she puts on a big hat, and we can’t even see her hair. Frame the shot, Tom!
Last night as I was getting ready to turn in, I turned on Dennis Miller’s talk show, which is delay-broadcast here. A married couple was sitting in for him (I forget their names), and they announced that their next guest would be their friend Dean Koontz, to talk about his new novel, Odd Apocalypse.
I listened to the interview and took the book’s release date, my birthday, as a sign from heaven that I was meant to buy it now, and not wait for a lower price when the paperback comes out.
What to do? What to do? I’m torn as to what my attitude should be toward The Dark Knight Rises, the new Batman movie. I haven’t seen it, mind you. But as an internationally respected blogger, I think I’m obligated to have an opinion. The question is, what opinion should I parrot? Two of my favorite bloggers have taken totally contradictory views.
First of all, Andrew Klavan praised it to the skies in a column for the Wall Street Journal, which he links here.
The movie is a bold apologia for free-market capitalism; a graphic depiction of the tyranny and violence inherent in every radical leftist movement from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street; and a tribute to those who find redemption in the harsh circumstances of their lives rather than allow those circumstances to mire them in resentment.
, is being harshly criticized by historians who usually agree with his conclusions.