Philip Mosley - Resuming Maurice: And Other Essays on Writers and Celebrity

RESUMING MAURICE

An altogether absorbing miscellany of literary biographical studies, shot through with wit and discernment. The flagship essay on Maeterlinck sets the standard, a brilliant elucidation of what made the writer so extraordinarily famous and bagged him the Nobel Prize for Literature before he more or less passes from popular consciousness. The linking theme with ten other essays, many of them gems, is the celebrity phenomenon, teasing out those mysterious properties which decide whether reputation is fugitive or permanent. Academic and recreational readers alike will acclaim Philip Mosleys own singular genius, the international sweep of his interests and understanding of peoples vagaries. The autobiographical snippets deftly woven into every essay are a particular delight.

Philip Waller, Emeritus Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and author of W riters, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 18701918 (2006)

In Resuming Maurice , Philip Mosleys brilliant collection of essays, not only do we learn how Maurice Maeterlinck managed his fame but how Karen Blixens narcissism fed her writing and Dylan Thomass star came to shine so brightly only to collapse. Readers are fascinated with context, and this volume offers tales of the well-known and the obscure in a most gratifying manner.

Bertha Rogers, Founding Director of Bright Hill Press, New York, and translator of the letterpress edition of Beowulf (2000)

And Other Essays on Writers and Celebrity

Philip Mosley

Dufour Editions

First published in the United States of America, 2020

by Dufour Editions Inc., Chester Springs, Pennsylvania 19425

Philip Mosley, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover:

Painting of Russian writer Evgeny Chirikov,

1904 by Ivan Kulikov - PD-US

ISBN 978-0-8023-1364-5

eISBN 978-0-87233-297-3

Mobi ISBN 978-0-87233-297-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mosley, Philip, author.

Title: Resuming Maurice: and other essays on writers and celebrity / Philip Mosley.

Description: Chester Springs: Dufour Editions, 2020. | Includes index. | Summary: A collection of personal essays on greater and lesser known writers whose lives and careers have sparked some of the authors own literary and historical interests-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020003401 | ISBN 9780802313645 (trade paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Authors--20th century. | Celebrities--20th century. | Authorship.

Classification: LCC PN452 .M67 2020 | DDC 809--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003401

To Shu-ching

Note: [p.d.] indicates a photo is understood to be now in the public domain. [WMC] indicates that the photographer has granted free use under the Creative Commons licence, and the work was sourced via Wikimedia Commons.

Frontispiece: the author, Schaarbeek, Brussels, 2013

Maurice Maeterlinck photographed by Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1915 [p.d.]

Karen Blixen, Copenhagen Airport, 1957 [p.d.]

Jrgen Laursen Vig, Hesbjerg. Courtesy Frej Schmedes/from The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun by Pernille Rose Grnkjr

Whitwell Elwin by Henry Weigall, RA, 1876. Photo Evelyn Simak [WMC]

Vita Sackville-West, 1926. Courtesy Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, Massachusetts.

George Barker as a young man. Courtesy Elspeth Barker

Dylan Thomas photographed by Nora Summers, 1938. Courtesy Jeff Towns Dylans Bookstore Collection

Ngugi wa Thiongo, London, 2007. Photo: Sixoone [WMC]

John Seymour. Courtesy the Seymour family, www.pantryfields.com

Octavio Paz, Malmo Poetry Festival, 1988. Photo Jonn Leffmann [WMC]

Rosario Castellanos [p.d.]

Virginia Haggard writing. Courtesy Jean McNeil

J. K. Nettlefold on his graduation, 1921. Courtesy Winterbourne House and Garden

Ned Washington [p.d.]

Resuming Maurice is a collection of personal essays on greater and lesser known writers whose lives and careers have sparked some of my own literary and historical interests. Elements of personal narrative enter into my appreciations of this diverse set of authors and thinkers, whose backgrounds range from English (Vita Sackville-West, Whitwell Elwin, George Barker, John Seymour, Virginia Haggard, J. K. Nettlefold), Welsh (Dylan Thomas) and American (Ned Washington) to Belgian (Maurice Maeterlinck), Danish (Karen Blixen, Jrgen Laursen Vig), Mexican (Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos) and Kenyan (Ngugi wa Thiongo). Corresponding to the growing academic subdiscipline of celebrity studies, a unifying theme of celebrity and its discontents runs throughout the volume. Additionally, my essays on Elwin, Barker, Seymour, and Nettlefold have an East Anglian connection in that these writers lived for part or all of their lives in a region of England where I was raised.

Philip Mosley

Clifton, Pennsylvania, February 2020

I am grateful to the following for their help, comments, and suggestions: Jean McNeil, Anne Sears, Philip Waller, Bertha Rogers, Charles Cantalupo, Sebastian Lockwood, Victoria Manthorpe, Andrew Gurr, Simon Lewis, Sevan Melikyan, Henrietta Lockhart, and Howard Hague.

An earlier version of Returning to Mr Vig (the postscript to the chapter on Karen Blixen) was published in Connectivism, Variety Crossing (Canada) 13 (2011).

Thanks also to Susan Curran of Lasse Press and Duncan May of Dufour Editions for their enthusiastic support of this project.

The author, Schaarbeek, Brussels, 2013

Resuming Maurice: Maeterlinck and literary celebrity

A pre-amble by way of reputation and renown

No matter how one chooses to define a literary celebrity, there is no doubt that Maurice Maeterlinck was one. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the Nobel prizewinning Belgian was one of the most famous authors in the world, his books translated into many languages and selling in vast numbers. On his first visit to the United States in 1919, people clamoured to meet him and hear him speak. Bunting was hung in his honour along Fifth Avenue in New York City. Yet since his death in 1949 his oeuvre poetry, plays, and essays has been largely neglected. His translated works with few exceptions exist only in reprints of those that had poured from the printing presses in the first quarter of the century when he was at the peak of his fame.

Maeterlinck was rarely out of the public eye from the beginning of the century to the years before the Second World War, and enjoyed an exceptional span of literary celebrity. I mark this essay by several milestones in his career: 1890, when the playwright, novelist, and critic Octave Mirbeau hailed a new Shakespeare on the publication of Maeterlincks first play, Princess Maleine ; 1901, when his nature essay The Life of the Bee created a global stir; 1908, when his play The Blue Bird began its extraordinary international popularity; 1911, when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature; and 1919 when, buoyed by his patriotic activities during the First World War, he took by storm first New York and then the rest of the United States. During that stay he became one of the earliest in a long line of migr artists to hearken to the call of a Hollywood eager for European cultural validation, though very little came of his brief arrangement with Samuel Goldwyn. The story goes that Goldwyn, on receiving a film treatment from Maeterlinck, rushed from his office shouting My God! My God! His hero is a bee! The two scripts he completed never reached the screen.