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| TS Eliot and Groucho Marx |
A glimpse at the correspondence — and one awkward dinner — of the iconic Jewish comedian and the brilliant, anti-Semitic poet.
Lee Siegel commemorates a new volume of T.S. Eliot's collected letters by noting a series of exchanges that aren't included in the book: the missive exchanged by Eliot and Groucho Marx, two sharply different men fascinated with each other.
since loving in Magyar is so complex / anyhow, let this be a simple, / touristy, Budapest morning. - Szabina Ughy's poem Explanation translated by Peter Sherwood.
EXPLANATION
It was a beautiful night,
he says, and I say nothing.
For the rest we can share no words,
his English, like mine, being so-so.
I can see how he imagines me to be,
fingers and mouth I mould around him,
since loving in Magyar is so complex
anyhow, let this be a simple,
touristy, Budapest morning.
Then the first 49 tram, the Danube,
the streetlights going out, one by one.
As the outlines become clearer
one phrase haunts me: sombre absolution,
confining me in words, comforting,
sombre absolution, an impassive threat
that for all this I have at least
a few borrowed words.
Translated by Peter Sherwood
Szabina Ughy was born in Ajka in 1985. She is the author of two poetry collections, Outer Prosthesis (Külső protézis, 2011) and Walks on the Outskirts (Séták peremvidéken, 2015), as well as the novel The Taste of Pomegranate (A gránátalma ize, 2018), released by Orpheusz Publishers. Graduate of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, she has published work in various literary magazines since the early 2000s, and is a recepient of the Bella István-díj (István Bella Award in Poetry, 2016) and the Móricz Zsigmond-ösztöndíj (Zsigmond Móricz Scholarship, 2013). Szabina Ughy is an editor at Móra Publishers, which specializes in children’s literature.
Peter Sherwood taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (now part of University College London) until 2007. From 2008 until his retirement in 2014 he was Distinguished Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received the Pro Cultura Hungarica prize of the Hungarian Republic in 2001, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2007, the János Lotz Medal of the International Association for Hungarian Studies in 2011, the László Országh Prize of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English in 2016, and the Árpád Tóth Prize for translation in 2020. His translations from Hungarian include Miklós Vámos's The Book of Fathers, Noémi Szécsi's The Finno-Ugrian Vampire, and collections of essays by Antal Szerb and Béla Hamvas. He co-translated Zsuzsa Selyem's It's Raining in Moscow (Contra Mundum Press, 2020).
HLO HU
1 September 2021
Aaron Eames, Loughborough University
Dafydd Jones, The Fictions of Arthur Cravan: Poetry, Boxing and Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019)
Arthur Cravan (1887-1918) was a sailor in the Pacific, muleteer, orange-picker in California, snake charmer, hotel thief, logger in the great forests, former French boxing champion, grandson to the Queen’s Chancellor, Berlin automobile chauffeur, gentleman thief, and much else besides – or so he claimed. Provocateur, poet and poser, we know for certain that Cravan mingled with the pre-war Parisian avantgarde, was knocked out in an exhibition match by Jack Johnson, and was the nephew of Oscar Wilde. He is, at first glance, a biographer’s dream but, when one considers all the misinformation, mystique, and mythology surrounding (and generated by) this remarkable man, he quickly becomes an impossible subject. In The Fictions of Arthur Cravan, Dafydd W. Jones manages to get to grips with this simultaneously effusive and elusive figure and place his impressive list of epithets in their proper context. Giving due acknowledgement to Maria Lluïsa Borràs’s Arthur Cravan: une stratégie du scandale (1996), this book provides anglophone audiences with the first comprehensive biographical study of this ‘twentieth century man of mystery’.[1]
In reality ‘Arthur Cravan’ is a fiction, a pseudonym of Fabian Avénarius Lloyd, but it is the name by which the man is primarily known. Lloyd developed many identities: ‘Bombardier Wells’, ‘Édouard Archinard’, ‘Jean Rubidini’, ‘Numa Persan’, ‘Philippe Or’, ‘Robert Miradique’, but ‘Cravan’ was his central persona. Jones assumes his audience’s familiarity with Cravan, and his legacy as a ‘proto-Dadaist’ and ‘nihilist hero’ (4), from the outset. We read, for instance, about his ‘dreamy orange-picking’ (55) without hearing much else about this languid interlude. This is offset by the book’s chronological structure which follows Cravan’s life from birth in Switzerland in 1887, his eventful sojourns in Germany, France, Spain, the United States and Mexico, up to his enigmatic disappearance in the Pacific in 1918, allowing one to become acquainted with his mythos even as the author simultaneously demystifies it. For instance, Jones corrects the tangled timeline of Cravan’s stay in Berlin, and the posthumous Cravanographies of his wife Mina Loy and the poet Blaise Cendrars are held up to the light alongside documentation such as Cravan’s Paris Address Book and passenger manifests. The title of the book thus gestures towards Jones’s combination of an historical scrutiny of Cravan’s legendised life and a critique of his literary works.
Jones examines the latter in detail. Chapters four and five in particular explore Cravan’s journal Maintenant, whose five issues he compiled almost single-handedly between April 1912 and April 1915. He critiques Cravan’s various journalistic and fictional endeavours, including his notoriously merciless review of the 1914 Salon des Indépendants, the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants founded in Paris in 1884 to promote the work of Impressionists and other artists rejected by the official Salon. In his review Cravan took the chance ‘to pillory, insult and summarily dismiss his close as well as fringe Parisian acquaintances’ (155) including the artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay; ‘his insulting invective’, Jones dryly comments, ‘was nothing if not inclusive’ (156). The author also considers Cravan’s attempts at poetry, identifying his debts to Walt Whitman in, for example, these characteristic lines from ‘Hie!’:
I would like to be in Vienna and Calcutta,
Catch every train and every boat,
Lay every woman and gorge myself on every dish,
Man of fashion, chemist, whore, drunk, musician, labourer, painter, acrobat, actor;
Old man, child, crook, hooligan, angel and rake; millionaire, bourgeois, cactus, giraffe, or crow;
Coward, hero, Negro, monkey, Don Juan, pimp, lord, peasant, hunter, industrialist,
Flora and fauna:
I am all things, all men and all animals! (126-127)
This is little more than Cravan’s ‘legendary roll-call’ (62) or his dream CV writ large.
Friedrich Nietzsche famously claimed to philosophise with a hammer. Jones makes use of the finer instruments in Nietzsche’s arsenal, along with the theoretical toolkit of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to read Cravan’s life. At times this critical apparatus can seem superfluous, as it does in chapter eight where in Jones’s own words the idea of ‘“death” in the infinitive’ acts as an ‘undercurrent’ (259), one that underwhelmingly rejoins the main course. It can also feel incomplete. In order to pin down the mercurial Cravan, Jones proposes a ‘schizo-biography’ that can encompass his myriad identities. Jones fails to define this term satisfactorily, perhaps leaning too heavily on a reference to his earlier monograph Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (2014). At other junctures, however, the theory-driven critique is highly illuminating and well-integrated. Jones’s application of Deleuze’s notion of the subject as ‘assemblage’, for example, generates an intriguing way of thinking about Cravan’s identity: where we might have seen a man in a mask, we are encouraged to perceive him as a mass of multiplicities. Jones argues that Lloyd/Cravan realised this and set about ‘creating, experimenting with and transforming (his) life’ (47) as he wished. His first step, for instance, in becoming a boxer was appearing to be one, just as he wrote that ‘[i]t is essential to be American, or at least to look like you are one, which is exactly the same thing’ (73) – to appear to be something is to become it.
There is plenty here of interdisciplinary interest. As a Wilde scholar, I can speak to the significance of this book in providing a necessary study of Wilde’s extraordinary nephew to complement that of his extraordinary niece Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Wilde.[2] This is particularly evident where Jones discusses Cravan’s short story ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ (Oscar Wilde is Alive!) in which Cravan pretends that Wilde, who died in Paris on 30 November 1900, casually stops by his home for a chat on the 23 March 1913 (Cravan assumes he has been living in South East Asia). Jones offers an intriguing reading of this tale as ‘a productive continuation of [André] Gide’s “Hommage à Oscar Wilde”’ to which it is ‘strikingly close in imitation’ (149), contending that the work which brought Cravan transatlantic attention was also a parodic response to an earlier Wilde-related memoir.
Jones both builds upon his own previously published research and makes full use of the latest scholarship by Bertrand Lacarelle and Bastiaan van der Velden, as well as the various articles contained in La règle du jeu, 53 (October2013), and Arthur Cravan: maintenant? (2017), a Museu Picasso exhibition catalogue edited by Emmanuel Guigon (with English texts translated by Paul Edson). Jones proves that, even without the mythology, Cravan lived a captivating life; indeed the author has the best of both worlds, being able to rehearse the legend even while dissecting it. However, the insistence on dense philosophical criticism in places renders Jones’s study difficult to penetrate without a complementary understanding of Deleuze, and the prose style of Jones’s preface in particular sets one up to expect (incorrectly, of course) that the rest of the book will be written in a sort of Expressionist stream of consciousness. Nevertheless, The Fictions of Arthur Cravan will serve as an essential basis for future scholarship, having provided us simultaneously with a biography of Fabian Lloyd and a critique of Arthur Cravan’s legend.
Sources:
[1] As he has been called by Mike Richardson and Rick Geary in their graphic novel Cravan (Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2005).
[2] See Joan Schenkar, Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece (London: Virago Press, 2000).
Brian Alan Ellis is perhaps the most twenty-first century writer there is. The unquestioned master of microfiction has boiled contemporary living to its bare essentials: movies, bad food, irony and crippling loneliness. That’s why I’ve covered him so extensively in the past and continue to cover him today. His never-ending emotional collapse is interesting and oddly relatable. In Bad Poet, Ellis continues his downward slide with increasing clarity and purpose.
Bad Poet will feel familiar to those of you who read Brian Alan Ellis’ previous collection Road Warrior Hawk. It’s a collection of poems that dialogue with their own title. The poem providing pure emotion and the title enhancing the experience by giving ironic, distanced perspective. I don’t know any purer depiction of being inside a millenial’s brain. Raw emotion and cynicism are constantly battling for your attention, not allowing you to live whatever you need to live.
If a stranger ever approaches you
and says, “Hey, you look familiar,”
remind them of who you really are,
which is the kid who shit their pants
in elementary school.
Easy.
The poem quoted above intends to make for of the overused expression street cred, which is thrown around today by people who aren’t from the street and who don’t have any credibility. Ellis makes a vibrant plea for transparency and self-acceptance with this poem. Sure, there’s irony to it. But the overarching idea of Street cred < Street dread is that you shouldn’t try to impress strangers. Instead, you should be using them to gain perspective and heal your trauma.
It’s brilliant in its own crass way.
There’s another great piece in Bad Poet about flipping over your mattress, a very matter-of-fact intergenerational advice that doesn’t make any sense if your sleeping problems are not physical. In this poem, Brian Alan Ellis really nails the anger of being supposed to find “happinesss” and “success” without even knowing what these things mean. We’re living in a world filled with solutions that completely ill-suited to our problems, like flipping a stupid fucking mattress.
Reminder:
My roommate’s half-eaten bowl
of Frosted Mini-Wheats
is definitely the saddest thing
I have ever found
inside a refrigerator.
Another thing I really like about Brian Alan Ellis’ writing that’s omnipresent in Bad Poet is the confrontation of pop culture. While others find it pleasant and comforting to watch wrestling or eat Domino’s, but looks at these for what they really are: temporary distractions from your problems, which give you pleasure in a physically unhealthy way. In Ellis’ case, every moment he chooses to spend with pop culture is actually enhancing his loneliness and heartbreak.
The well-cultivated, intoxicating mix of cynicism and self-awareness are really what Brian Alan Ellis’ does better than everybody else. But he does it in a format that is both relatable (not longer than a Facebook status) and accessible. If he really invested his time into it, Ellis could easily be gutter version of Rupi Kaur on Instagram. His work has a good enough balance of humanity and self-loathing to travel beyond the pages of his books.
That said, you should totally read Bad Poet. It’s short, clever and low-key emotional. The kind of book you read in one feverish afternoon (who am I kidding? One feverish hour) near the pool, while slowly getting drunk on Palm Bays you’ve just bought at 7-11. It’s poetry for internet people. For people like you and I who have grown up with that digital wall between each other. I don’t know how else to say it. Even if you’re not into reading, you should like these.
DEAD END FOLLIES
1979
midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within an endless war
well it’s not exactly endless one day it will end even the Hundred Years’ War ended
“achievement unlocked”
Dante placed all of his enemies in the different circles of hell he’d read the footnotes about these enemies but didn’t know the context of the book’s translation and publication
“achievement unlocked: in the context of war”
now everyone is saying that they knew it would come to war well I didn’t know anything like that
if you ask me if anything in life brought me pleasure, it was reading books
had they taken the books from me, I’d feel at war; in my Babushka’s village books were delivered twice a week
romance novels from the 18th century and mysteries well what else could the villagers really need what else
“achievement unlocked”
when I arrive in Europe people there don’t understand what bombing is well what is bombing why should they want to hear about it
and I say no I don’t want them to understand it
I don’t want to blame them for sitting peacefully in cafés
and not knowing where the nearest bomb shelter in their neighborhood is
I know far too much about the bomb shelters of our country
* “Midway upon the journey of our life” is the first line of Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Inferno.
my country is at war and I want a farmer cheese and vanilla bun
to travel to Europe and to not see the sign “You’re Safe Here”
so that it’d be safe everywhere and not only behind the invisible front line
over on this side a missile might land but further on there are no air-raid sirens
the tastiest farmer cheese and vanilla bun is in Prague
we come to the cemetery where Kafka is buried
together with his parents because his sister died at a concentration camp lanterns flowers nearby
nameplates on the wall commemorate people whose names mean nothing to us but who also
ended up in concentration camps no safety anywhere near the tastiest vanilla bun
if someone doesn’t like your last name or language you become a nameplate on this wall
displayed in this movie set of a city full of expensive hotels and tourists
I look at the beggars asking for alms on the central streets
hunched over on their knees awkwardly amidst all the riches I’d find this so galling
even if we never had this war
by Olga Zilberbourg
Olga Bragina wrote these poems about a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. In February 2022 she was living in Kyiv with her parents and decided to leave a few weeks later. She and her mother spent several months as refugees in eastern Europe before returning to Kyiv. A prolific writer of poetry and prose, Olga responded to the war by keeping what I would describe as a poetic diary on Facebook, posting new pieces multiple times a week.
I’d fallen in love with Olga’s work several years prior to this period, attracted by her mix of personal candor, literary erudition, and a certain intentional naïveté. Together, these qualities create an approachable lyrical style that seems to address the reader as though they were her personal friend. Her parents often play a significant role in her poems, both in the plural first-person voice she often uses and in direct quotations. Though I’d never met Olga in person, I felt like I knew her and her family. This feeling increased when she began posting her wartime poetry. Her poems gave me the illusion of sharing her experiences.
The cultural icon captures close intimacy between his friends to illustrate CP Cavafy’s poem
With its lovers’ just-touching bodies, marked out in simple, delicate lines above the soft, rumpled sheets, David Hockney’s 1966 etching conjures a luminous scene of post-coital bliss.
It is part of a series: Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from CP Cavafy. Hockney often turned to art-historical or literary sources. The early 20th-century Greek poet’s writing gave gay love in the ancient world a contemporary immediacy.
Hockney’s print matches the poetry’s thrill, mixing sensuality, history and “the now”. It feels very modern with its stripped-down technique; more so with its intimate subject matter.
The artist had travelled to Cavafy’s home city, Alexandria, in 1963. It was in Beirut in 1966, though, where he found the cosmopolitan energy the poet channelled.
While imbued with the poetry’s mood, what Hockney depicts is his own milieu. The two men are his friends, artists Mo McDermott and Dale Chisman.
THE GUARDIAN
