Showing posts with label Henry James. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry James. Show all posts

Sunday, November 06, 2022

James Family Values


Barry Sonnenfeld, dir.: Addams Family Values (1993)
June 17, 1905

Dear Mr. Johnson:

Just back from three months in Europe, I find your letter of May 16th awaiting me, with the very flattering news of my election into the Academy of Arts and Letters. I own that this reply gives me terrible searchings of the heart.

On the one hand the lust of distinction and the craving to be yoked in one Social body with so many illustrious names tempt me to say “yes.” On the other, bidding me say “no,” there is my life‐long practice of not letting my name figure where there is not some definite work doing in which I am willing to bear a share; and there is my life‐long professional habit of preaching against the world and its vanities.

I am not informed that this Academy has any very definite work cut out for it of the sort in which I could bear a useful part; and it suggests
tant soit peu the notion of an organization for the mere purpose of distinguishing certain individuals (with their own connivance) and enabling them to say to the world at large “we are in and you are out.”

Ought a preacher against vanities to succumb to such a lure at the very first call? Ought he not rather to “refrain, renounce, abstain,” even tho it seem a sour and ungenial act? On the whole it seems to me that for a philosopher with my pretensions to austerity and righteousness, the only consistent course is to give up this particular vanity, and treat myself as unworthy of the honour, which I assuredly am. And I am the more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy, and that if I were there too, the other families represented might think the James influence too rank and strong.

Let me go, then, I pray you, “release me and restore me to the ground.” If you knew how greatly against the grain these duty‐inspired lines are written, you would not deem me unfriendly or ungenial, but only a little cracked.

By the same token, I think that I ought to resign from the Institute (in which I have played so inactive a part) which act I herewith also perform.

Believe me, dear Mr. Johnson, with longing regret,
heroically yours,

WILLIAM JAMES

Cambridge, Mass.


- Quoted from Letters to the Editor. The New York Times (April 16, 1972)


R. W. B. Lewis: The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1991)


I think you'll agree that this is quite an odd letter to send to someone inviting you to join their organisation - all the more so given that William James had already agreed to be one of the founding members of the American Institute of Arts and Letters some years before.

What can have motivated it? Was it really an expression of humility on his part, or was it - as Leon Edel, in his immense, magisterial five-volume biography of Henry James (1953-1972), suggests - because his "younger and shallower and vainer brother" was already in the Academy: i.e. had been asked first?

It's important to stress that William James was 63 at the time, with a worldwide reputation as one of the most influential psychologists and philosophers then living. His "younger and shallower and vainer brother", Henry, was 62, and already seen as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he was nominated in 1911, 1912, and 1916.

William himself, in context, characterises his own reaction to this insult - an Academy daring to offer priority to his younger brother - as "a bit cracked." His choice of words in describing the possible "James influence" on that institution as "too rank and strong" is also strangely visceral - as if there were something lurking in his family background which literally sickened him.

I've written elsewhere about the mountain of books by and about Henry James collected by me over the years. Which is yet another reason for being surprised at Williams' characterisation of this "Master of nuance and scruple" (in W. H. Auden's phrase), this "great and talkative man," as a "younger and shallower and vainer brother." Vain, yes, perhaps - younger, definitely - but shallow? The mind boggles.

The family tree of the Jameses was more or less as follows ("A shilling life will give you all the facts" - Auden again):

On July 28, 1840, [Henry James Sr. (1811–1882), an American theologican and Swedenborgian mystic], was married to Mary Robertson Walsh (1810–1882), the sister of a fellow Princeton seminarian, by the mayor of New York ... The couple lived in New York, and together had five children:
  1. William James (1842–1910), a philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
  2. Henry James Jr. (1843–1916), an author considered to be among the greatest novelists in the English language ...
  3. Garth Wilkinson "Wilkie" James (1845–1883) ...
  4. Robertson "Bob" James (1846–1910) ...
  5. Alice James (1848–1892), a writer and teacher who became well known for her diary published posthumously in 1934 ...
- Wikipedia: Henry James Sr.
[It could almost pass for a picture of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, couldn't it? The article I borrowed this image from is even entitled "Henry James’s Smarter Older Brother." And is it just me, or is there something a little territorial in the way William is trying to tower over his brother, while Henry obligingly tilts his head to try and look as small as possible? It's like two cats establishing precedence when they meet in the backyard.]
I guess what interests me most about the James family, though, is not so much the primeval struggle for dominance between the two eldest brothers - it's a psychological commonplace that a second child tries to distinguish him or her self as much as possible from their older sibling. No, it's how that pattern affects the other children that concerns me.

And, yes, I am the youngest in a family of four children: my eldest brother embodies scientific method and logic; the next brother down is completely dedicated to creative writing and the exercise of the existential will; the next down, my sister, was an invalid a little like Alice James, very gifted artistically but unable to deal with the stresses of the workaday world.

So what was left for me, the youngest child? The necessity of avoiding all of these prior choices - in part, or wholly - in order to construct my own independent existence. And how successful have I been? Well, I'm not really in a position to judge: but all I can say is that I believe that your place in the succession, from first to last, has a massive influence on your own individual process of individuation, especially in families with a very dominant ethos: like the Jameses, or the Manns, or (for that matter) the Rosses.


Viktor Mann: Wir waren fünf. Bildnis der Familie Mann [There were five of us: A Mann Family Album] (1949)
Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (1840–1891), Lübeck merchant and senator, married Júlia da Silva Bruhns (1851–1923), a German-Brazilian writer. Together they had five children:
  1. [Luiz] Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), author, president of the fine poetry division of the Prussian Academy of Arts ...
  2. [Paul] Thomas Mann (1875–1955), author, Nobel Prize for Literature laureate in 1929 ...
  3. Julia Elisabeth Therese ['Lula'] Mann (1877–1927), married Josef Löhr (1862–1922), banker. She committed suicide by hanging herself at the age of 50.
  4. Carla [Augusta Olga Maria] Mann (1881–1910), actress. She committed suicide by taking poison at the age of 29.
  5. Karl Viktor Mann (1890–1949), economist, married Magdalena Nelly Kilian (1895–1962).
- Wikipedia: The Mann Family
[In this picture, taken around 1902, Heinrich seems still to be trying to assert dominance over Thomas. He was, after all, a well-known writer and cultural figure by this time. He'd already published a number of books. Thomas, by contrast, had only published one novel, but it was Buddenbrooks, a massively influential work which would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. Is he already conscious, here, of biding his time?]
You see what I mean about the possible perilous effects of family dynamics? First Carla, then Lula, both sisters, both suicides. Carla was conscious that her acting career was not going as she'd planned: she had little hope left of rivalling her two elder brothers. Whatever miseries drove her to the final act, it cast a long shadow over the whole family. And, then, of course, Lula followed her example seventeen years later.

Thomas Mann's eldest son, Klaus, another writer, who'd striven all his life to get out from under his father's long shadow, would commit suicide in his turn in 1949. He, too, had lived much of his life in a closer-than-close conspiracy with his older sister Erika, a well-known actress married - for passport reasons - to homosexual poet W. H. Auden.

So what am I trying to say about this succession of family tragedies? Nothing to belittle or attempt to 'explain' them, I assure you. Let's return to the Jameses in an effort to make the point a little clearer.


Marie Leon: Henry and William James (early 1900s)


William and Henry had their intense rivalry, co-existing with a genuine love for each other, to keep them going. But what of the rest of the family?

You'll note that both brothers were just of an age to be eligible to join up for the American Civil War (1861-65) - William 19, Henry 18 - when it first broke out. Henry bowed out as the result of an 'obscure hurt', a phrase which generations of critics interpreted to mean some kind of debilitating accident in the genital regions: a little like the hero of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926). It explained a lot.

However, his biographer Leon Edel has deduced from careful sorting of the evidence that it was far more likely to have been a bad back. In any case, it was enough to spare him from joining the forces in any capacity whatsoever. Was it residual guilt over this that explains his rather patronising review of Walt Whitman's poetry book Drum-taps (1865), a record of the older poet's hospital visits and tending of wounded soldiers during the war? Certainly in later life Henry felt deeply ashamed at having so missed the merits of Whitman's work when he first encountered it.

William, by contrast, was already at Harvard, where he made sure he had enough to do in the scientific arena to make it quite impossible for him to find leisure to take note of the war. Nor was he alone in this. As was the case during the Vietnam war, very few university students in the North actually joined the colours. It was mostly those with manual jobs who marched off to the front.


Jane Maher: Biography of Broken Fortunes (1986)


It was Wilkie and Bob, their two younger brothers, who actually joined up. In her book Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James, Jane Maher traces the sorry saga of their lives thereafter: their abortive attempts to be accepted on their own terms, their business and other failures. Wilkie went bankrupt, was left out of his father's will, and died at the early age of 38. "Unsuccessful at poetry and painting, Bob, an alcoholic with a violent temper, spent many years in asylums, and died at 63, not long before his brother William," as her blurb has it.

But that's not really the whole story. It's important to note here that both brothers were legitimate war heroes, men of honour and principle, and that many of their subsequent difficulties ought properly to be attributed to post-traumatic stress. Both volunteered to serve as officers in Massachusetts' newly-formed Black regiments. As Wilkie put it in a speech to Union Veterans many years later:
When I went to war I was a boy of 17 years of age, the son of parents devoted to the cause of the Union and the abolition of slavery. I had been brought up in the belief that slavery was a monstrous wrong, its destruction worthy of a man’s best efforts, even unto the laying down of life.
Wilkie subsequently took part in the heroic (if misguided) Union assault on Battery Wagner in 1863 - the subject of the 1989 civil war film Glory - and was only a few steps behind Colonel Robert Shaw when he died.
Gathering together a knot of men after the suspense of a few seconds, I waved my sword for a further charge toward the living line of fire above us. We had gone then some thirty yards ... Suddenly a shell tore my side. In the frenzy of excitement, it seemed a painless visitation … A still further advance brought us to the second obstruction … The enemy’s fire did not abate for this crossing, and here it was I received my second wound, a canister ball in my foot.
He did eventually recover from his wounds, but walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

Bob, too, saw action in the sea islands off coastal South Carolina and Georgia, and nearly died of sunstroke while campaigning in Florida. Little was done by their family after the war to assist them in their transition to civilian life.

When their father decided to buy some land in Florida which he intended to farm with the help of freed slaves, Wilkie was put in charge of the venture. Bob joined him just before local hostility and bad financial conditions put an end to the experiment. They eventually both ended up working for the same railroad in Wisconsin.

Were they failures? In the material sense, perhaps yes. But as Henry remarked (a little guiltily?) of Wilkie:
"He is not particularly successful, as success is measured in this country; but he is always rotund and good-natured and delightful."
- quoted in Carl Swanson, Milwaukee Independent (2021)
As for Bob, his alcoholism gradually estranged him from his family, and:
In 1885 he returned to Concord to become, in the quarter-century remaining to him, an amiable dilettante, painting, writing poetry and endearing himself as a conversationalist of remarkable powers.
- Edwin M. Yoder, The Washington Post (1986)
Henry James found this brother's conversation, too, "charged with natural life, perception, humor and color ... the equivalent, for fine animation, of William's epistolary prowess."


Alice James (1848-1892)


What, then, of Alice, the youngest of the James siblings? Well, in many ways she had the oddest destiny of all. She became a professional invalid in the High Victorian manner: like the sofa-bound Signora Neroni in Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857), or (for that matter), the crippled heir of Redclyffe in Charlotte M. Yonge's famous novel.


Alice James & Katharine Loring (Leamington Spa, 1890)


William, the psychologist, was largely unimpressed by her vapours, but empathetic Henry lavished her with attention. It was mainly for that reason that she shifted her residence to Britain after their parents' death. She also wrote an exceptionally subtle and (at times) acerbic diary, which has become a classic in its own right.

Subsequent biographers and critics, Jean Strouse and Susan Sontag among them, have veered between sympathy and impatience with "Alice-as-icon and Alice-as-victim". She did, however, at least for a time, succeed in putting herself at the centre of the family discourse - which is more than her other two brothers, Wilkie and Bob, ever managed to do.


Leon Edel, ed. The Diary of Alice James (1964)






Anne Ross: Poinsettia: A Mermaid's Tale (2013)


My own sister, Anne Mairi Ross (1961-1991), a gifted writer and artist, took her own life some three decades ago now. The rest of us rage on. Surviving such family conflicts can be a difficult thing to achieve, and it's therefore with more than an Academic interest that I pore over the histories of the Jameses and the Manns - as well as those of various other creative families, the Bells (Julian and Quentin), the Powyses (John, Theodore, Llewellyn and their eight siblings).

I'm not so naïve as to think that such analogues could ever account for the complexities of any human life, but I'm not sure it's really feasible to ignore the similarities in all these Freudian sibling dramas, either.

I'd like to conclude with a poem from my latest book, The Oceanic Feeling. This one comes from the section called "Family plot," which begins with the following epigraph:
These works of fiction, which seem so full of hostility, are none of them really so badly intended … they still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents. The faithlessness and ingratitude are only apparent.

– Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’ (1909)

Jack Ross: The Oceanic Feeling (2021)


Oh br/other!


My eldest brother is flying up

to Auckland
for the weekend
to see my mother

Bronwyn is flying down
to see her sister
in Wellington on Friday

coincidence? hardly
Bronwyn’s younger brother
arrives today

last time we stayed with him
I had a tantrum
and wouldn’t sleep another night

under his roof
I read a thesis recently
on placing far less stress

on Oedipus
the br/other was the term
the author coined

for his new theory
Luke, I am your father!
try your brother

then the sparks will fly  



Anne Ross: Poinsettia (2013)






Sunday, January 30, 2022

The Magician: Thomas Mann or Colm Tóibín?


Thomas Mann (1946)


I've spent a good deal of time these summer holidays rereading books by Thomas Mann. When I wasn't reading him, I was writing blogposts about him: on this site as well as my bibliography one. And when I wasn't reading or writing about him, I was ordering new items to fill (mostly imaginary) gaps in my Mann collection. I may have gone a bit over the top in that respect, in fact.

Even so, it came as a surprise when I saw how many of the people I mentioned him to already seemed to have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of the life and times of Thomas Mann. I hadn't realised his work was so much in the mainstream. Until the penny dropped. Their knowledge was not so much knowledge gleaned from reading Mann, as a reflection of the vogue of Colm Tóibín's recent biographical novel The Magician.


Colm Tóibín: The Magician (2021)


So what's wrong with that, you ask? Why, nothing at all. There's no reason why people shouldn't use biographies and even biographical novels to pick up information about authors they've never actually read. I've done it myself, and feel no compunction in admitting the fact.

It isn't quite the same as actually reading your way through Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain, mind you, but then who ever claimed it was? I guess any disquiet I feel over this - which I freely admit may be partially motivated by pique: there I was thinking I was something special because I'd ploughed through all these immense novels by some obscure old German, only to find that all his secrets were freely on sale in a far more convenient and readable form - is really based on a couple of other issues.




Murdo Macleod: Colm Tóibín (2018)


My first concern can be outlined more or less as follows. The Magician is certainly a very readable novel, but is it a good novel? There seems to be a kind of concensus among those who haven't actually read Mann that it is a pretty good novel - even such terms as 'masterpiece' have been bandied about (with a subtle implication that Mann is rather lucky that one so gifted should take him up at this late date in time).

I, too, think it a good novel: or at any rate a very entertaining one, which is perhaps not quite the same thing. But then I'm rather a fan of bio-fiction. In my teens I greatly enjoyed reading fat tomes by the likes of Irving Stone which gave overviews of the lives of worthies like Vincent Van Gogh (Lust for Life) or Michelangelo (The Agony and the Ecstasy) long before I'd seen the fine films based on these books.

I've provided a list of Irving Stone's books at the bottom of this post for anyone who'd like to follow up on his work. His later books on the likes of Darwin and Freud were perhaps less successful than the earlier ones, but there's no harm in such works (I think), especially given the lack of pretentiousness which surrounds them.

That isn't quite the tone people take when they talk of Colm Tóibín. After all, he's only written two such novels so far - about, respectively, Mann and Henry James - but he does appear to have won quite a reputation as a serious modern author with his (many) other novels.


Colm Tóibín: The Master (2004)


The Henry James novel, which I've also read, is interesting. Tóibín makes a concerted attempt to inhabit the style as well as the consciousness of James during one of the great crises of his life, the failure of his dramatic ambitions in the 1890s. It's a far more focussed, and perhaps more ambitious attempt to become the Master, than is his Mann.


John Singer Sargent: Henry James (1913)


On the other hand, the Mann book covers a whole half-century of his life and contacts in a series of neatly staged scenes, with an overarching theme. Such a task cannot have been easy. It might, in fact, have been easier to repeat his earlier success by doing a study of some particular aspect of his life in a prose-style pastiched from Death in Venice.




Luchino Visconti, dir.: Death in Venice (1971)


Which brings me to my second point. No-one's ever really been in any serious doubt about the homoerotic inclinations of either Henry James or Thomas Mann. True, the former may well never had had sex at all in the conventional sense. He certainly formed no longterm relationships, and kept his private life a well-guarded secret.

Mann, by contrast, was a married man, with a complex and turbulent family life, and a crowd of children and siblings who all seem to have been in varying states of rebellion at various times. But no reader of his work can fail to notice his obsession with male beauty and passionate same-sex friendships. Even if you didn't, critics and biographers have pointed it out ad nauseam. But did he ever actually have sex with a man? No-one knows. There are reasons to doubt it.

Tóibín's Mann certainly does. He's a good deal gayer than any previous version of Mann - which is, again, Tóibín's prerogative. Nor does this decision exactly come as a surprise, given the tenor of his other work. His James, too, is far gayer than (say) Leon Edel's.


Leon Edel: Life of Henry James (5 vols: 1953-72)


All that is certainly well within the bounds of fair comment. But Tóibín's Mann is also far more of a domestic tyrant and family autocrat than seems to come through in his surviving letters and diary - not to mention a bit of a sneak when it comes to hiding his rather hole-in-corner affairs.



There's a very apposite letter by Thomas Hardy once applied by the poet Elizabeth Bishop to a not dissimilar case:
Here is a quotation from dear little Hardy which I copied out years ago ... It's from a letter written in 1911, referring to "an abuse which was said to have occurred - that of publishing details of a lately deceased man's life under the guise of a novel, with assurances of truth scattered in the newspapers." ...

"What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorisation, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that channel after they are dead, by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate."
Which I guess is my point. 'If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons.' In other words, interesting though many of Tóibín's conjectures about Mann certainly are, it's hard to know how to take them, exactly, without any real sense of the evidence they're based on.

Of course this could be used as a way of dismissing biographical novels in general as a viable literary form, but I'm not sure that it's necessary to go quite so far as that. Tóibín's novel strikes me - from my own knowledge of Mann's writing and from reading at least some of the other biographies - as unreasonably critical of his subject's bona fides in matters of the heart. He leaves Mann's rather more patchy political record largely to one side.



But all this leaves me dying to know where Tóibín got his information from. Out of his own head? Or are there substantive archives of material which give a sound basis for at least some of these suppositions? I don't suppose we'll ever know, unless he decides to give us a 'writing-of' book along the lines of Mann's own Story of a Novel, about the composition of Doctor Faustus; or David Lodge's The Year of Henry James, which gives an account both of his own James bio-novel Author, Author, but also of the various others - including Tóibín's - which appeared in that same year, 2004.


David Lodge: The Year of Henry James (2006)





Alex Ross (2010)


That's about as far as I'd got when I chanced upon a recent New Yorker article called "Thomas Mann’s Brush with Darkness" by their learned Germanophile music critic, Alex Ross. This was the first passage that caught my eye:
Because I have been almost unhealthily obsessed with Mann’s writing since the age of eighteen, I may be ill-equipped to win over skeptics, but I know why I return to it year after year. Mann is, first, a supremely gifted storyteller, adept at the slow windup and the rapid turn of the screw. He is a solemn trickster who is never altogether earnest about anything, especially his own grand Goethean persona. At the heart of his labyrinth are scenes of emotional chaos, episodes of philosophical delirium, intimations of inhuman coldness. His politics traverse the twentieth-century spectrum, ricochetting from right to left. His sexuality is an exhibitionistic enigma. In life and work alike, his contradictions are pressed together like layers in metamorphic rock.
Yep. What he said. I know what he means when he refers to his Mannophilia as an 'unhealthy obsession.' As a fellow-obsessive, I also understand the reservations he mentions below on the actual need for Tóibín’s project:
At first glance, Tóibín’s undertaking seems superfluous, since there are already a number of great novels about Thomas Mann, and they have the advantage of being by Thomas Mann. Few writers of fiction have so relentlessly incorporated their own experiences into their work. Hanno Buddenbrook, the proud, hurt boy who improvises Wagnerian fantasies on the piano; Tonio Kröger, the proud, hurt young writer who sacrifices his life for his art; Prince Klaus Heinrich, the hero of Royal Highness, who rigidly performs his duties; Gustav von Aschenbach, the hidebound literary celebrity who loses his mind to a boy on a Venice beach; Mut-em-enet, Potiphar’s wife, who falls desperately in love with the handsome Israelite Joseph; the confidence man Felix Krull, who fools people into thinking he is more impressive than he is; the Faustian composer Adrian Leverkühn, who is compared to “an abyss into which the feelings others expressed for him vanished soundlessly without a trace” — all are avatars of the author, sometimes channelling his letters and diaries.
He, too, feels some misgivings about the clash between Tóibín's imaginings and the existing documents:
Tóibín doesn’t adhere exclusively to the biographical record, and his most decisive intervention comes in the realm of sex. In all likelihood, Mann never engaged in anything resembling what contemporary sensibilities would classify as gay sex. His diaries are reliable in factual matters and do not shy away from embarrassing details; we hear about erections, masturbation, nocturnal emissions. But he clearly has trouble even picturing male-on-male action, let alone participating in it. When, in 1950, he reads Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, he asks himself, “How can one sleep with gentlemen?” The Mann of The Magician, by contrast, is allowed to have several same-sex encounters, though the details remain vague.
In the end, much though he relishes certain passages and aperçus in Tóibín's novel:
The Magician, deft and diligent as it is, ultimately diminishes the imperial strangeness of Mann’s nature. He comes across as a familiar, somewhat pitiable creature — a closeted man who occasionally gives in to his desires. The real Mann never gave in to his desires, but he also never really hid them. Gay themes surfaced in his writing almost from the start, and he made clear that his stories were autobiographical. When, in 1931, he received a newspaper questionnaire asking about his “first love,” he replied, in essence, “Read ‘Tonio Kröger.’ ” Likewise, of Death in Venice he wrote, “Nothing is invented.” Gay men saw the author as one of their own ...
Perhaps the real problem with The Magician, then, is that its author is not content to write a solid, unexciting Mann-and-water bio-novel in the Irving Stone mode, but isn't ready, either, to engage fully with the 'element of charlatanism' (Alex Ross's phrase) inherent in Mann's magpie methodology.

As a result, The Magician ends up falling between two stools. It provides a fascinating (though selective) reading of Thomas Mann's life, but not really of his art. Tóibín's muse seems more comfortable with the stylistic conventions of Henry James's day than with the oncoming juggernaut of twentieth-century Modernism. Mann's basic techniques of irony and sampling were foundational for post-modern writers such as Nabokov or Pynchon. Mann, after all, 'had always been haunted by the sense of being an empty shell, a wooden soldier.'
All along, the dubiousness of genius had been one of his chief motifs. In “The Brother,” his essay on Hitler, he wrote that greatness was an aesthetic rather than an ethical phenomenon, meaning that Nazi exploitation of Goethe and Beethoven was less a betrayal of German artist-worship than a grotesque extension of it. The Magician’s finest trick was to dismantle the pretensions of genius while preserving his own lofty stature. The feat could be accomplished only once, and it happens definitively in Doctor Faustus, when Leverkühn’s explication of his valedictory cantata spirals into madness. An immaculately turned-out personification of bourgeois culture stages its destruction.
So am I saying that you shouldn't read The Magician? Not at all. Tóibín is not alone nowadays in his return to the solider conventions of the realist novel. What I would advise, though, is tempering your reading of Tóibín with some study of Thomas Mann's own fiction: even just a few short stories if you don't have the patience for one of the novels. "Disorder and Early Sorrow" or "Mario and the Magician" will quickly convince you, if you needed the reminder, that we're not dealing here with an empty windbag but with a far subtler talent, a writer on a level with Chekhov or Joyce.







Getty Images / Hulton Archive: Irving Stone

Irving Tennenbaum ['Irving Stone']
(1903-1989)


    Fiction:

  1. Lust for Life: A Novel of Vincent Van Gogh. 1935. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1940.
  2. Sailor on Horseback. [Jack London] (1938)
  3. Immortal Wife. [Jessie Benton Frémont] (1944)
  4. Adversary in the House. [Eugene V. Debs and his wife Kate] (1947)
  5. The Passionate Journey. [American artist John Noble] (1949)
  6. The President's Lady. [Andrew Jackson and Rachel Donelson Jackson] (1951)
  7. Love is Eternal. [Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd] (1954)
  8. The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo. 1961. Fontana Books. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1965.
  9. Those Who Love. [John Adams and Abigail Adams] (1965)
  10. The Passions of the Mind. [Sigmund Freud] (1971)
  11. The Greek Treasure. [Heinrich Schliemann] (1975)
  12. The Origin. [Charles Darwin] (1980)
  13. Depths of Glory. [Camille Pissarro] (1985)

  14. Non-fiction:

  15. Clarence Darrow for the Defence. 1941. London: The Bodley Head, 1949.
  16. They Also Ran. [Failed Presidential Candidates] (1943 / 1966)
  17. Earl Warren (1948)
  18. Men to Match My Mountains: The Monumental Saga of the Winning of America's Far West (1956)

  19. Edited:

  20. [with Jean Stone]. Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh. 1937. London: Cassell, 1973.
  21. [with Jean Stone]. I, Michelangelo, Sculptor: An Autobiography through Letters. Trans. Charles Speroni. 1963. Fontana Books. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1965.


Carol Reed, dir.: The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)


Thursday, February 25, 2021

Risorgimento!



My Sixth Form history teacher at Rangitoto College in 1978 was called Mr. Dalton. He was an excellent teacher, I think, relaxed and approachable, and treating our overall theme - European history in the 19th century - with gusto and enthusiasm.

The topic that interested me most that year was the Unification of Italy - aka 'il Risorgimento' [the Resurgence / the Uprising]. I knew nothing whatever about it (though I already had some grasp of the main events of the Napoleonic wars through assiduous reading of C. S. Forester's Hornblower books). Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi - I might have heard their names, but I had no idea who they actually were.

I had, of course, encountered the last of them in that celebrated passage in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) where Mole's tastes in ornamental statuary are itemised:
... Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy.


Chris Dunn: Carol-singing mice


Presumably those 'other heroes' would have included Cavour and Mazzini, and possibly even King Vittorio Emanuele himself. If you look at the picture at the top of this page, you can see an idealised version of the famous meeting between the King and Garibaldi at which the latter handed over to the former dominion over the whole of Southern Italy.

G. M. Trevelyn. Garibaldi and the Thousand (May 1860). 1909. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.

I think, at the time, I already owned a copy of G. M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909), his classic account of the liberation of Sicily during a single month of that year of destiny, 1860.

I owned it but I hadn't read it. In fact I didn't finally read it till last week, more than forty years after buying it for a buck or so from a pile of other remaindered stock at Allphee books in Auckland. It wasn't so much laziness as the fact that I knew that it was the middle part of a trilogy, and - being of a somewhat obsessive temperament where such things are concerned - I had to get the other two parts before I could finally open its pages.

G. M. Trevelyan. Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, 1848-9. 1907. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2001.

I found volume one, Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, in Albany in 2011. I'm not quite sure when I acquired volume three, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, but it's an ex-library book, so it was probably in Palmerston North in the 1990s.

G. M. Trevelyan. Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (June-November 1860). 1911. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.

I guess the point I'm making is that it was quite a protracted process.

In many ways I'm glad that I waited so long, though. I think I'm in a better position now to appreciate it without being put off by the almost hysterical tone of adulation that pervades its pages.



William Hope: George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962)


The young Trevelyan, great-nephew of the classic Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay and son of his biographer George Otto Trevelyan, was in his late twenties when he began his researches, and had only reached his mid-thirties when he completed the last volume. Perhaps as a result of youthful enthusiasm, he seems to have found it nearly impossible to maintain any distance from his subject.

The mere fact that he'd found time to tramp over every obscure goat track frequented by the great one gives testimony to that. He was even able to talk to many of Garibaldi's principal lieutenants (and accomplices) before time overtook them.

All of this gives his trilogy an atmosphere of intimate absorption in the career of a larger-than-life hero. Nor does he apologise for this in any of the prefaces to its many reprints. There is, he admits, room for alternative approaches - but this is his, and it does have the effect of making it feel more like an elaborately researched work of creative non-fiction than your more typical dry-as-dust history.



I suppose, in retrospect, that sixth-form history course might have had something to do with my decision to take Italian as one of the majoring subjects in my BA. I've certainly never regretted that choice. It's true that we spent more time studying the literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than that of the nineteenth - in fact, so much Ariosto, Dante, Poliziano and Tasso did we read that our young Neapolitan Italian conversation teacher, Francesca, accused us of speaking "una specie d'italiano Dantesco": a distinctly Dante-esque Italian - but at the time that suited my medievalist inclinations very well.

But the theme of the unification of Italy dominates not just the writers of its own era, the mid to late nineteenth century, but also many of their precursors. Reading Trevelyan, with his copious quotations from contemporary English and Italian poets, got me to thinking about the literature of the Risorgimento: those books which can give us some sense of what it felt like to be alive in those times.

Trevelyan puts it best in the preface to a 1920 popular edition of Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic:
The events of the Risorgimento, a large portion of which are covered in this Garibaldian trilogy, are ... to the Italian of to-day more than any single epoch of English history can be to us. They are to him all that the story of Washington and Lincoln together are to the American. To be friends with Italy, we must begin by understanding and sympathising with the movement that gave her birth. [6]
Any attempt to chronicle the history of English culture in the nineteenth century has to run up continually against Italy: the Romantic poets were obsessed with its language and literature; Keats and Shelley both died there, and Byron spent many years there before his final Greek adventure. Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Ruskin, all travelled there, and all had a singular relationship with it.

I've tried to confine myself to those writers who had a direct connection with the actual events of the Risorgimento or who significantly influenced it. If you look at the list of books below, though, you'll see that that still amounts to quite a few names:





Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803)

Precursors:



    Vittorio Alfieri: Vita Scritta da Esso (1804)


    Count Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803)

  1. Alfieri, Vittorio. Vita Scritta da Esso. 1804. Ed. Luigi Galeazzo Tenconi. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1563-1566. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1960.
  2. Vittorio Alfieri's posthumously published autobiography gives a good account of the life of this turbulent, quarrelsome poet and tragedian. His liberal inclinations, expressed in his various political writings ("Against Tyranny" and "The Prince and Literature"), had a considerable influence on the beginnings of the movement for Italian freedom.


    Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872)

  3. Mazzini, Joseph. The Duty of Man and Other Essays. 1907. Everyman’s Library, 224. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1924.
  4. Giuseppe Mazzini was the heart and soul of the ideological struggle for a unified Italy. While his own desires for a republic rather than a monarchy were not fulfilled, his lifelong devotion to the cause inspired Garibaldi and the other architects of the eventual, compromised Kingdom of Italy. His brief stint as one of the three triumvirs at the head of the Roman Republic was a failure in practical terms, but a symbolic triumph, which helped establish the idea of Rome as the capital of the new nation.






Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827)

Poets:



    Giosuè Alessandro Michele Carducci (1835–1907)

  1. Carducci, Giosuè. Selected Verse. Ed. & trans. David H. Higgins. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1994.
  2. Giosuè Carducci, the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize for literature, has come to be seen as a kind of embodiment of intellectual liberty, both in his life and his works. His most famous poem, the "Hymn to Satan" (1863) was considered "by Italian leftists of the time as a metaphor of the rebellious and freethinking spirit." It was first published in a newspaper shortly before the 1870 march on Rome which finally reunited the country. Somewhat appropriately, the Museum of the Risorgimento (Bologna) is located in the house he died in, the Casa Carducci.


    Ugo Foscolo: Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802)


    Niccolò [Ugo] Foscolo (1778-1827)

  3. Foscolo, Ugo. Tutte le Poesie. Ed. Ludovico Magugliani. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 411-413. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1952.

  4. Foscolo, Ugo. Liriche Scelte: I Sepolcri e Le Grazie. Commento di Severino Ferrari. Ed. Oreste Antognoni & Sergio Romagnoli. Biblioteca Carducciana, 5. Firenze: Sansoni, 1964.

  5. Foscolo, Ugo. Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Ed. Ludovico Magugliani. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 12-13. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1949.
  6. Ugo Foscolo's famous novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798) depicts the state of mind of an Italian patriot forced to endure the destruction of the Venetian Republic by Napoleon's invading armies in 1797. His most famous poem, "Dei Sepolcri" [From the graves] (1807) suggests summoning up the spirits of the dead to help in the struggle from freedom in his country. He died in exile in London, like so many other Italian writers and thinkers. Long after his death he became a potent symbol of resistance for the new nation of Italy.


    Giacomo Leopardi: All'Italia (1819)


    Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (1798–1837)

  7. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Ed. Franco Brioschi. 1974. Superbur Classici. Milan: BUR, 1999.

  8. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Ed. John Humphreys Whitfield. 1967. Italian Texts. Ed. Kathleen Speight. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978.

  9. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Trans. Jonathan Galassi. 2010. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2010.

  10. Leopardi, Giacomo. Operette Morali. 1827. Ed. Saverio Orlando. Classici Italiani. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli. 1976. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1982.

  11. Flora Francesco, ed. Tutte le Opere di Giacomo Leopardi: Le Poesie e le Prose. 1940. vols 1 & 2 of 5. I Classici Mondadori. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1962.

  12. Leopardi, Giacomo. Poesie e Prose. Volume primo: Poesie. Ed. Mario Andrea Rigoni. Essay by Cesare Galimberti. 1987. Le Opere di Giacomo Leopardi. 4 vols. I Meridiani. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1998.
  13. Giacomo Leopardi was unquestionably the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century. While he was not directly involved in the revolutionary movements which led eventually to the reunification, the strongly idealistic and even (at times) nationalistic tone of much of his poetic work had a huge influence on the generation which attempted to enact these abstractions in reality. Poems such as "Orazione agli Italiani in Occasione della Liberazione del Piceno" [Oration to the Italians on the liberation of Piceno] (1815) were read as more directly prophetic of Mazzini and Garibaldi's aspirations than they were probably meant to be by the poet himself.


    Anthologies & Secondary Literature

  14. Kay, George R., ed. The Penguin Book of Italian Verse: With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem. 1958. The Penguin Poets. Ed. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.

  15. Sanguinetti, Edoardo, ed. Poesia Italiana del Novecento. Gli Struzzi, 3. 2 vols. Torino: Einaudi, 1969.
  16. Either of these anthologies can serve as a useful sampler from the immense body of patriotic Italian verse produced during the nineteenth century (alongside the usual reams of love poetry).






Ippolito Nievo (1831-1861)

Novelists:



    Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetery (2010)


    Umberto Eco (1932-2016)

  1. Eco, Umberto. The Prague Cemetery. 2010. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2011.
  2. Umberto Eco's penultimate novel is set against the backdrop of the Italian Risorgimento. The main character, a cynical reactionary called Simone Simonini, encounters the patriotic Italian novelist Ippolito Nievo in Sicily, during Garibaldi's 1860 campaign to liberate of the island:
    Simonini is ordered to destroy some heavily guarded documents in Nievo's possession. He befriends Nievo to gain his confidence - but the papers are too closely guarded. The only way Simonini can think of is to blow up the ship on which Nievo is sailing - sending the papers, Nievo himself and dozens of others to the deeps. Simonini develops an elaborate scheme to smuggle aboard a deranged malcontent with a box of explosives, and bribes a sailor to take part in the scheme, knowing that they would both be killed along with everybody else on the boat. Simonini then stabs to death an accomplice on land who had provided the explosive, to silence him.
    Simonini goes on to engineer the forgery of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.


    Giuseppe de Lampedusa: The Leopard, with a Memory and Two Stories (1958 & 1961)


    Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa (1896-1957)

  3. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. Il Gattopardo: Edizione conforme al manoscritto del 1957. 1958. Universale Economica Feltrinelli. Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1981.

  4. Lampedusa, Giuseppe di. The Leopard. 1958. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. 1960. Fontana Modern Novels. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1969.

  5. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. I Racconti. 1961. Ed. Nicoletta Polo. Prefazione di Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi. 1988. Universale Economica Feltrinelli. Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1993.

  6. Lampedusa, Giuseppe di. Two Stories and a Memory. 1961. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. 1962. Introduction by E. M. Forster. The Universal Library. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968.

  7. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. The Siren & Selected Writings. 1961 & 1990-91. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun, David Gilmour, & Guido Waldman. 1962 & 1993. Introductions by David Gilmour. London: The Harvill Press, 1995.

  8. Gilmour, David. The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. 1988. The Harvill Press. London: Random House, 2003.
  9. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is really known only for the one novel he wrote, Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (1958), set in his native Sicily during Garibaldi's invasion of the island, and not published till after the author's death. Acclaimed as a masterpiece, the book was subsequently filmed by Luchino Visconti. Starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale, The Leopard won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963.


    Alessandro Manzoni: The Betrothed (1827)


    Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni (1785-1873)

  10. Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi sposi: Edizione Integrale Commentata. 1825-27. Ed. Lanfranco Caretti. Grande Universale Mursia testi, Nuova serie, 16. 1966. Milano: U. Mursia & C., 1972.

  11. Manzoni, Alessandro. The Betrothed: ‘I Promessi sposi.’ A Tale of XVII Century Milan. 1827. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. 1951. London: The Reprint Society Ltd., 1952.
  12. While Alessandro Manzoni's famous novel I promessi sposi [The Betrothed] (1827) is set in the seventeenth century:
    The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language.
    Having published it, first, in his native Lombardy in the 1820s, he painstakingly rewrote it in Tuscan dialect - identified by him as the proper model for a modern literary Italian - for republication in 1842. His stanzas on the death of Napoleon, Il Cinque maggio [The Fifth of May] (1821), have become one of the most popular lyrics in the Italian language.


    Ippolito Nievo: The Castle of Fratta (1954)


    Ippolito Nievo (1831-1861)

  13. Nievo, Ippolito. The Castle of Fratta. Trans. Lovett F. Edwards. Illustrated by Eric Fraser. London: The Folio Society, 1954.
  14. Ippolito Nievo, who died young in the shipwreck described in Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery (mentioned above), shortly after taking part in the liberation of Sicily as one of Garibaldi's famous "thousand", is best known for his novel Le Confessioni d'un italiano [Confessions of an Italian], a portion of which was translated into English as The Castle of Fratta in 1954. A complete translation came out from Penguin Classics in 2014. It is widely considered the most important Italian novel of the Risorgimento era.






Carlo Pellegrini: Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909)

Foreigners:



    E. B. Browning: Casa Guidi Windows (1851)


    Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

  1. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Poetical Works. Introduction by Alice Meynell. London: Ward, Lock & Co., Limited, n.d.

  2. Kelley, Philip, & Ronald Hudson, ed. Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1831-1832. Including Psychoanalytical Observations by Robert Coles, M. D. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969.

  3. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-46. With Portraits and Facsimiles. 2 vols. 1898. New York & London: Harper & Brothers., Publishers, 1926.
  4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning moved to Italy with her husband in 1846, and died in Florence in 1861. She took a passionate interest in the movement for Italian freedom, and wrote an account of her personal experience of the events of 1848-49 in her 1851 poem "Casa Guidi Windows." Shortly before her death she issued:
    a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress (1860) "most of which were written to express her sympathy with the Italian cause after the outbreak of fighting in 1859". They caused a furore in England, and the conservative magazines Blackwood's and the Saturday Review labelled her a fanatic.


    Robert Browning (1812-1889)

  5. Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. 2 vols in 1. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1872.

  6. Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works, with Portraits. Ed. Augustine Birrell. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1900.

  7. Browning, Robert. Poetical Works, 1833-1864. Ed. Ian Jack. 1970. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

  8. Browning, Robert. The Poems. Ed. John Pettigrew & Thomas J. Collins. Penguin English Poets. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  9. Browning, Robert. The Ring and The Book. Ed. Richard D. Altick. 1971. Penguin English Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  10. Hodell, Charles W., trans & ed. The Old Yellow Book: Source Book of Browning’s “The Ring and the Book”. 1911. Everyman’s Library, 503. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1927.

  11. Browning, Robert. Browning to His American Friends: Letters between the Brownings, the Storys and James Russell Lowell, 1841-1890. Ed. Gertrude Reese Hudson. 1970. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1965.
  12. Robert Browning was perhaps the most 'Italianised' English poet of the nineteenth century. From his first travels there in 1838, looking for material for his book-length poem Sordello to his epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868-69), it stood at the centre of his preoccupations. His poem "The Italian in England" (1845) shows an interestingly detached view of revolutionary politics, but there's no doubt that he sympathised greatly with the movement for Italian independence.


    George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824)

  13. Byron, Lord. The Complete Poetical Works. Volume 1. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

  14. Byron, Lord. The Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. 1904. Rev. ed. 1945. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

  15. Byron, Lord. Don Juan. Ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, & W. W. Pratt. Penguin English Poets. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.

  16. Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord. Selected Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 1982. London: Picador Classics, 1988.

  17. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Byron's Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All the Letters Available in Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others. 12 vols. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: John Murray, 1973-82.

  18. Longford, Elizabeth. Byron. 1976. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1978.

  19. Origo, Iris. The Last Attachment: the Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, as Told in Their Unpublished Letters and Other Family Papers. 1949. The Fontana Library. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1962.
  20. George Gordon, Lord Byron lived in Italy for seven years after the breakup of his marriage in 1816. He moved between the cities of Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa, where he maintained extensive contacts with radicals and revolutionaries from a number of nations, and participated in a lot of vague plotting before settling on the struggle for Greek Independence as his principal cause. This period is chronicled in Peter Quennell's Byron in Italy (1941), as well as the book by Iris Origo listed above. More of a precursor than a participant in the struggle for freedom in Italy. one can't underrate the lasting influence of Byron's example on future poets and writers devoted to the cause.


    A. H. Clough: Amours de Voyage (1858)


    Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)

  21. Clough, Arthur Hugh. Poems. 1891. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1903.

  22. Clough, Arthur Hugh. The Poems. Ed. A. L. P. Norrington. Oxford Standard Authors. 1967. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

  23. Thorpe, Michael, ed. A Choice of Clough’s Verse. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1969.
  24. Arthur Hugh Clough's most famous poem Amours de Voyage was written in Rome in 1849, though it wasn't published until 1858. Clough provides us with a surprisingly modern set of reactions to the revolutionary turmoil taking place around him, rather in the manner of Stendhal's account of the Battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme (1839).


    Henry James (1843-1916)

  25. Collected Travel Writings. The Continent: A Little Tour in France; Italian Hours; Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. The Library of America, 65. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993.

  26. Kaplan, Fred, ed. Travelling in Italy with Henry James: Essays. A John Curtis Book. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1994.

  27. William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. In Two Volumes (Combined). 1903. London: Thames & Hudson, n.d.

  28. Edel, Leon. Henry James. 5 vols. 1953-72. New York: Avon Books, 1978.
    1. The Untried Years: 1843-1870 (1953)
    2. The Conquest of London: 1870-1881 (1962)
    3. The Middle Years: 1882-1895 (1962)
    4. The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901 (1969)
    5. The Master: 1901-1916 (1972)

  29. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 1: 1843-89. 1953, 1962, 1963. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

  30. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 2. 1963, 1969, 1972. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

  31. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. 1953, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1972 & 1977. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1985.

  32. Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. 1991. An Anchor Book. New York: Doubleday, 1993.
  33. Henry James's devotion to Italy was profound and life-long, though largely apolitical. His travel book Italian Hours (1909) chronicles forty years of impressions of the country. His contribution to the literature of the Risorgimento comes more from the one biography he wrote, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903), an account of the American sculptor's long stay in Rome from the late 1840s onward. There Story made friends with the Brownings, Walter Savage Landor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, and a host of other travellers and exiles.


    George Meredith: Vittoria (1867)


    George Meredith (1828-1909)

  34. Meredith, George. The Poetical Works. With Some Notes by G. M. Trevelyan. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1912.
  35. George Meredith spent three months in Italy in 1866, which assisted him in composing Vittoria (a sequel to Emilia in England (1864) - later retitled Sandra Belloni). While not perhaps among his finest works, these two novels - along with many of his poems - show his lifelong love and devotion to Italy.


    Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

  36. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Works. Volume I: Poems, Prose-Tales and Literary Papers. Ed. William M. Rossetti. 2 vols. London: Ellis & Elvey, 1888.

  37. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Works. Volume II: Translations, Prose-Notices of Fine Art. Ed. William M. Rossetti. 2 vols. London: Ellis & Elvey, 1888.

  38. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Poems and Translations: 1850-1870. Together with the Prose Story ‘Hand and Soul.’ Oxford Standard Authors. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1913.

  39. Doughty, Oswald, ed. Rossetti’s Poems. 1961. Everyman’s Library, 627. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1968.
  40. Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian patriot and poet in exile, married Frances, the daughter of another prominent political exile, Gaetano Polidori, one of whose other sons, Dr John Polidori, was Byron's physician and companion during the famous 'haunted summer' of 1816. They had four children, including the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the critic and editor William Michael Rossetti, and the poet Christina Rossetti, all important figures in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and vital to nineteenth century English literary and artistic culture in general.


    A. C. Swinburne: Songs Before Sunrise (1871)


    Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

  41. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Collected Poetical Works. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1924.

  42. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poems. Ed. Bonamy Dobrée. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.

  43. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poems and Ballads / Atalanta in Calydon. 1866 & 1865. Ed. Morse Peckham. Indianapolis & New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

  44. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. A Choice of Swinburne’s Verse. Ed. Robert Nye. London: Faber, 1973.

  45. Thomas, Donald. Swinburne: The Poet in His World. 1979. London: Allison & Busby, 1999.
  46. The dissolute English poet Algernon Swinburne's most famous contribution to the struggle to free Italy was his poetry collection Songs Before Sunrise (1871), which continued the themes of his earlier "A Song of Italy". It was partly inspired by his meeting with Mazzini in 1867.


    Illustrated London News: Tennyson meets Garibaldi (1864)


    Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (1809-1892)

  47. Tennyson, Alfred. Poems. London: Edward Moxon, 1853.

  48. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. The Works. 1884. London: Macmillan and Co., 1893.

  49. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poems of Tennyson, 1830-1868: Including 'The Princess,' 'In Memoriam,' 'Maud,' Four 'Idylls of the King,' 'Enoch Arden' etc. Introduction by Sir Herbert Warren. Oxford Edition. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1923.

  50. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poetical Works, Including the Plays. 1953. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

  51. Ricks, Christopher, ed. The Poems of Tennyson. Longmans Annotated English Poets. London & Harlow: Longman, Green and Co, Ltd.. 1969.

  52. Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Longmans Annotated English Poets. Ed. Christopher Ricks. 1969. Revised ed. 3 vols. 1987. Selected Edition. 1989. Pearson Longman. Edinburgh Gate: Pearson Education Limited, 2007.

  53. Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts; Juvenilia and Early Responses; Criticism. Ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. A Norton Critical edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

  54. Lang, Cecil Y., & Edgar F. Shannon, ed. The Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Volume 1: 1821-1850. 1981. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

  55. Hallam, Lord Tennyson. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, by His Son. 1897. 2 vols in 1. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1899.
  56. Alfred Tennyson's 1851 poem "The Daisy" gives a vivid account of his honeymoon in Italy. Though far less of an "Inglese Italianato" (è un diavolo incarnato) [An Italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate], as the proverb puts it, than many of his contemporaries, he did have a widely publicised meeting with Garibaldi on the Isle of Wight in 1864, and the latter planted a tree to commemorate the event.


    Geoffrey Trease: Follow My Black Plume (1963)


    Geoffrey Trease (1909-1998)

  57. Trease, Geoffrey. Follow My Black Plume. Illustrated by Brian Wildsmith. 1963. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

  58. Trease, Geoffrey. A Thousand for Sicily. Illustrated by Brian Wildsmith. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1964.
  59. Geoffrey Trease's pair of historical novels give a lively and nuanced account of the dramatic events of 1849 and 1860 - meant for children, but based firmly on a reading of Trevelyan's trilogy among other works.


    Anthologies & Secondary Literature

  60. Baker, Carlos. Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. Ed. Elizabeth B. Carter. Introduction & Epilogue by James R. Mellow. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.

  61. Morley, John. The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. 1903. Lloyd's Popular Edition. 2 vols. London: Edward Lloyd, Limited, 1908.
  62. The first of these books gives a lively account of Emerson's friend Margaret Fuller's involvement with Italian revolutionary politics over the 1848-49 period. She was a close friend of Mazzini, and had a child with Italian patriot Giovanni Ossoli. All three of them were drowned in a shipwreck in 1850.

    The second gives full details of the circumstances surrounding the composition of Gladstone's Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen (1851), a denunciation of the Bourbon regime in Naples based on a visit to some of the political prisoners in their jails. Gladstone famously described what he saw there as "the negation of God erected into a system of government." This had an immense effect on public opinion throughout Europe.







G. M. Trevelyan with his Father and Son (1910)

George Macaulay Trevelyan
(1876-1962)


  1. England in the Age of Wycliffe, 1368–1520 (1899)

  2. England Under the Stuarts (1904)

  3. The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906)

  4. The Garibaldi Trilogy. 3 vols (1907-1909)
    1. Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, 1848-9. 1907. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2001.
    2. Garibaldi and the Thousand (May 1860). 1909. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.
    3. Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (June-November 1860). 1911. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.

  5. [Ed.] The Poetical Works of George Meredith (1912)

  6. The Life of John Bright (1913)

  7. Clio, A Muse and Other Essays (1913)

  8. Scenes From Italy's War (1919)

  9. The Recreations of an Historian (1919)

  10. Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920)

  11. British History in the Nineteenth Century, 1782–1901 (1922)

  12. Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848 (1923)

  13. History of England (1926)

  14. [Ed.] Select Documents for Queen Anne's Reign, Down to the Union with Scotland 1702-7 (1929)

  15. England Under Queen Anne. 3 vols (1930-34):
    1. Blenheim. 1930. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.
    2. Ramillies and the Union with Scotland. 1932. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.
    3. The Peace and the Protestant Succession. 1934. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.

  16. Sir George Otto Trevelyan: A Memoir (1932)

  17. Grey of Fallodon (1937)

  18. The English Revolution, 1688–1698 (1938)

  19. A Shortened History of England. 1942. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.

  20. Illustrated English Social History. 1942. 4 vols. Volume One: Chaucer’s England & The Early Tudors. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949.

  21. English Social History. 1942. Illustrated Edition, ed. Ruth C. Wright. 4 vols. 1949-1952. Harmondsworth Penguin, 1964.
    1. Volume One: Chaucer’s England & The Early Tudors
    2. Volume Two: The Age of Shakespeare and the Stuart Period
    3. Volume Three: The Eighteenth Century
    4. Volume Four: The Nineteenth Century

  22. Trinity College: An Historical Sketch (1943)

  23. History and the Reader (1945)

  24. An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949)

  25. [Ed.] Carlyle: An Anthology (1953)

  26. A Layman's Love of Letters (1954)