Literature

Jules Verne Sets Out

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Grove Koger

Today’s post is about the early life of an enormously influential French novelist who was born February 2, 1828—Jules Verne. It’s drawn from my article “Extraordinary Voyages: Jules Verne’s Geographical Imagination,” which originally appeared in the September/October 2002 issue of Mercator’s World.

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When Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a child, he decided to run away to sea. Accompanied by two friends, he rowed out to a ship anchored near his family’s summer home on the Loire River and signed on as a cabin boy. Had the Coralie not put in subsequently at the nearby port of Paimboeuf, allowing Verne’s father to catch up with him, he might well have reached the Indies. It was 1839, and Jules was eleven.

It’s a fine story, and it offers a handy key to the mind of a writer who set so many of his stories at sea, or beneath it. Yet Verne published no account of the escapade during his lifetime, and it almost certainly never took place, even though it became enshrined in family legend and has been repeated in many biographies. Verne grew up in the western French port of Nantes, and like many youths he dreamed of ships and the sea, but in the story of the Coralie we meet the daring boy that Verne and his readers wanted him to be, not the timid boy he really was.

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What is beyond doubt is that the writer subsequently underwent a young man’s typical struggle between his father’s expectations and his own ambitions. Verne studied law, but he lived and breathed literature. That his legal studies had taken him to Paris in 1846 was surely fortuitous. Verne’s first literary efforts were boulevard dramas, but what little success he enjoyed in the theatre seems to have been due to his friendship with Alexandre Dumas pere and fils. Several short stories Verne published in 1851–“The First Ships of the Mexican Navy” and “A Balloon Trip”–suggested a different direction, but it was to be more than a decade before he found a winning formula.

By 1863 European explorers such as Richard Burton and Heinrich Barth had penetrated deep into Africa. The public anxiously awaited word from James Grant and John Speke about the source of the Nile River. In January of that year, Parisians woke up to read the exciting account of one Dr. Samuel Ferguson, who, thanks to the backing of the Daily Telegraph in London, had set out to cross the continent with two companions—by hydrogen balloon! According to the report, Ferguson had solved some of the most vexing problems involved in long balloon flights—the apparent necessity of releasing precious gas or dropping ballast from time to time in order to control the craft’s  altitude.

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Five Weeks in a Balloon was the first of an array of novels, novellas, and short stories that Verne and his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, would call “Les Voyages extraordinaires.” Hereafter, most of Verne’s works made their first appearance in Hetzel’s Magasin d’éducation et de recreation. The astute publisher contracted with Verne to handle the author’s works in periodical form, followed by book publication. Over the years this arrangement, revised several times, would make Verne rich, allowing him to move his family to the quiet northern French town of Amiens and to buy a series of yachts.

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Frederick Prokosch

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Grove Koger

As a young man, I was fascinated by writer Frederic Prokosch and his books, particularly The Seven Who Fled, which I bought in a Dell paperback edition soon after its appearance in 1963. Since then I’ve collected and read several more of his books, so I was delighted to review a biography of him—the first and, in all likelihood, the last—for Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal in 2012. Below is a slightly shortened version of that review.

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Robert M. Greenfield. Dreamer’s Journey: The Life and Writings of Frederic Prokosch. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010

In late 1942 Henry Miller sent Lawrence Durrell a letter that urged him to “take a glance at Frederic Prokosch’s The Seven Who Fled. It’s all about Central Asia—a real opium book. And tell me if you recognize any of the places, will you? Most of them I never heard of.”

In describing the novel as a “real opium book”—meaning, presumably, a pipe dream or opium-induced fantasy—Miller was perhaps closer than he realized. The Seven Who Fled was a fantasy all right, although not one produced under the influence of drugs. It was the second novel from a young American writer who, although certainly talented and widely read, had no direct experience of Asia. The places that Miller had never heard of were real enough, but Prokosch had never laid eyes on them.

Born in Wisconsin on May 17, 1906, Prokosch was the child of a classically dysfunctional couple: a rigid, repressive father (noted academic linguist Eduard Prokosch) and a submissive mother. Eduard Prokosch insisted upon absolute silence in his house, dooming his wife’s dreams of becoming a concert pianist. He would later forbid Frederic’s accompanying the family to Europe lest his mildly effeminate mannerisms embarrass them in front of their European relatives. The son chose to retaliate in a manner strikingly emblematic of much of his subsequent behavior. Rather than sit with the rest of his graduating class at Haverford College in 1925, he watched from the audience—dressed as a woman.

Prokosch’s first published novel, The Asiatics, was as much a fantasy as the one that provoked Miller’s enthusiasm. Recounting an impressionable young American’s peregrinations across the Asian continent, it was praised by such distinguished figures as Thomas Mann, who called it a “book which has stimulated, haunted and enthralled me.” With his second, more ambitious novel, Prokosch expanded his cast of major characters to seven Europeans of various nationalities forced to flee the Central Asian city of Kashgar due to the outbreak of civil war in China. Displaying a strong sense of place, a sensuous style, and a preoccupation with passion and art, it, too, earned nearly ecstatic reviews, and went on to win the Harper Prize.

Did Durrell ever get around to reading The Seven Who Fled? I can find no evidence, but it is interesting to speculate what the future author of The Alexandria Quartet would have made of Prokosch’s band of spiritually bankrupt Europeans working out their fates against the vividly realized backdrop of an etiolated Oriental (and Orientalized) landscape.

Prokosch’s reputation declined precipitously after the appearance of The Seven Who Fled. His half-dozen or so succeeding novels were so inferior that his very name on a cover came to guarantee a poor reception, but when he regained his stride, he generally fared no better. His brilliant reimagining of Byron’s life, The Missolonghi Manuscript—which Greenfield calls the “most impressive” of his novels and which should have guaranteed his critical rehabilitation—was greeted with misapprehension.

Exacerbating the problem was Prokosch’s troubling personality. Routinely jealous of the accomplishments of his contemporaries, he was also petty, vain, and reflexively dishonest—the last possibly a result of his having to disguise his sexual orientation as a young man. Virtually everything he had to say about himself seems to have been either an evasion or an outright lie. His most honest self-portrait may appear in his poem “Sunburned Ulysses.” “Loving the unattainable and forbidden, in love with change alone,” Prokosch wrote of the Greek hero (and himself), “He recognized the frightful necessity in the song of the sirens: for he likewise possessed / Flesh fanned easily into fire, and a heart as hard as a stone.”

For years Prokosch was indeed in love with change alone. He spent most of his adult life in Europe, and was frequently on the move. He preferred to be seen in the company of the rich and famous, or, if alone, with a notebook and an ostentatiously large gold fountain pen. He eventually settled in the Alpes-Maritime department of southeastern France, where he died in 1989.

Robert Greenfield must have found it challenging to write engagingly of so dispiriting a life, but for the most part he has succeeded. His account is literate, and he deals even-handedly with his subject’s failings. His five-plus pages of acknowledgements suggest many years of labor. Having wanted to know more about Prokosch since I first read The Seven Who Fled decades ago, I’m grateful to Greenfield for his perseverance.

It’s customary in reviewing a writer’s biography to conclude with the hope that readers will now turn to the writer’s works, and there is no reason to depart from custom in this case. Along with the novels already mentioned, A Tale for Midnight (an account of the ordeal of Beatrice Cenci) and America, My Wilderness (a magical realist journey through the land of Prokosch’s birth) are the works of a major writer, however imperfect that writer may have been as a human being. They deserve reading and rereading.

Charles Boni’s Paper Books

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Grove Koger

An attractive paper edition of a Pulitzer Prize novel  marked the beginning of a short-lived venture in subscription publishing.

Charles Boni and his older brother Albert had been in the business in New York City since 1923, and in 1929 they released the first in their series of Paper Books, inexpensive reprints featuring striking covers designed by noted artist (and writer) Rockwell Kent. Their plan offered discerning subscribers a dozen books a year for the relatively modest fee of $5, with a new volume published and mailed on the 25th of each month.

The series’ editorial board included Padraic Colum, Louis Untermeyer and Kent himself, as well as several now-forgotten figures. A statement printed at the back of each volume explained the laudable intent of the series: “to place good books, well-designed and carefully made, within the reach of any reader.”

Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which had been published in its first edition by the brothers in 1927, was printed as an “example of the format” in May 1929. It was followed in September by a second volume, and then, month by month, further titles through November 1930.

Alas, the series failed after 16 selections, a victim of the Great Depression. But by then, the editors had chosen a number of estimable titles, including The Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz (illustrated above), The History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells, The Lost Girl by D.H. Lawrence, and Cheri by Colette—this last the French writer’s masterpiece. In retrospect, the most surprising entry in the series may have been The Cardinal’s Mistress by one Benito Mussolini, an ambitious figure destined to make his name in another, entirely unrelated field of endeavor.

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A subsequent series from the publishers, Bonibooks, reprinted a number of the Paper Books, but was not offered by subscription.

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Pictured at the bottom are the volume’s endpapers, which I assume were created by Kent as well. 

John O’Hara’s Appointment

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Grove Koger

The Philadelphia Review of Books posted “The Way We Were: On Penguin’s John O’Hara Reissues” on September 9, 2014. In it, I reviewed new editions of Appointment in Samarra, BUtterfield 8, The New York Stories, and Ten North Frederick. I’ve always felt that O’Hara (who was born on January 31, 1905) is America’s most undeservedly neglected writer, so discussing him was a welcome opportunity to sort out some of my ideas about him and his work.

The Review ceased publication shortly after I began writing for it, so I’m going to repost one section of my O’Hara piece at a time, beginning below with a few general comments and a consideration of his first novel.

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John O’Hara

 Appointment in Samarra

Let’s say you’re a good writer, maybe even a great one. You desperately want the praise and the prizes you know you deserve, but at the same time you feel an irresistible urge to alienate everyone—critics, lit professors, editors, even fellow writers you might run into at the corner bar—who might be in a position to help. If that’s you, then you could do worse than emulate John O’Hara.

Born into an Irish Catholic family in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1905, O’Hara grew up with a thirst for alcohol and—in a small town whose social elite were WASPs—a big chip on his shoulder. It was a bad combination, and earned O’Hara an equally bad reputation wherever he went. During his New York City years, for instance, waiters at the Stork Club routinely seated him near the door so that they could throw him out more easily when he started a fight. He was widely known as “the master of the fancied slight,” as Robert Benchley and his daughter-in-law had occasion to learn. They once called O’Hara over to their table at another of the city’s clubs, 21, to tell him how much they’d enjoyed Pal Joey, a Rodgers and Hart musical based on a series of his stories. It seems that they had seen it before, but when the daughter-in-law remarked that she had liked it even better this time, O’Hara responded, “What was the matter with it the first time?”

As Fran Lebowitz has pointed out, with only slight exaggeration, O’Hara is underrated “because every single person who knew him hated him.” To make matters worse, O’Hara generally refused to allow his stories to be included in anthologies and college textbooks, ensuring that he would remain untaught and excluded from the canon. Geoffrey Wolff had good reasons for calling his 2003 biography of O’Hara The Art of Burning Bridges.

It’s important to mention these matters up front. They have to be faced sooner or later, but more importantly, they go a long way toward explaining why you may not have read anything by O’Hara or even know who he is.

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O’Hara was an unruly student, and although he was apparently accepted by Yale in 1924, his father withdrew his financial support when the young man got drunk with two friends and a pair of policemen (!) the night before his graduation from prep school. The father’s death the following year left the family nearly destitute, forcing O’Hara to give up his dream of attending Yale. But he never gave up the idea of Yale, which came to represent everything that he aspired to and that—thanks largely to his own behavior—would remain beyond his reach.

O’Hara began working as a reporter for the Pottsville Journal in 1924 and for another Pennsylvania daily in 1927. The year after that he moved to New York City, where he began publishing in The New Yorker almost immediately. Over the following few years there were jobs at Time and a couple of the big city’s dailies, a short-lived marriage, and then, in 1934, the publication of Appointment in Samarra. At that point, it’s safe to say, O’Hara had arrived.

In this first novel, Pottsville has become Gibbsville, like its model a small town in Pennsylvania’s anthracite-rich Coal Region. The book’s protagonist is Julian English, the owner of the local Cadillac dealership. His father, like O’Hara’s, is a doctor, and he’s also, like O’Hara at the time, well on his way to becoming an alcoholic. There the resemblance pretty much ends, because Julian is a WASP, an insider.

O’Hara’s three big subjects—in no particular order—were sex, class, and alcohol, and in Appointment in Samarra he recorded their dizzying interaction in the last thirty-six hours of Julian’s life, as he first throws a drink in the face of an Irish Catholic bore who has loaned him money, takes the local mob boss’s mistress out to his car for a quickie, alienates his loving wife, gets into a brawl with an old friend, makes a heavy pass at a young reporter looking for details about an upcoming party, and finally kills himself in his garage with carbon monoxide from the exhaust of his sedan.

The novel, which is still O’Hara’s most famous, takes its title from an otherwise forgotten play by W. Somerset Maugham in which a wealthy man’s servant encounters Death in the marketplace. Understandably frightened when he sees Death make a threatening gesture, the servant secures his master’s permission to take a horse to Samarra and hide there. Later that day the master himself encounters Death and asks her why she had threatened his servant, to which she replies that she had merely been surprised to see him there, for she has an appointment with him that night in Samarra.

Although O’Hara later managed to antagonize Ernest Hemingway, whom he envied and admired, Hemingway had high praise for the novel when it was published: “If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra.”

Penguin has produced an attractive new edition of Samarra, with deckled edges and jazzy covers. In his introduction, Charles McGrath (a former deputy editor of The New Yorker) writes that in spite of Julian’s beautiful wife and his equally beautiful clothes, his fraternity key and his social position, “there’s an emptiness” in him. Indeed, he might well be one of Eliot’s Hollow Men (the poem had been published in 1925), for he has no interior; once he destroys his standing in Gibbsville, he’s no one. Julian may have been fated to die—Maugham’s wonderful little story is, after all, about fate—but it’s a fate that consists of several factors, including his weakness of character and the coldness of the world he was born into. Intriguingly, he seems to understand his fate well enough, and at one point feels a “tremendous excitement” over the direction he sees it taking.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (whom O’Hara knew) popularized the term “Jazz Age” in 1922 and created an enduring myth of its elegance and excess in The Great Gatsby a short time later. But with Appointment in Samarra, O’Hara kicked the literary door shut on the era and moved on.

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My personal copy of Appointment, which I’ve had for decades and whose cover I’ve reproduced below, is a Modern Library edition that appeared in 1953.

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