Malcolm Lowry's Library

Joseph Kramm The Shrike

2011-07-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

The Shrike is a play written by American dramatist Joseph Kramm. It debuted on Broadway at the Cort Theater, on January 15, 1952, with Jose Ferrer as the producer, director and star. Kramm received the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work.

The play is set in the mental ward of a city hospital, and revolves around a theatrical director named Jim Downs, who has been driven to the verge of insanity and suicide by his estranged wife Ann, who is the "shrike" alluded to in the play's title.

To outsiders, Ann seems to epitomize sweetness, kindness and graciousness. In reality, she is a bitter, manipulative shrew. Like the shrike, a small predatory bird that kills and impales smaller birds, Ann seems harmless but brings death and destruction to everyone she grows close to.

Ann married Jim in hopes that he would eventually gain fame, wealth and stardom, and so his lack of success galls her. Her mockery and nagging led Jim to an unsuccessful suicide attempt, by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. This led to his commitment to a mental hospital, where Jim finds that it will not be easy to secure a release. Getting out of the hospital will require the help and cooperation of Ann, who enjoys holding power over her husband.

Ann regularly visits Jim at the hospital, supposedly to provide comfort and love, but really to continue her hectoring and manipulation of him. She is also able to charm the doctors, who usually accede to her wishes and follow her advice as to what is best for Jim.

In order to win his freedom, Jim must give all the "right" answers expected by his doctors, and in doing so, he places himself utterly under Ann's control. Wikipedia

Julian Green The Dark Journey

2011-07-13T01:09:00.000-07:00

Julien Green's book was of Malc's favourites.

THE DARK JOURNEY—Julian Green— Harper ($2.50).
Awarded. By Harper & Bros, to Julian Green, for writing The Dark Journey: $10,000.

The Story: Guèret was a huge stoop-shouldered young man, his full and sallow face had a fleshy nose, thick lips, grey eyes, a blighted look. He worked as tutor to small André Grosgeorge. Once Madame Grosgeorge surprised the two in the garish lesson-room when André was stumbling over his history. Guèret heard the softness in her voice as she called her son: "Come closer. . . . Raise your head and look at me." Then, clenching her teeth, she struck the boy suddenly across the face and with sadistic greed in her black eyes, watched the red mark fade. Horrified, Guèret could not help admiring her vitality.

Work over, Guèret decided to eat not with his wife but alone. He entered the restaurant presided over by Madame Londe.

Past 50, Madame Londe's good looks were on the wane. In public a studied smile corrected the arrogant sag of her mouth and she gave change like charity. Madame Londe supplied needs other than gastronomic ones. For her customers she was breaking in Fernande, 13, who sniggered when tickled. Angèle, older, reliable, was more popular. Only Angèle could answer inquisitive Madame Londe's "whys" about the customers. Somehow Madame Londe did not set Angèle to probe this reticent stranger Guèret. Yet it was Angèle who attracted Guèret nightly to the restaurant's neighborhood.

Guèret loved Angèle but at first he excited only her contempt with his tactlessness, her pity with his distress, her amused indifference with his bitter glumness at her lack of response, her fear with his broad but bent shoulders. "Naturally she had no illusions about what the man wanted, but by a monstrous caprice of her nature she resolved to refuse him everything because he did not despise her." She retreated in rage when he guessed her occupation. He let her go.

First rejoicing at the sudden aloneness, then mortified, he wept while the futility of the whole affair made him laugh.

Then a sexagenarian came and described how Angèle had come to him for money. And one night the customers at the restaurant exchanged obscene impressions. Now he knew he must be very distasteful to her since, definitely a prostitute, she had turned down only himself. He climbed into her bedroom after midnight, but she was sleeping elsewhere. In the morning he found her, took her to the river bank, twisted her arm to make her admit he disgusted her. She began screaming shrilly in terror and in equal terror he began beating her over the face with a convenient club. In his flight he joyfully murdered an oldster who seemed to be watching him.

News of these activities interested Madame Grosgeorge. As her son's tutor, Guèret had seemed such a shy nonentity. Now the sadist within her felt a fellowship. Secretly she harbored him in her house. When he confessed that he had killed for love she, jealously wishing to prove to him Angèle's hatred, let Angèle know that the fugitive who had scarred her was now at the Grosgeorge's. But it was another who sent the police. Angèle was now finally aware that her happiness was at Guèret's side. Seeking happiness, she died, Madame Grosgeorge shot herself, the police got Guèret.

The Significance is embodied in the reflection: "Happiness existed for him somewhere in the world, and he was distracted because he could not find it. When he ran after women it was this that he was pursuing." Only in the black sky could he find peace after the babble of human speech.

Detailed and accurate in his handling of externals. Author Green handles the human mind similarly. One François Le Grix, critic, has already said with more grace than fact: "Racine. Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, Dostoievsky: one hesitates a little before putting beside these great names that of this young man, Julian Green, but it must be done."

The Author. In 1900 two Virginians were traveling through France when Julian Green was born to them. At 17 he drove an army ambulance, at 18 he was a French artilleryman, at 19 he was a University of Virginia freshman. Since 21 he has "devoted himself to literature" in France, has matured the French way, writes in French. His earlier novel, The Closed Garden (1928) was crowned by the French Academy. Time Magazine 2 September 1929

The book has the following inscription: "Xmas 1946 To Margerie, Bonner, ---this weird (sic) touchstone - I believed (in my youth) I hope rightly--good" (Indecipherable inscription on front free endpaper.

Cecil Gray Contingencies and Other Essays

2011-07-13T00:51:00.001-07:00

Cecil Gray (1895–1951) was a Scottish music critic and composer. He published books on the composers Jean Sibelius, Peter Warlock and Carlo Gesualdo, the last of these co-authored by the same Warlock; also a history of music, collections of essays on music, a play about Gilles de Rais and an autobiography.

He also wrote three operas: Deirdre (performed in part on the BBC), The Temptation of St Anthony (after Flaubert) and The Trojan Women. Wikipedia

The book has the inscription: "For Malcolm Lowry from Cecil Gray Capri 7/V11/48"

Malc and Margerie had met Cecil Gray when they traveled to Capri in July 1948. Malc also mentions Gray in a letter dated 2 March 1950 to Downie Kirk in which he says that he has been reading Gray in a "Concert Companion" that he had borrowed from the Kirks. The companion must be The Concert Companion: a comprehensive guide to symphonic music, Volume 1947, Part 1 edited by Robert C. Bagar, Louis Leopold Biancolli containing essays by Cecil Gray

John Goodwin The Idols and The Prey

2011-07-12T03:46:00.000-07:00

John Blair Linn Goodwin (1912–1994) was an American author and poet, best known for his story "The Cocoon" (1946), collected in Houghton Mifflin's The Best American Short Stories in 1947.

Goodwin was a native of Manhattan and a world traveler. His other works include the 1940 children's book The Pleasant Pirate, 1952 novel The Idols and the Prey about Haiti, and 1963 novella "A View From Fuji." He died at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in January 1994. Wikipedia

John Blair Linn Goodwin (1912-1994) was a novelist, poet, and painter, as well as a discerning collector of modern art. The son of Walter L. Goodwin and Elizabeth Sage Goodwin, he was born in Manhattan, and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. Later he maintained homes in Manhattan, West Palm Beach, Florida, and the Netherlands Antilles and socialized with a wide and interesting circle of friends that included the novelists Paul Bowles and Christopher Isherwood, the artist and poet Jean Cocteau, and the painters Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Roberto Matta. Goodwin was born into a distinguished family of artists, collectors, and art patrons. The Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, preserves a nineteenth-century reception room from the home of one of his forebears, and other members of the family have been generous donors both to the Athenaeum collection and to its library. His uncle, Philip L. Goodwin, was one of the architects of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as a member of its board of directors, and his older brother, Henry Sage Goodwin, was a highly regarded architect and painter. The Surrealist artist, patron, and collector Kay Sage was also a member of the family. This cultivated background informed and enriched his entire life and was a formative influence on his collecting.

A well-informed world traveler, Goodwin often wrote knowledgeably about places he had visited. His novel, The Idols and the Prey (New York, 1953) was set in Haiti, and his novella, A View from Fuji (New York, 1963) took place in Japan. He also published poetry, a children's book, The Pleasant Pirate (New York, 1940), and one of his many short stories, "The Cocoon," was included in a 1947 anthology of best American short stories.

From 1974-1977 the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe exhibited a selection of works from the Goodwin collection, thirteen of which are included in this sale. Upon Goodwin's death in 1994, his collection was inherited by Anthony P. Russo. Doyle NY

The book has the inscription: "for Malcolm Lowry - with affection, respect and considerable qualms. John - July 53."

Malc wrote to Arabel Porter, executive editor of New American Library in 1953: " Thank you for giving my address to John Goodwin: I'd very much like the Idols and The Prey, from what I read of it in the second N.W.W. A strange, strange fellow." Letters Vol 2 Pg 650.

Andre Gide Strait Is The Gate

2011-07-12T03:25:00.000-07:00

La Porte Étroite is a French novel written by André Gide published in 1909. It is a very sad and moving story[citation needed] which probes some of the complexities and terrors of adolescence and growing up. Based on a very Freudian interpretation, the story uses the influences of childhood experience and the misunderstandings that can arise between two people.

It was translated into English by Dorothy Bussy as Strait is the Gate.

The story is set in a French north coast town. Jerome and Alissa as 10-11 year olds make an implicit commitment of undying affection for each other. However, in reaction to her mother's infidelities and from an intense religious impression, Alissa develops a rejection of human love. Nevertheless, she is happy to enjoy Jerome's intellectual discussions and keeps him hanging on to her affection. Jerome thereby fails to recognise the real love of Alissa's sister Juliette who ends up making a fairly unsatisfactory marriage with someone else. Jerome believes he has a commitment of marriage from Alissa, but she gradually withdraws into greater religious intensity, rejects Jerome and refuses to see him. Eventually she dies from an unknown malady which is almost self-imposed. Wikipedia

André Paul Guillaume Gide (22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a strait-laced education and a narrow social moralism. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR. Read more

Above image: Portrait d'André Gide par Théo van Rysselberghe Détail de La Lecture par Emile Verhaeren.

Sir James George Frazer The Golden Bough

2011-07-12T02:36:00.000-07:00

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). It first was published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes. It was aimed at a broad literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). It offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it dispassionately as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective. The impact of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature was substantial. Read more

The book has the inscription: "Xmas 1943. Margerie with love from Malcolm."

Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education

2011-07-12T02:11:00.001-07:00

Sentimental Education was Gustave Flaubert's last novel published during his lifetime, and is considered one of the most influential novels of the 19th century, being praised by contemporaries George Sand, Emile Zola, and Henry James.

The novel describes the life of a young man (Frederic Moreau) living through the revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire, and his love for an older woman (based on the wife of the music publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who is portrayed in the book as Jacques Arnoux). Flaubert based many of the protagonist's experiences (including the romantic passion) on his own life. He wrote of the work in 1864:

"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation-- or, more accurately, the history of their feelings. It's a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays--that is to say, inactive."

The novel's tone is by turns ironic and pessimistic; it occasionally lampoons French society. The main character, Frédéric, often gives himself to romantic flights of fancy. Read more

The book contains the inscription: "Happy birthday to Malc July, 1952 Margie"

Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education

2011-07-12T02:11:00.000-07:00

F.Scott Fitzgerald The Beautiful and The Damned

2011-07-07T03:47:00.001-07:00

I couldn't find an image of Malc's Copp Clark edition of the novel. The above is an autographed 1922 Scribners first edition.

The Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner's in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. The novel provides a portrait of the Eastern elite during the Jazz Age, exploring New York Café Society. As with his other novels, Fitzgerald's characters are complex, especially in their marriage and intimacy, much like how he treats intimacy in Tender Is the Night. The book is believed to be largely based on Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with Zelda Fitzgerald.

It tells the story of Anthony Patch (a 1920s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune), his relationship with his wife Gloria, his service in the army, and alcoholism.

Toward the end of the novel, Fitzgerald references himself via a character who is a novelist by quoting this statement given after the novel:

"You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read 'This Side of Paradise.' Are our girls really like that? If it's true to life, which I don't believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I'm sick of all this shoddy realism."

While researching this post, I discovered that a movie had been made of the novel in the same year.Directed by William A. Seiter and released by Warner Brothers in their early years. This film, based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel published in the same year, starred Kenneth Harlan and Marie Prevost. It is 70 minutes long.
There are no known surviving prints of the film; it is likely a lost film. See more images here.

T.S. Eliot From Poe to Valery

2011-07-07T03:34:00.000-07:00

See T. S. Eliot on Poe B. R. McElderry, Jr. University of Southern California:

It will be well, however, to look at the later essay first. “From Poe to Valéry” is typical of Eliot in many ways. Just after receiving the Nobel Prize, he delivered it as a lecture at the Library of Congress in November, 1948; in the next twelve months it appeared in print three times (1). Based on the well-known interest in Poe taken by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, the essay contrives an emphasis relevant to the contemporary scene, just as Eliot had previously made John Donne and the metaphysical poets relevant to twentieth-century poetry. The apologetic tone so frequent in Eliot’s writing is at once apparent. He is not attempting, he says, a “judicial estimate” of Poe, though parts of the essay, especially paragraphs one and four, do constitute an estimate, judicial or otherwise. Examined in detail, Eliot writes, Poe’s work seems to show nothing but “slipshod writing,” “puerile thinking,” and “haphazard experiments.” Poe’s diction is sometimes inexact, as in “my most immemorial year” and “a stately raven.” Yet Poe’s work as a whole is “a mass of unique shape and impressive size.” The “ordinary cultivated reader” (Eliot himself, of course) recalls a few short poems “which enchanted him for a time when he was a boy, and which do somehow stick in the memory.” Such a reader also recalls the tales, and notes their influence on detective and science fiction. But the impact of Poe on three French poets — Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry — has been much more profound. Read more

George Eliot Felix Holt

2011-07-07T03:27:00.000-07:00

Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) is a social novel written by George Eliot about political disputes in a small English town at the time of the First Reform Act of 1832.
In January 1868, Eliot penned an article entitled "Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt". This came on the heels of the Second Reform Act of 1867 which expanded the right to vote beyond the landed classes and was written in the character of, and signed by, Felix Holt. Wikipedia

Mary Anne (Mary Ann, Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and well known for their realism and psychological insight.

She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years. Wikipedia

Malc's copy contains the inscription: "Malc from Margie love, July 28, 1951".

Malc also had a copy of Eliot's Silas Marner

Isak Dinsen Winter's Tales

2011-07-07T03:15:00.000-07:00

In Isak Dinesen's universe, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale and the moral resonance of myth coexist with an unflinching grasp of the most obscure human strengths and weaknesses. A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night's wandering, he learns love's true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant.
Amazon

Its title was derived from Shakespeare's play, but the tales also contained references to folktales. 'The Pearl' was a variant on the Grimms Brothers' tale 'The Boy Who Set Out to Learn How to Shudder'.

Winter's Tales was smuggled out of the occupied country through Sweden. In the United States a pocketbook edition was printed for soldiers fighting in different parts of the world. The setting of the stories were prediminantly Nordic, but not exactly the present time. Books and writers

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in both Danish and in English.

Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Prior to the release of the first film, she was noted for her Seven Gothic Tales, for which she is also known in Denmark. Read more on Wikipedia

Malc's copy has inscription: "To Malc with love, Margie, Sept. 1952"

Honore Daumier 240 Lithographs

2011-07-07T03:05:00.001-07:00

Introduction by Bernard Lemann. Illustrated with 240 black and white plates. Slim folio, natural cloth, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, (1946).

Honoré Daumier (February 26, 1808 – February 10, 1879) was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century.

A prolific draftsman who produced over 4000 lithographs, 1000 wood engravings, 1000 drawings, 100 sculptures he was perhaps best known for his caricatures of political figures and satires on the behavior of his countrymen, although posthumously the value of his painting has also been recognized.
Read more on Wikipedia

Frederick Buechner A Long Day’s Dying

2011-07-07T02:42:00.000-07:00

During his senior year at Princeton, Buechner received the Irene Glascock Prize for poetry, and he also began working on what was to be his first novel and one of his greatest critical successes: A Long Day’s Dying, published in 1950. Of this first book Buechner says,

"I took the title from a passage in Paradise Lost where Adam says to Eve that their expulsion from Paradise "will prove no sudden but a slow pac’d evil,/ A Long Day’s Dying to augment our pain," and with the exception of the old lady Maroo, what all the characters seem to be dying of is loneliness, emptiness, sterility, and such preoccupation with themselves and their own problems that they are unable to communicate with each other about anything that really matters to them very much. I am sure that I chose such a melancholy theme partly because it seemed effective and fashionable, but I have no doubt that, like dreams generally, it also reflected the way I felt about at least some dimension of my own life and the lives of those around me." Wikipedia

A Long Day's Dying is a mid-twentieth-century Jamesian novel that foreshadows many of the themes in Mr. Buechner's later writing—faith, trust, and the complex relations of family and friends. The story follows Tristram Bone, a rotund man of wealth and "organized leisure" but a failure with women, and Elizabeth Poor, a rich, charming, and beautiful widow and Bone's unrequited love interest, through a series of encounters with friends and family, affairs real and imagined, gossip, jealousy, and innuendo. We also meet Bone's servant Emma and his pet monkey Simon; the novelist George Motley; the arrogant and seductive academic Paul Steitler, Elizabeth's naïve son Lee, and her omniscient mother Maroo. Amazon

(Carl) Frederick Buechner is an American writer and theologian. Born July 11, 1926 in New York City, he is an ordained Presbyterian minister and the author of more than thirty published books thus far.[1] His work encompasses different genres, including fiction, autobiography, essays and sermons, and his career has spanned six decades. Buechner’s books have been translated into many languages for publication around the world. He is best known for his works A Long Day’s Dying (his first work, published in 1950); The Book of Bebb, a tetralogy based on the character Leo Bebb published in 1977; Godric, a first person narrative of the life of the medieval saint, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981; Brendan, a second novel narrating a saint’s life, published in 1987; Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner (1992); and his autobiographical works The Sacred Journey (1982), Now and Then (1983), Telling Secrets (1991), and The Eyes of the Heart: Memoirs of the Lost and Found (1999). He has been called "Major talent" and "…a very good writer indeed" by the New York Times, and "one of our most original storytellers" by USA Today. Annie Dillard (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) says: "Frederick Buechner is one of our finest writers." Read more on Wikipedia

Malc received a copy of A Long Day's Dyingfrom Henry Ford, a friend of Albert Erskine. Ford worked for Knopf whp published the book and sent the copy to Malc for his comments. You can read his comments in a letter to Ford dated 5/11/49 in the Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry Volume 2.

Lowry also had a copy of Buechner's A Season's Difference.

Earl Birney's Books In Malcolm Lowry's Library

2011-01-30T09:15:00.000-08:00

Earle Alfred Birney, OC, FRSC (13 May 1904 – 3 September 1995) was a distinguished Canadian poet. He was twice winner of the Governor General's Award for Literature (for David and Other Poems, 1942, and for Now Is Time, 1945).

Birney was a professor in the English Department of the University of British Columbia when he and Lowry met in 1947. The Birneys and the Lowrys became friends and Birney actively supported Lowry's work and reputation.

Birney was born in Calgary, Alberta, and raised on a farm in Erickson, near Creston, his childhood was somewhat isolated. After working as a farm hand, a bank clerk, and a park ranger, Birney went on to college to study chemical engineering but graduated with a degree in English. He studied at the University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, University of California, Berkeley and University of London.
Through a brief and quickly annulled marriage to Sylvia Johnston, he was introduced to Trotskyism. In the 1930s he was an active Trotskyist in Canada and Britain and was the leading figure in the Socialist Workers League but drifted away from the movement during World War II.

During the conflict, he served as a personnel officer in the Canadian Army, which inspired creation of the title character of his comic military novel, Turvey (1949), a saga of one hapless soldier's struggle to get to 'the sharp end' of the fighting in Holland and Germany during 1944-45. The character of Turvey is a fascinating melange of country boy innocent, common sense utilitarian and town fool, and seems to have been fashioned as a foil to the eccentrically pseudo-sophisticated Canadian military life as illustrated in the novel. The book has been described as "uproariously ribald",[1] winning the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

Birney published his second novel, Down the Long Table, in 1955.

In 1970 Birney was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

In 1995 Birney died of a heart attack. Wikipedia

The following books by Birney were in Malc's library:

Malc's copy was inscribed "With admiration, to Malcolm and Margerie Lowry. Earl Birney."

Malc's copy is inscribed "For Malcolm and Margerie Lowry in friendship and admiration Earle Birney"

Malc's copy is inscribed: "For Malcolm, no lady, Margerie, no sailor, with admiration and affection from Earle and Topsy Turvey". Malc aslo wrote a blurb for the dust cover for the McClelland & Stewart 1949 edition.

Malc also had a copy of Birney's anthology Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry published in 1953.

Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable or Beauties and Legends of Charlemagne of Mythology

2011-01-30T09:06:00.000-08:00

Thomas Bulfinch (July 15, 1796 - May 27, 1867[1]) was an American writer, born in Newton, Massachusetts. Bulfinch belonged to a well educated Bostonian merchant family of modest means. His father was Charles Bulfinch, the architect of the Massachusetts State House in Boston and parts of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.. Bulfinch supported himself through his position at the Merchants' Bank of Boston. Read more on Wikipedia

Bulfinch's Mythology is a collection of the works of Thomas Bulfinch, renamed after him and published after his death. It is a classic work of mythology and is still in print 150 years after the first work, Age of Fable, was published in 1855.

See a full list of myths included in book

The Consolation of Philosophy (The Consolation of Philosophy; The Imitation of Christ; Religio Medici)

2011-01-30T08:25:00.000-08:00

The above book was originally in Malc's Library but is currently missing according to the UBC Archive records.

The book consists of 3 religious texts - Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius,The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis and Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne introduced by Irwin Edman

Irwin Edman (November 28, 1896 – September 4, 1954) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy. He was born in New York City to Jewish parents. Edman spent his high-school years at Townsend Harris Hall, a New York high school for superior pupils. He then attended Columbia University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and earned his bachelor’s degree in 1917, and his Ph.D. in 1920. He became a professor of philosophy at Columbia, and during the course of his career he rose to serve as head of the philosophy department. He also served as a visiting lecturer at Oxford University, Amherst College, the University of California, and Harvard and Wesleyan Universities. The United States Department of State and the Brazilian government in 1945 sponsored a series of lectures he gave in Rio de Janeiro.

Edman was known for the “charm and clarity” of his writing, and for being an open-minded critic. He was a popular professor and served as a mentor to undergraduate students, notably Pulitzer Prize-winning author Herman Wouk (Columbia class of 1934), who dedicated his first novel to Edman.

In addition to writing philosophical works, Irwin Edman was a frequent contributor to literary magazines such as The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and Commentary.

In 1953, Professor Edman was elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Irwin Edman published many books on philosophy as well as poetry and some fiction. Some of his works include “Philosopher’s Holiday,” “Richard Kane Looks at Life,” “Four Ways of Philosophy,” "Philosopher's Quest," and “Arts and the Man – An Introduction to Aesthetics.”Wikipedia

Alphonse Daudet The Nabob

2010-10-28T06:24:00.000-07:00

Alphonse Daudet was born in Nîmes, France. His family, on both sides, belonged to the bourgeoisie. The father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune and failure. Alphonse, amid much truancy, had a depressing boyhood. In 1856 he left Lyon, where his schooldays had been mainly spent, and began life as a schoolteacher at Alès, Gard, in the south of France. The position proved to be intolerable. As Dickens declared that all through his prosperous career he was haunted in dreams by the miseries of his apprenticeship to the blacking business,[citation needed] so Daudet says that for months after leaving Alès he would wake with horror, thinking he was still among his unruly pupils.

On 1 November 1857, he abandoned teaching and took refuge with his brother Ernest Daudet, only some three years his senior, who was trying, "and thereto soberly," to make a living as a journalist in Paris. Alphonse took to writing, and his poems were collected into a small volume, Les Amoureuses (1858), which met with a fair reception. He obtained employment on Le Figaro, then under Cartier de Villemessant's energetic editorship, wrote two or three plays, and began to be recognized, among those interested in literature, as possessing individuality and promise. Morny, Napoleon III's all-powerful minister, appointed him to be one of his secretaries — a post which he held till Morny's death in 1865 — and showed Daudet no small kindness. Daudet had put his foot on the road to fortune. Read more on Wikipedia

The above is the same edition which Malc owned. Malc's copy has the inscription: "To my darling - Margie July 28th 1953"

Extract:

Jenkins entered the bed-chamber, a banal place like all furnished apartments, and moved towards the fire on which there were set to heat curling-tongs of all sizes, while in the contiguous laboratory, separated from the room by a curtain of Algerian tapestry, the Marquis de Monpavon gave himself up to the manipulations of his valet. Odours of patchouli, of cold-cream, of hartshorn, and of singed hair escaped from the part of the room which was shut off, and from time to time, when Francis came to fetch a curling-iron, Jenkins caught sight of a huge dressing-table laden with a thousand little instruments of ivory, and mother-of-pearl, with steel files, scissors, puffs, and brushes, with bottles, with little trays, with cosmetics, labelled and arranged methodically in groups and lines; and amid all this display, awkward and already shaky, an old man's hand, shrunken and long, delicately trimmed and polished about the nails like that of a Japanese painter, which faltered about among this fine hardware and doll's china.

While continuing the process of making up his face, the longest, the most complicated of his morning occupations, Monpavon chatted with the doctor, told of his little ailments, and the good effect of the pills. They made him young again, he said. And at a distance, thus, without seeing him, one would have taken him for the Duc de Mora, to such a degree had he usurped his manner of speech. There were the same unfinished phrases, ended by "ps, ps, ps," muttered between the teeth, expressions like "What's its name?" "Who was it?" constantly thrown into what he was saying, a kind of aristocratic stutter, fatigued, listless, wherein you might perceive a profound contempt for the vulgar art of speech. In the society of which the duke was the centre, every one sought to imitate that accent, those disdainful intonations with an affectation of simplicity.

Read novel on Internet Archive

Alphonse Constant Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual

2010-10-28T06:09:00.000-07:00

Eliphas Lévi, born Alphonse Louis Constant, (February 8, 1810 - May 31, 1875) was a French occult author and purported magician.

"Eliphas Lévi," the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or transliterate his given names "Alphonse Louis" into Hebrew although he was not Jewish.

Lévi was the son of a shoemaker in Paris; he attended a seminary and began to study to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood. However, while at the seminary he fell in love, and left without being ordained. He wrote a number of minor religious works: Des Moeurs et des Doctrines du Rationalisme en France ("Of the Moral Customs and Doctrines of Rationalism in France", 1839) was a tract within the cultural stream of the Counter-Enlightenment. La Mère de Dieu ("The Mother of God", 1844) followed and, after leaving the seminary, two radical tracts, L'Evangile du Peuple ("The Gospel of the People," 1840), and Le Testament de la Liberté ("The Testament of Liberty"), published in the year of revolutions, 1848, led to two brief prison sentences. Read more at Wikipedia

In 1853, Lévi visited England, where he met the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was interested in Rosicrucianism as a literary theme and was the president of a minor Rosicrucian order. Levi's first treatise on magic appeared in 1854 under the title Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, and was translated into English by Arthur Edward Waite as Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual. Its famous opening lines present the single essential theme of Occultism and gives some of the flavor of its atmosphere:

Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. (Introduction)

"Dogme et Rituel de La Haute Magie." With a Biographical Preface by Arthur Edward Waite. Including all the original Engravings and a Portrait of the author. Contents: The Candidate; Occult Symbolism; Magical Equilibrium; The Fiery Sword; Realization; Initiation; The Kabbalah; The Magic Chain; The Great Work; Necromancy; Black Magic; The Universal Medicine; Divination; etc

“The man who is enslaved by his passions or worldly prejudices can be initiated in no wise (meaning he can never be initiated); he must reform or he will never attain; meanwhile he cannot be an adept, for this word signifies a person who has acheived by will and by work. The man who loves his own opinions and fears to part with them, who suspects new truths, who is unprepared to doubt everything rather than admit anything on chance, should close this book; for him it is useless and dangerous. He will fail to understand it, and it will trouble him, while if he should divine the meaning, there will be a still greater source of disquietude. If you hold by anything in the world more than reason (as opposed to superstition), truth and justice; if your will be uncertain and vacillating, either in good or evil; if logic alarm you, or the naked truth make you blush; if you are hurt when accepted errors are assailed; condemn this work straight away. Do not read it; let it cease to exist for you; but at the same time do not cry it down as dangerous. The secrets which it records will be understood by an elect few and will be reserved by those who understand them.” Levi

Eleanor Clark Rome and A Villa

2010-10-28T05:52:00.000-07:00

Eleanor Clark (July 6, 1913 – February 16, 1996) was an American writer. Clark was born in Los Angeles. She attended Vassar College in the 1930s and was involved with the literary magazine Con Spirito there, along with Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and her sister Eunice Clark. She married Robert Penn Warren in 1952 and lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, with him and their two children, Rosanna and Gabriel.

Her book The Oysters of Locmariaquer received the National Book Award, for Arts and Letters, in 1965. She was also the author of two other works of nonfiction, Rome and a Villa and Eyes, Etc., and the novels The Bitter Box, Baldur's Gate, and Camping Out.
Clark died in Boston in 1996 Wikipedia

She was actually in Mexico at the same time as Malc in 1937 acting as a translator to Trotsky. Read more here

Read more on Eleanor Clark at Narrative Magazine

In 1952 Clark finished the first of her unusual "travel" books produced during long periods abroad, Rome and A Villa. Although it is concerned with setting, the book's effect is meditative rather than descriptive. It reveals a keen awareness of atmosphere and the passing of time. Clark's observations are not limited to place but encompass the political, literary, and personal as well. Katherine Anne Porter has said that Rome and A Villa is "autobiographical in the best sense" because it reflects the impact of the outer world upon the inner. Read more on Novel Guide

Publisher's Note
IN 1947 A YOUNG AMERICAN woman named Eleanor Clark went to Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel. But Rome had its way with her, the novel was abandoned, and what followed was not a novel but a series of sketches of Roman life written mostly between 1948 and 1951. This new edition of the essential classic Rome and a Villa includes an evocative introduction by the preeminent translator William Weaver, who was close friends with the author and often wandered the city with her during the years she was working on the book.

Once in Rome, the foreign writer or artist, over the course of weeks, months, or years, begins to lose ambition, to lose a sense of urgency, to lose even a sense of self. What once seemed all-consuming is swallowed up by Rome itself; by the pace of life, by the fatalism of the Roman people, to whom everything and nothing matters, by the sheer historic weight and scale of the place. Rome is life itself - messy, random, anarchic, comical one moment, tragic the next, and above all, seductive.

Clark pays special attention to Roman art and architecture. In the book's midsection she looks at Hadrian's Villa - an enormous, unfinished palace - as a meta-phor for the city itself: decaying, imperial, shabby, but capable of inducing an overwhelming dreaminess in its visitors. The book's final chapter, written for an updated edition in 1974, is a lovely portrait of the so-called Protestant cemetery where both Keats and Shelley are buried, along with other foreign notables.

Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights

2010-10-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

Emily Jane Brontë (30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet, now best remembered for her novel Wuthering Heights, a classic of English literature. Emily was the second eldest of the three surviving Brontë sisters, between Charlotte and Anne. She published under the androgynous pen name Ellis Bell. Read more on Wikipedia

Wuthering Heights is a gothic novel, and the only novel by Emily Brontë. It was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, and a posthumous second edition was edited by her sister Charlotte.

The name of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors on which the story centres (as an adjective; wuthering is a Yorkshire word referring to turbulent weather). The narrative tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them.

Now considered a classic of English literature, Wuthering Heights met with mixed reviews by critics when it first appeared, mainly because of the narrative's stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty. Though Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was generally considered the best of the Brontë sisters' works during most of the nineteenth century, many subsequent critics of Wuthering Heights argued that its originality and achievement made it superior. Read more on Wikipedia

Henri Bergson Creative Evolution

2010-10-25T01:42:00.000-07:00

Henri-Louis Bergson (French pronunciation: [bɛʁksɔn] 18 October 1859–4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.

Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859 (the year in which France emerged as a victor in the Second Italian War of Independence and over a month before the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species). His father, the musician Michał Bergson had a Polish Jewish family background (originally bearing the name Bereksohn). His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous[citation needed] Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.

Henri Bergon's family lived in London for a few years after his birth, and he obtained an early familiarity with the English language from his mother. Before he was nine, his parents crossed the English Channel and settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized French citizen.

Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust (1871–1922), in 1891. They had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896.

Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers), married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the couple later relocated to Paris as well.

Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor, marked by the publication of his four principal works:

in 1889, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience)
in 1896, Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire)
in 1907, Creative Evolution (L'Evolution créatrice)
in 1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion)

In 1900 the College of France selected Bergson to a Chair of Greek and Latin Philosophy, which he held until 1904. He then replaced Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of Modern Philosophy, which he held until 1920. The public attended his open courses in large numbers. Wikipedia

Creative Evolution (L'Evolution créatrice) is a 1907 book by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Its English translation appeared in 1911. The book provides an alternate explanation for Darwin's mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by an élan vital, a "vital impetus" that can also be understood as humanity's natural creative impulse. The book was very popular in the early decades of the twentieth century, before the Neodarwinian synthesis was developed.

The book also develops concepts of time (offered in Bergson's earlier work) which significantly influenced modernist writers and thinkers such as Marcel Proust. For example, Bergson's term "duration" refers to a more individual, subjective experience of time, as opposed to mathematical, objectively measurable "clock time." In Creative Evolution, Bergson suggests that the experience of time as "duration" can best be understood through creative intuition, not through intellect.

Harvard philosopher William James intended to write the introduction to the English translation of the book, but died in 1910 prior to its completion. Wikipedia

Download or read a copy from Internet Archive

Djuna Barnes Nightwood

2010-10-24T03:55:00.000-07:00

The above is a New Directions copy of the book. I am uncertain whether the dustcover of the above is the same as Lowry's New Directions copy.

Nightwood is a 1936 novel by Djuna Barnes first published in London by Faber and Faber. An edition published in the United States in 1937 by Harcourt, Brace included an introduction by T. S. Eliot.

Nightwood is notable because it is one of the earliest novels written by a well-known novelist to portray explicit homosexuality. It is also notable for its intense, gothic prose style. Regarding the difficulty of reading the novel's dense prose, T.S. Eliot writes in his introduction, "only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it

The novel, like many of its time, is essentially plotless. It focuses on Robin Vote, a bisexual woman in constant search of "secure torment." Robin's story begins in Europe, where she meets, and marries the false Baron Felix Volkbein, who wants nothing more than an heir to carry on his family name and uphold the traditions of old European nobility. The birth of their son, Guido, causes Robin to realize that she does not wish to carry on this life. She moves to America, where she begins a romantic relationship with Nora Flood. The two move to Paris together. Unfortunately, Robin is unable to remain peacefully with Nora. She feels driven by the conflicts of "love and anonymity," and spends her nights away from home, having quick flings with strangers while Nora waits nervously for her lover's return. It is during one such night that Robin meets Jenny Petherbridge, a widow four times over, who gains happiness by stealing the joy of others. She immediately turns her attention to stealing Robin away from Nora, and succeeds. In her despair, Nora (like Felix before her) turns to the counsel of Dr. Matthew O'Connor to recover from the devastating loss of Robin.

Some time later, Nora has returned to America, and is camping in a forest with her dog when she discovers Robin kneeling before an altar in an abandoned church. Attempting to enter, Nora hits the door jamb, and is knocked unconscious. Robin and the dog frolic on the floor before finally succumbing to sleep.
Wikipedia

Djuna Barnes (12 June 1892 – 18 June 1982) was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T. S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of lesbian themes and its distinctive writing style. Since Barnes's death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back in print.

W. N. P. Barbellion The Journal of a Disappointed Man

2010-10-24T03:31:00.000-07:00

"Country (?) of Alton (?) et tous ces petits animaux - with great love Dec 2 1949 - inscription in Malcolm Lowry's Penguin edition.

W(ilhelm) N(ero) P(ilate) Barbellion was the nom-de-plume of Bruce Frederick Cummings (7 September 1889 - 22 October 1919), an English diarist who was responsible for The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Ronald Blythe called it "among the most moving diaries ever created"

Cummings was born in Barnstaple in 1889. He was a naturalist at heart and ended up working at the British Museum's department of Natural History in London. Having begun his journal at the age of thirteen, Cummings continued to record his observations there - gradually moving from dry scientific notes to a more personal, literary style. His literary ambitions changed course in 1914 upon reading the journal of the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff, in whom he recognised a kindred spirit (see the 14 October 1914 entry of his Journal); in his 15 January 1915 entry he indicated that he intended to prepare his Journal for publication: "Then all in God’s good time I intend getting a volume ready for publication." Wikipedia

Likened to James Joyce and Franz Kafka, W.N.P. Barbellion’s Journal is one of the great diaries and caused a sensation when first published in 1919. Begun when its author was 13 years old, the Journal at first catalogues his misadventures in the Devon countryside - collecting birds’ eggs, spying girls through binoculars - but evolves into a deeply moving account of his struggle with multiple sclerosis.

Yet, for all its excruciating honesty, W.N.P. Barbellion has an extraordinary lust for life. As Zeppelins loomed above South Kensington, the humour and beauty he found in the world around him – in music, friendship, nature and love – deepens not just the tragedy of his own life, but the millions of lives lost during the First World War. Buy a copy from The Dovecote Press

You can read the diaries on Internet Archive or as a weblog

Also check out The Quotable Barbellion

Margaret Armstrong Field Book Of Western Wild Flowers

2010-10-24T02:44:00.001-07:00

Margaret Nielson Armstrong (1867-1944) was the most productive and accomplished American book designer of the 1890s and early 1900s. Thematically and philosophically, her career places her squarely within the vibrant Arts and Crafts Movement in the United States. Her eclectic style - combining classical and art nouveau with its graceful symmetry and natural motifs, mainly floral in character, rooted in Japonisme and with Colonial, Native American and other motifs - resists easy characterization. Read more on Cassandra Considers

In this little book a very large number of the commoner wild flowers growing in the United States, west of the Rocky Mountains, are pictured and described. It is the first attempt to supply a popular field book for the whole West. This is the only fully illustrated book of western flowers, except Miss Parsons's charming book, which is for California only. The drawings have all been made from life. Almost all technical botanical terms have been translated into ordinary English, as this book is intended primarily for the general public, but as a large number of the plants given have never before been illustrated, or even described, except in somewhat inaccessible or technical publications, it is hoped that the scientist also may find the contents both interesting and useful. Read more including a detailed account of the contents of the book.

You can read the book on the Internet Archive.

Margaret Armstrong, second left, in 1910 at the family's lake house in North Hatley, Quebec, Canada with friends & sister, Helen, far left, and brother, Hamilton, far right.

Read an excellent piece on Margaret Armstrong on Cassandra Considers blog

Margaret Armstrong is also known for her book binding designs - you can read more Rare Book School.

James Agee & Walker Evans Let us now Praise Famous Men

2009-08-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let us now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

The Lowrys met James Agee and his wife on a visit to New York in February 1947.

In a letter to James Stern 23/3/47, Lowry wrote:

I have been reading Jim Agee's and Evan's book Let us now praise famous men, too, you see: surely one of the most important in all of American literature, & one of the finest & most beautiful; & useful - I think I will begin my education upon it - God damn it, he even tells me how I/we built my/our house in it.... The Collected Letters Of Malcolm Lowry Vol. 2

James Agee was an admirer of Under The Volcano and his letter to Albert Erskine, a mutual friend of Lowry's, praising Lowry's masterpiece was published in theLiens; Cahier mensuel des lettres et des arts 30 in November 1949. In the article, Agee says he has been more impressed by Volcano than any other contemporary novel for many years. (Sherrill E. Grace notes in Collected Letters Of Malcolm Lowry Vol. 2.)

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans first published in 1941 in the United States. The title is from a passage in Ecclesiasticus that begins, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us."

The book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of an assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the conditions among white sharecropper families in the U.S. South. It was the time of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs designed to help the poorest segments of the society. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty. They returned with Evans' portfolio of stark images—of families with gaunt faces, adults and children huddled in bare shacks before dusty yards in the Depression-era nowhere of the deep south—and Agee's detailed notes.

As he remarks in the book's preface, the original assignment was to produce a "photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers." However, as the Literary Encyclopedia points out, "Agee ultimately conceived of the project as a work of several volumes to be entitled Three Tenant Families, though only the first volume, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was ever written." Agee considered that the larger work, though based in journalism, would be "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity. Read more on Wikipedia

The following articles offer further insight into the Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

The Most Famous Story We Never Told
And Their Children After Them

You can see some of the photographs from the book and read essays on Walker Evans in the University Of Virginia archives.

James Agee

Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, at Highland Avenue and 15th Street (renamed James Agee Street in 1999) to Hugh James Agee and Laura Whitman Tyler. When Agee was six, his father died in an automobile accident. From the age of seven, he and his younger sister, Emma, were educated in boarding schools. The most influential of these was located near his mother's summer cottage two miles from Sewanee, Tennessee. Saint Andrews School for Mountain Boys was run by Episcopal monks affiliated with the Order of the Holy Cross, and it was there that Agee's lifelong friendship with an Episcopal priest, Father James Harold Flye, began in 1919. As Agee's close friend and spiritual confidant, Flye was the recipient of many of Agee's most revealing letters.

Agee went to Knoxville High School for the 1924–1925 school year, then travelled with Father Flye to Europe in the summer, when Agee was sixteen. On their return, Agee moved to boarding school in New Hampshire, entering the class of 1928 at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, he was president of The Lantern Club and editor of the Monthly where his first short stories, plays, poetry and articles were published. Despite barely passing many of his high school courses, Agee was admitted to Harvard University's class of 1932. He was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Advocate and delivered the class ode at his commencement.

In 1951 in Santa Barbara, Agee suffered the first two in a series of heart attacks, which ultimately claimed his life four years later at the age of 45. He died on May 16, 1955, while in a taxi cab en route to a doctor's appointment — coincidentally two days before the anniversary of his father's death[1] He was buried on a farm he owned at Hillsdale, New York. Read more Wikipedia

Walker Evans

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera.

He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums, and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read more on Wikipedia

Edmond About King Of The Mountains

2009-08-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

About, Edmond. The King Of The Mountains. Trans. Andrew Long. New York: P.F. Collier 1902

"To Malc-- as ever--Margie. July 28, 1950."

We start our browsing of Malc's library with a 1950 birthday present from Margerie to Malc.

Edmond About was born at Dieuze, in the Moselle département in the Lorraine region of France.[1] In 1848 he entered the École Normale, taking second place in the annual competition for admission in which Hippolyte Taine came first. Among his college contemporaries, besides Taine, were Francisque Sarcey, Challemel-Lacour and Prevost-Paradol. Of them all, About was considered the most highly vitalized, exuberant, brilliant and "undisciplined". It is said that one of his schoolmasters told him "You will never be more than a little Voltaire," and About's career did tend toward Voltaire-style witty satire and commentaries on contemporary issues.

At the end of his college career, he joined the French school in Athens, but claimed that he had never intended to follow the professorial career for which the École Normale was a preparation, and in 1853 he returned to France and devoted himself to literature and journalism. Read more on Wikipedia

The King of the Mountains" is the best-known of Edmond About's novels, as it is also the best. In 1854 About was working as a poor archaeologist at the French School at Athens, where he noticed there was a curious understanding between the brigands and the police of modern Greece. Brigandage was becoming a safe and almost a respectable Greek industry. "Why not make it quite respectable and regular?" said About. "Why does not some brigand chief, with a good connection, convert his business into a properly registered joint-stock company?" So he produced, in 1856, one of the most delightful of satirical novels, The King of the Mountains.

You can read the full text of King Of The Mountains on Google Books

Welcome to Malcolm Lowry's Library

2009-08-10T04:04:00.000-07:00

I have set this blog up to sit alongside my main Malcolm Lowry blog in order to allow readers a chance to take a dip into Malc's library.

Malcolm Lowry's Library is based on the list of books held in boxes 53-56 of the Malcolm Lowry Collection at the University Of British Columbia (UBC).

The monographs and periodicals in Malcolm Lowry's Library have been divided into 2 groups by the UBC: the first contains items marked "Lowry", items dedicated to the Lowrys and gift volumes from Malcolm to Margerie and from Margerie to Malcolm; the second contains miscellaneous works of interest to Lowry.

I will gradually work my way through the Library detailing something about the author of each book, providing a brief synopsis of each book and posting any relevant images. Hopefully, it will give some insight into what the importance of each book may have been for Malc.