#1952Club Candidates

Once again it's time for Kaggsy & Simon's year club and this spring its 1952:

 

I've heaped up a pile of books, not all of which I'll read:

Left, then top to bottom:

A. J. Liebling/Chicago

Liebling wrote several articles about Chicago for The New Yorker in early 1952; the book came out later that year. I've read this one before, but something I read recently about the Mob in Chicago referenced it and I've been thinking about rereading it. When I first read it, my thought at the time was, enh, a New Yorker writing about Chicago--what did he know? But we can see if that's true! (Liebling at his best is amazing.)

Angus Wilson/Hemlock & After

Bernard Sands is a 50-something novelist who wants to start an arts centre. Wilson's first novel.

Kurt Vonnegut/Player Piano

Also Vonnegut's first novel. I've never read it but I think it's harder sci-fi than a lot of his later novels.

Henry Green/Doting

Henry Green's last novel. Witty and dialog-heavy? I suspect. I've read a couple of Greens, but not this one.

Yasunari Kawabata/Thousand Cranes

Hopeless love and the Japanese tea ceremony says the cover. I've also read a couple of Kawabata's and not this one--the Other Reader is a fan and we have a stack, which I haven't made my way through.

Vassily Grossman/Stalingrad

Well, this one is here, but I'd have to have started it already to actually read it in time for this week. But I've been thinking about it since I recently read Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction and one of his chapters is devoted to this and the amazing Life and Fate. So I could be reading it soon.

Van Wyck Brooks/The Confident Years

Brooks' history of the American literary scene in the years 1885-1915. Late Henry James, Edith Wharton, Lafcadio Hearn, early Theodore Dreiser. Brooks' whole Makers and Finders series on the history of American literature is pretty great.

I've already read one and a half of the books on that pile (in addition to the Liebling which I read some years ago). First post on Monday!

But of course I won't read all of them this week, alas...

There's one book I've read from 1952 since I've started the blog:

Edmund Wilson's The Shores of Light. It's a pretty great collection of Wilson's criticism, bookended by two essays he wrote in 1952, on Christian Gauss, the literary critic and his (and F. Scott Fitzgerald's) professor at Princeton, and on Edna St. Vincent Millay, with whom Wilson had been in love at one point.

Some other '52 books I've read and enjoyed in the past: Invisible Man, Martha Quest, East of Eden, The Old Man and the Sea, Wise Blood, The Cloven Viscount, Men at Arms (from Evelyn Waugh's Swords of Honour trilogy).

And if I want to sneak in a mystery toward the end of the week, some possible rereads:

I remember the Queen pretty well--well, it is one of his most striking solutions--so I probably won't reread that. The Lew Archer and the Perry Mason I scarcely remember and so they'd practically be like new mysteries. One of those is likeliest.

I'm pretty sure I've also read the two Christies from that year, but I don't have them and would have to hunt them up. Though the Poirot from that year seems vague to me and it's possible I've never read it.

Are you joining in? Which look good to you? Which should I be sure not to miss?

Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!

 

Catullus 75 (#poem)

My beat up undergraduate text

Catullus 75

Huc est mens deducta tua mea, Lesbia, culpa

  Atque ita se officio perdidit ipsa suo

Ut iam nec bene velle queat tibi, si optima fias,

  Nec desistere amare, omnia si facias.

 

-Catullus

 

Yikes, Latin! Fortunately my translation of the poem appeared in a web-based magazine here just last week. 

Catullus 75

Lesbia, I've been brought so low by your wayward ways--

  I'm also by my own nice-guy-ness cursed--

that I cannot like you when you try to be your best,

  or stop loving you, when you do your worst.

 

-Catullus (tr. Reese Warner--hey, that's me!)

 

The original is written in elegiacs--alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter. I've been translating these into a syllable-counting measure with rhymes (a style Marianne Moore often used, though not for elegiacs). 

A couple of other translations I happened to have lying around:

 

Catullus 75

 

My mind has been brought so low by your conduct, Lesbia,

  and so undone itself through its own goodwill

that now if you were perfect it couldn't like you,

  nor cease to love you now, whatever you did.

 

-Catullus (tr. Peter Green)

 

Catullus 75

 

Lesbia, you are the author of my destruction.

My heart is weary and defeated at the thought of life.

I will wish terrible things for you if you become great,

But I will always love you just the same.

 

-Catullus (tr. Ewan Whyte)

 

 

Peter Green was a British professor of Classics who mostly taught in the U.S. He died last year at the good age of 99. (!) His complete translation of Catullus came out in 2005. Ewan Whyte is a Toronto-based poet and essayist. His volume of Catullus translations came out in 2004.

 

 

Ostend 1936

"Letting barbarism assume rule bore fruit. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns."

-Letter from Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig

In 1936 several exiled writers and artists decided to summer in Ostend in Belgium. Not just Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth pictured on the cover, but also Irmgard Keun, Ernst Toller, and for a while Arthur Koestler (until he leaves for Spain to report on the Civil War).

Zweig and Roth are old friends and like to write in each other's company in order to bounce around ideas. Both are Jews born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but unable to live in Austria any more. Zweig, the more financially successful of the two, is already in Ostend and he encourages his friend Roth to come. Ostend is a beach resort.

Roth is already suffering from the alcoholism that will kill him in 1939 at the age of 44 and Zweig also hopes to wean him off alcohol (or at least eat regular meals). Schnapps, Roth's preferred tipple, is illegal in Belgium, and then, as now, Belgian beers are an acquired taste, one which Roth has failed to acquire. It takes Roth longer to sort the necessary visa for Belgium, but he does get there.

The writing is working for both of them. Zweig helps Roth edit his new novel Confessions of a Murderer, though neither can publish in Germany or Austria by then--their books will come out with German exile presses. Romance is also in the air: Zweig has separated from his first wife, and is travelling with his secretary, then his mistress, but later his second wife. Roth and Irmgard Keun become a couple; she's banned from Germany for her communist politics; the books of all three were burned by Nazi authorities. Unfortunately for Zweig's efforts at reform, it's mostly drinking that Keun and Roth have bonded over, and they've discovered an illegal source of schnapps.

This short book featuring a moment in the precarious lives of German-language writers in 1936 is both touching and alarming. The book came out in 2014--Weidermann is a German cultural journalist--and was translated into English in 2016 by Carol Brown Janeway.

Zweig (on left) and Roth in Ostend in 1936