The Monkey's Marginalia, No 4

1.  I'd like to start off this post with a short blurb about Malcolm Cowley.  He's been in my radar for awhile now, but then serendipity happened and I was able to pick up his book about the expats in 1920s Paris (for fifty cents!).  Cowley was probably one of the more important critics to the Lost Generation writers.  Hemingway had described Cowley in the Snows of Kilimanjaro as 

"that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement."

Cowley did note in The Paris Review, 

"Hemingway had the bad habit of never forgiving anyone for giving him a hand up. That may have been the problem between them. Ford was a character; he was a liar, not for his own profit, but just because he had a very faint hold on actuality. He told beautiful stories of English literary life, in which he knew everybody, had a hand in everything, and his hand grew larger as he told the story. He had a roving eye for younger women, whom he especially liked to fascinate. He came to this country after the breakup of his relationship with Stella Bowen. I can remember on one occasion he came up to Robber Rocks—a place back in the woods near the New York-Connecticut line which was the country headquarters for Allen Tate, Hart Crane, and others—where a lot of young wives were around at the party. They would be fondled by Ford, and then escape him up the stairs. Ford, heavy and wheezing by that time, would follow them to the head of the narrow stairs, and the door would close in his face. He would wheeze back down, and a while later he'd follow another young woman until she took refuge behind a locked door."

Although he was an active participant in the Paris circles of writers, artists and poets that comprised the Lost Generation; many of his peers from that era apparently didn't think much of Cowley, but were careful to not let him know of their disdain for the sake of their careers. Additional writers that I have found from that time period include: 

• Archibald MacLeish

• Ford Madox Ford (Guthrie MacInnes?????)

• Harry Crosby

• E. E. Cummings

• Erskine Caldwell

Cowley also started the League of American Writers, but later resigned due to it's ties with the communists.  Notable authors from that group include: 

• Archibald MacLeish

• Dashiell Hammett

• Carl Sandburg

• Erskine Caldwell

• Upton Sinclair

• Clifford Odets

• Langston Hughes

• Carl Van Doren

• Waldo Frank

• David Ogden Stewart

• John Dos Passos

• Lillian Hellman

Other items of note is that Cowley spent some time as the deputy for Archibald MacLeish (writer, poet and Libararian of Congress), who was head of the Office of Facts of Figures under Roosevelt, but Cowley resigned when his liberal political leanings came under fire. 

2.  In other news, The publisher of the Brazilian botanical gardens of the postcard appears to be Lito Tipo Guanabarathe.  In looking at some online auction sites,  there was a company named Lito Tipo Guanabarathe, their cards apparently were often stamped "LITO TIPO GUANABARA."  

3.  Out of pure cussidness (and, perhaps, with some masochism thrown in), I did a worldcat search for Vaclav Straka and found some entries that have strange references thrown in.  These may turn out to have no significance, but the translation of Random Harvest caught my eye. 

(8/1/14 edited for grammar and tags added) 

The Violin Player, Notes on Footnote 6, Chapter 1 (page 26)

In my last couple of posts I briefly talked about the Lost Generation. Hemingway was in that circle, as was John Dos Passos and many others. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are often included in discussions of Lost Generation poets.

Ezra Pound was one of the premier poets of the period until he lost himself in a stew of racism and insanity. World War II had come around and Pound by this time had made over one hundred radio broadcasts in support of Hitler and Mussolini. Hemingway had made it clear in a letter to Archibald MacLeish that Pound deserved punishment, disgrace and mostly ridicule. Pound was fortunate, he was tried for treason, but sent to a mental institution. Although he repudiated his support of Fascism, he never lost his racist streak.

But I need to back up a bit. Although Pound was married to Dorothy Shakespear, he did have several affairs; his longest running affair was with Olga Rudge, which lasted 50 years.

Rudge was a world class violinist. She had spent World War I playing in concerts to raise money for the British and French war efforts. Eventually Rudge had made her way to Italy and met Pound in the early 1920's. This was still at Pound's peak, he was one of the luminaries of the Lost Generation and mentor to Hemingway. Around this same time, Rudge became acquainted with George Antheil, a young American composer.

Around this time, Pound was still promoting Vorticism as a style of poety. To Pound, Vorticism is described as "The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is ... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." Pound worked with Antheil to develop Vorticism in musical compositions for the violin. Pound wrote Antheiland the Treatise on Harmony to help promote Antheil.

As an interesting aside, Antheil wrote the murder mystery Death in the Dark under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop. It was actually a collaborative effort including Antheil, T. S. Eliot, Franz Werfel, W. B. Yeats, and Pound.

Eventually, Antheil was forced to disavow Pound, probably in part due to Pound's increasing collaboration with the Fascists.

In later years Antheil made his way to Hollywood and scored several films, including The Pride and the Passion, starring Cary Grant and Sofia Loren.

On a side note, it was Antheil's pseudo-expertise in endocrinology that brought him in touch with the screen actress Hedy Lamar. Antheil and Lamar worked together on a way to encrypt radio signals to torpedoes to prevent them from being jammed. The idea used frequency hopping and the idea was based on the mechanics of a player piano. The idea was patented, but initially the Navy dismissed the idea. Eventually the technique was used by the U.S. military after the patent expired and frequency hopping is now widely used. 


(edited for grammar 7/31/14 and tags added)

Thoughts on Footnote 2, Translator's Note and Forward (page vi) Part 1

In Footnote 2, F.X. Caldeira describes Ernest Hemingway, though originally an admirer, as one of "Straka's harshest critics."  In 1935, Hemingway was reputed to have given a interview to Le Monde stating his high regard for Straka.

This is unusual as most of, if not all, the historical characters mentioned in the footnotes are purely fictional.  And according wikipedia.org, Le Monde, a Paris evening newspaper, has only been in publication since December 19, 1944.  (Here is 19 again, and a very important number in S.)

During World War I, Hemingway was in Italy as a volunteer ambulance driver.   Notably (as it perhaps relates to S.), he helped recover the remains of workers killed in a munitions factory explosion. The experience was also documented in his book Death in the Afternoon.   According to Luca Gandolfi for an article he wrote in The Hemingway Review, the June 7, 1918 explosion occurred at the Sutter and Thevenot munitions plant in Bollate, Italy.

In 1934, Hemingway was traveling extensively in his boat Pilar and in 1935 he traveled to Bimini.  It was around this time that he wrote the short story that would later become the seed for his novel, To Have and Have Not.  In 1935, Hemingway's Green Hills Of Africa was published.

But why Hemingway?  Hemingway was one of the Lost Generation, namely those who came of age during World War I and the 1920's.  Notable Lost Generation writers were Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos.  (and another Lost reference?)

Sorry for such a short post, but I promise to pick the thread back up in Part 2.

(edited 7/31/14 for grammar and tags added)