Friday, May 14, 2004
The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective)
welcomes questions about literary mysteries and scandals, which should be sent to: woodyswoody@hotmail.com. The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective) is published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, by Jonathanames.com. Just so you know, Jonathan Ames, our mentor here at this website, has a new book coming out in July, called, Wake Up, Sir!
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Investigating Sex & A Call for Feedback
I was in a bookstore in Dublin when I came across Investigating Sex. Consisting of a series of conversations held by Surrealist figures between 1928-1932, Investigating Sex is a fun book. These Surrealist’s sit around and ask sex questions, and debate. A participant in one of the conversations is Jean Genbach, who was a defrocked French priest. Here is an exchange between Genbach and Marcel Duhamel,
“Marcel Duhamel: You have said that you deny sexuality.
Jean Genbach: In opposition to love. I can only see one reason for living: to love and to desire.
Marcel Duhamel: Yet you refuse to discuss these subjects, love and desire.
Jean Genbach: Ask me concrete questions. Would you like me to tell you that one of the things I like most is to rub a woman’s sex when she is dressed, something which disgusts me when she is naked.” (Investigating Sex Edited by Jose Piere. Tanslated by Malcolm Imrie. Page 55)
I think part of the fun is the sense that you’re obviously reading a translation. Here’s the beginning of the conversation that Genbach is in,
“Jean Genbach: I am astounded by the fact that you are concerned with the sexual question on a physical level, that you can separate it from love.
Andre Breton: There has never been any question of making such a seperation.
Jean Genbach: I only live to find one woman. I don’t give a damn about the rest, nothing exists apart from this woman. I’ve told you that sexuality doesn’t exist, there is only love. That ought to make you tremble with fear, to overwhelm you.
Andre Breton: Very amusing. Now let us try to be serious. I am not overwhelmed by the question of sex. I dominate it in the name of love.
Jean Genbach: Love is something you experience in your guts and your brain.
Max Moris: What do you mean by guts as distinct from brain?
Jean Genbach: I mean all the fibres of my nerves, all of myself, all that is understood by the world soul.
Andre Breton: The soul does not exist.
Jean Genbach: But I claim the soul does exist and that is why I don’t agree with you/ The idea of the soul is more familiar, more normal to me than the idea of the mind.” (Ibid, 53)
Apparently a movie was made based on this book. I never saw it, I think Nick Nolte is in it. Do you find any of this interesting? We here at The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective) want to know what you think about this, and about the site in general. Are we meeting your expectations? Is there something we could be doing better? Are there any things you’d really like to see, that we’re not delivering? When you’re sending in your comments, (which, unless, they’re really horrible will be posted on the site) don’t forget that new mysteries are always welcome.
Also, it’s come to my attention that I’m not getting all the emails people are trying to send me. So, if you tried to write to me, and I didn’t respond, that’s why. Sorry about that; I’m trying to work on the problem, so if you try again, that’d be great.
welcomes questions about literary mysteries and scandals, which should be sent to: woodyswoody@hotmail.com. The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective) is published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, by Jonathanames.com. Just so you know, Jonathan Ames, our mentor here at this website, has a new book coming out in July, called, Wake Up, Sir!
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Investigating Sex & A Call for Feedback
I was in a bookstore in Dublin when I came across Investigating Sex. Consisting of a series of conversations held by Surrealist figures between 1928-1932, Investigating Sex is a fun book. These Surrealist’s sit around and ask sex questions, and debate. A participant in one of the conversations is Jean Genbach, who was a defrocked French priest. Here is an exchange between Genbach and Marcel Duhamel,
“Marcel Duhamel: You have said that you deny sexuality.
Jean Genbach: In opposition to love. I can only see one reason for living: to love and to desire.
Marcel Duhamel: Yet you refuse to discuss these subjects, love and desire.
Jean Genbach: Ask me concrete questions. Would you like me to tell you that one of the things I like most is to rub a woman’s sex when she is dressed, something which disgusts me when she is naked.” (Investigating Sex Edited by Jose Piere. Tanslated by Malcolm Imrie. Page 55)
I think part of the fun is the sense that you’re obviously reading a translation. Here’s the beginning of the conversation that Genbach is in,
“Jean Genbach: I am astounded by the fact that you are concerned with the sexual question on a physical level, that you can separate it from love.
Andre Breton: There has never been any question of making such a seperation.
Jean Genbach: I only live to find one woman. I don’t give a damn about the rest, nothing exists apart from this woman. I’ve told you that sexuality doesn’t exist, there is only love. That ought to make you tremble with fear, to overwhelm you.
Andre Breton: Very amusing. Now let us try to be serious. I am not overwhelmed by the question of sex. I dominate it in the name of love.
Jean Genbach: Love is something you experience in your guts and your brain.
Max Moris: What do you mean by guts as distinct from brain?
Jean Genbach: I mean all the fibres of my nerves, all of myself, all that is understood by the world soul.
Andre Breton: The soul does not exist.
Jean Genbach: But I claim the soul does exist and that is why I don’t agree with you/ The idea of the soul is more familiar, more normal to me than the idea of the mind.” (Ibid, 53)
Apparently a movie was made based on this book. I never saw it, I think Nick Nolte is in it. Do you find any of this interesting? We here at The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective) want to know what you think about this, and about the site in general. Are we meeting your expectations? Is there something we could be doing better? Are there any things you’d really like to see, that we’re not delivering? When you’re sending in your comments, (which, unless, they’re really horrible will be posted on the site) don’t forget that new mysteries are always welcome.
Also, it’s come to my attention that I’m not getting all the emails people are trying to send me. So, if you tried to write to me, and I didn’t respond, that’s why. Sorry about that; I’m trying to work on the problem, so if you try again, that’d be great.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective)
welcomes questions about literary mysteries and scandals, which should be sent to: woodyswoody@hotmail.com. The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective) is published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, by Jonathanames.com. Just so you know, Jonathan Ames, our mentor here at this website, has a new book coming out in July, called, Wake Up, Sir!
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Pelham & Raymond & Bertie & Philip
The other day, Maud Newtown, who’s several times been nice enough to mention this site on her excellent one, posted the following:
“Apropos of last week’s posting about whether Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse attended Dulwich College simultaneously, a reader writes:
Moments in greatness: suppose if Wodehouse had had to fag for Chandler? The parody almost writes itself.
You know who you are. You know what to do.
Perhaps The Literary Dick can track down the answer to the Dulwich College question.”
Only the last sentence is Ms. Newton’s, the rest is from another website; I don’t know if anyone on that website has answered the Dulwich College question, but since Ms. Newton thought I should take the case, I did, and I was especially glad to because the publisher of this blog, Jonathan Ames, told me that his two favorite writers are P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, and that he was keenly interested to see what I discovered.
But before I reveal the answer to this latest mystery, I'll tell you that I think it’s interesting that the reader in the above assumes that P.G. would be the subservient party in a Wodehouse/Chandler relationship. While we know who would win in a fight between Philip Marlow and Bertie Wooster - a sort of precurser to the upcoming 'Alien Vs. Predator' movie - had their creators met at Dulwich, it is likely that Wodehouse would have had the upper hand, if for no other reason than that he was seven years older than the American.
But the two didn’t meet at Dulwich, which Chandler started going to in September 1900 (when he was twelve), a semester after Wodehouse left.
Because they both went to Dulwich, (which is near London) scholars have sought other similarities between the writers. As Benny Green writes in his biography of Wodehouse,
“Both men were academically sufficiently talented to have gone on to Oxbridge. Both were deprived of the opportunity through straitened financial circumstances. Both were at the mercy of avuncular whim. Both were put to work in uncongenial clerky jobs, Wodehouse in a bank, Chandler in the Civil Service. Both were indifferent to their temporary fate, knowing it to be temporary because of the iron resolve they shared to become writers. Both expressed their indifference to employment in the same unconcerned terms, Wodehouse remarking: ‘I didn’t know what it was all about, Chandler saying: ‘I was a bit passive about the whole thing’.” (Green, Benny. P.G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography. New York, The Rutledge Press: 1981. Page 34)
Displaying a similiar fondness for the word 'both', Chandler's biographer Tom Hiney writes,
"Both grew up with absent parents - Wodehouse's mother and father lived in Hong Kong - and overbearing aunts; both would move to America after stints on Fleet Street, and both would be employed by Hollywood. Their literary trademarks would be an emphasis on character and wit and their style would be firmly non-intellectual." (Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography. New York, The Atlantic Monthly Press: 1997. Page 18)
Besides having some similar attributes, Chandler and Wodehouse had some friends in common, such as William Townend, another writer who went to Dulwhich. In 1945, Wodehouse wrote to Townend, from Paris, “I wish I could get hold of Raymond Chandler’s stuff. It sounds from what you say just the kind of thing I like.” (Wodehouse, P.G.. Performing Flea: A Self Portrait in Letters. With an Introduction and Additional Notes by W. Townend. London, Herbert Jenkins Ltd. First Printed 1953, this edition 1954. Page 124). The following year he wrote to Townend,
“I’ve just read Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. It’s good. But a thing I’ve never been able to understand is how detectives in fiction drink so much and yet remain in the hardest physical condition.” (Ibid., 136)
Aside from Townend, the name that pops up most frequently in linking Chandler and Wodehouse, is that of A.H. Gilkes, the headmaster of Dulwich. Apparently Gilkes was a bit of an eccentric (for a start, he was 6'5" with a big grey beard (Hiney, 18)) and in his strictness he may have had a similar affect on both writers. Hiney writes,
“Both authors experienced their first real criticism at the hands of Gilkes, as he dissected their extracurricular essays in his study, attacking any signs of pretentiousness he considered his duty to exorcize.” (Hiney, 19)
But according to Green, Wodehouse didn’t think Gilkes exerted a strong influence over his or Chandler’s fiction:
“[Chandler] played rugby and cricket with the same enthusiasm but with less success than Wodehouse and, like him, found the pronouncements of Gilkes unforgettable […] Chandler remembered Gilkes as a stickler for clear prose who contrived to drive home the need for linguistic control by instructing boys to translate Cicero and then, days later, inviting them to translate it back again. When asked if he detected any Gileksian influence in either on his own style or on Chandlers, Wodehouse doubted it. (Green, 33)
So, it is the opinion of the Literary Dick that P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler weren’t at Dulwich College at the same time. They knew some of the same people, and were familiar with the work of the other, but I don’t think they knew each other.
I thought I’d end by quoting from an amusing school report written by Gilkes, about the then seventeen or eighteen year old Wodehouse,
“He is a most impractical boy . . . often forgetful, he finds difficulty in the most simple things and asks absurd questions, whereas he can understand the most difficult things. He has the most distorted ideas about wit and humour; he draws over his books in a most distressing way, and writes foolish rhymes in other people’s books. One is obliged to like him in spite of his vagaries.” (Hiney, 17)
welcomes questions about literary mysteries and scandals, which should be sent to: woodyswoody@hotmail.com. The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective) is published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, by Jonathanames.com. Just so you know, Jonathan Ames, our mentor here at this website, has a new book coming out in July, called, Wake Up, Sir!
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Pelham & Raymond & Bertie & Philip
The other day, Maud Newtown, who’s several times been nice enough to mention this site on her excellent one, posted the following:
“Apropos of last week’s posting about whether Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse attended Dulwich College simultaneously, a reader writes:
Moments in greatness: suppose if Wodehouse had had to fag for Chandler? The parody almost writes itself.
You know who you are. You know what to do.
Perhaps The Literary Dick can track down the answer to the Dulwich College question.”
Only the last sentence is Ms. Newton’s, the rest is from another website; I don’t know if anyone on that website has answered the Dulwich College question, but since Ms. Newton thought I should take the case, I did, and I was especially glad to because the publisher of this blog, Jonathan Ames, told me that his two favorite writers are P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, and that he was keenly interested to see what I discovered.
But before I reveal the answer to this latest mystery, I'll tell you that I think it’s interesting that the reader in the above assumes that P.G. would be the subservient party in a Wodehouse/Chandler relationship. While we know who would win in a fight between Philip Marlow and Bertie Wooster - a sort of precurser to the upcoming 'Alien Vs. Predator' movie - had their creators met at Dulwich, it is likely that Wodehouse would have had the upper hand, if for no other reason than that he was seven years older than the American.
But the two didn’t meet at Dulwich, which Chandler started going to in September 1900 (when he was twelve), a semester after Wodehouse left.
Because they both went to Dulwich, (which is near London) scholars have sought other similarities between the writers. As Benny Green writes in his biography of Wodehouse,
“Both men were academically sufficiently talented to have gone on to Oxbridge. Both were deprived of the opportunity through straitened financial circumstances. Both were at the mercy of avuncular whim. Both were put to work in uncongenial clerky jobs, Wodehouse in a bank, Chandler in the Civil Service. Both were indifferent to their temporary fate, knowing it to be temporary because of the iron resolve they shared to become writers. Both expressed their indifference to employment in the same unconcerned terms, Wodehouse remarking: ‘I didn’t know what it was all about, Chandler saying: ‘I was a bit passive about the whole thing’.” (Green, Benny. P.G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography. New York, The Rutledge Press: 1981. Page 34)
Displaying a similiar fondness for the word 'both', Chandler's biographer Tom Hiney writes,
"Both grew up with absent parents - Wodehouse's mother and father lived in Hong Kong - and overbearing aunts; both would move to America after stints on Fleet Street, and both would be employed by Hollywood. Their literary trademarks would be an emphasis on character and wit and their style would be firmly non-intellectual." (Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography. New York, The Atlantic Monthly Press: 1997. Page 18)
Besides having some similar attributes, Chandler and Wodehouse had some friends in common, such as William Townend, another writer who went to Dulwhich. In 1945, Wodehouse wrote to Townend, from Paris, “I wish I could get hold of Raymond Chandler’s stuff. It sounds from what you say just the kind of thing I like.” (Wodehouse, P.G.. Performing Flea: A Self Portrait in Letters. With an Introduction and Additional Notes by W. Townend. London, Herbert Jenkins Ltd. First Printed 1953, this edition 1954. Page 124). The following year he wrote to Townend,
“I’ve just read Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. It’s good. But a thing I’ve never been able to understand is how detectives in fiction drink so much and yet remain in the hardest physical condition.” (Ibid., 136)
Aside from Townend, the name that pops up most frequently in linking Chandler and Wodehouse, is that of A.H. Gilkes, the headmaster of Dulwich. Apparently Gilkes was a bit of an eccentric (for a start, he was 6'5" with a big grey beard (Hiney, 18)) and in his strictness he may have had a similar affect on both writers. Hiney writes,
“Both authors experienced their first real criticism at the hands of Gilkes, as he dissected their extracurricular essays in his study, attacking any signs of pretentiousness he considered his duty to exorcize.” (Hiney, 19)
But according to Green, Wodehouse didn’t think Gilkes exerted a strong influence over his or Chandler’s fiction:
“[Chandler] played rugby and cricket with the same enthusiasm but with less success than Wodehouse and, like him, found the pronouncements of Gilkes unforgettable […] Chandler remembered Gilkes as a stickler for clear prose who contrived to drive home the need for linguistic control by instructing boys to translate Cicero and then, days later, inviting them to translate it back again. When asked if he detected any Gileksian influence in either on his own style or on Chandlers, Wodehouse doubted it. (Green, 33)
So, it is the opinion of the Literary Dick that P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler weren’t at Dulwich College at the same time. They knew some of the same people, and were familiar with the work of the other, but I don’t think they knew each other.
I thought I’d end by quoting from an amusing school report written by Gilkes, about the then seventeen or eighteen year old Wodehouse,
“He is a most impractical boy . . . often forgetful, he finds difficulty in the most simple things and asks absurd questions, whereas he can understand the most difficult things. He has the most distorted ideas about wit and humour; he draws over his books in a most distressing way, and writes foolish rhymes in other people’s books. One is obliged to like him in spite of his vagaries.” (Hiney, 17)
Monday, May 10, 2004
The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective)
welcomes questions about literary mysteries and scandals, which should be sent to: woodyswoody@hotmail.com. The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective) is published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, by Jonathanames.com. Just so you know, Jonathan Ames, our mentor here at this website, has a new book coming out in July, called, Wake Up, Sir!
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An Apology: Blogger has some new format which I can't yet get my feeble mind around; rather than do a posting without proper spacings (which I haven't mastered) I can only post this apology. If anyone can give me some advice, that would be appreciated. I will have this all sorted out by Wednesday at the latest.
welcomes questions about literary mysteries and scandals, which should be sent to: woodyswoody@hotmail.com. The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective) is published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, by Jonathanames.com. Just so you know, Jonathan Ames, our mentor here at this website, has a new book coming out in July, called, Wake Up, Sir!
_____________________________________________________________________________________
An Apology: Blogger has some new format which I can't yet get my feeble mind around; rather than do a posting without proper spacings (which I haven't mastered) I can only post this apology. If anyone can give me some advice, that would be appreciated. I will have this all sorted out by Wednesday at the latest.
