Blockchain Papers

Kirk Curnutt

Scott Donaldson, writes James L. W. West III in his short but precise preface to Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes, a posthumous collection of essays by the late literary biographer (1928–2020) who was a mainstay of Fitzgerald studies for a half-century, “was an excellent scholar and a good man, generous with his time and knowledge. . . . He brought a newspaperman’s curiosity to his work and an open, accessible style to his writing” (West, “Preface” viii). From the beginning of his career, the prolific Donaldson was also a master of repurposing his wide-ranging contributions to American literary history and its development. Whereas most scholars are content to see an essay or chapter into print in one venue and move on, the author, perhaps most notably of The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015), found inventive ways of repackaging and reconfiguring entries on his vita, sometimes decades after the fact. Twenty years ago, just before the dawn of the e-reader era, such long-out-of-print early efforts as his The Suburban Myth (1968) and Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scott (1972) reappeared under the aegis of the print-on-demand publisher iUniverse, making available in affordable softcover editions valuable studies that remained sequestered in university stacks, unavailable to most readers. This foray into self-(re)publishing soon led to a valuable relationship with Open Road Media, which produced digital versions of his controversy-scarred John Cheever: A Biography (1988) and the unjustly overlooked Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (1992).1 Thanks to the encouragement of the Minnesota Historical Society, the University of Minnesota Press also brought his much-admired Fitzgerald biography, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), back to life for a new generation of scholars and fans.Perhaps most impressively, Donaldson himself rewrote nearly two dozen previously published journal articles to create the essential collection Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days (2009). It is hard to think of another omnibus of a commentator’s lifework whose contents fit together so seamlessly. By updating each essay’s secondary sources and revising for overall unity and cohesion of voice, Donaldson pulled off the rare feat of compiling a “greatest hits” collection that never sounds dated, whose analyses feel fresh and insightful rather than like time capsules from, say, 1973 (when the well-known essay “Scott Fitzgerald’s Romance with the South” first appeared in the Southern Literary Journal) or 1982 (when the oft-republished “Money and Marriage in Fitzgerald’s Stories” was featured in Jackson R. Bryer’s collection The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism).Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes is not, as its title may imply, a focused dissection of a specific theme across an array of Fitzgerald efforts. Rather, it is a gathering of five late efforts either unpublished or uncollected at the time of their author’s death. One main selling point of the book is its compact size and affordability: at a brisk 132 pages and a $15.95 paperback list price, the collection represents an initiative on the part of West and Penn State University Press to produce critical studies of Fitzgerald for the general reader. (West’s own Business Is Good: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Writer, coming in 2023, will be the second book in the series.) The centerpiece here is a sixty-three-page excursion into the gender dynamics of Tender Is the Night, “Tender Is the Night: The War Between the Sexes” (1–63), which West calls “the best close reading of the novel that I have seen” (“Preface” vii). I would agree with this assessment; its core appeal is its neutrality. Ever the journalist, Donaldson declines to take a position on the contentious gender politics in the novel that can make Fitzgerald seem at best an essentialist when it comes to sexual difference and at worst a misogynist in his insistence that modernity eroded the fundamental strengths of manhood.Another of the great pleasures that accounts for the essay’s readability is that Donaldson does not harp on his thesis. Rather, he lets his discussions of key moments in Fitzgerald’s fourth novel flow with a spontaneity that arises in part from his nonchronological analysis. His discussion begins in media res, focusing on the moment in book 2, chapter 14, when Dick Diver treats (not very effectively or with much sympathy) the eczemic “woman in room twenty.” As Donaldson argues, the patient’s inflamed skin is Fitzgerald’s most autobiographical nod to the torments suffered by his wife during the initial months of her protracted hospitalization at Dr. Oscar Forel’s Les Rives de Prangins Clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, a that the to the Dick that is the of the of time who to the and that Fitzgerald his and her in the her novel the and her to and in the that this is as and as the that in gender is Donaldson is the who the the Tender Is the the From the essay on the ways in which the of “the of to Dick Diver by The from the Diver and to a that and the wife and of who as a by a and whose with Fitzgerald’s the to his Donaldson for A on and essential and to Fitzgerald’s 2, chapter a that to on her in the the of Dick and as for the that to by to as the of a as which to Dick to Donaldson not in the have the of his as a for his her own to such as to I to as a from to a from to of the than the during their than a in American Donaldson as part of his the essay also the of which Dick and As Donaldson Fitzgerald’s of the of in the relationship and may have to the the of the of and in that Tender Is the be for in the of the and the of remained a rather for the was the of a a into a a Fitzgerald best his for in which he previously in his first two This of and The and As Donaldson argues, the for of whose for and and from the of which the the in to to and Literary the own in his of his of and the and his to for his from the can the novel and the of the to A on of his “the of his and his into the of politics by a New of of of of his in the in the dissection of the of or is in Donaldson calls the and that can have on of its like who may in the feel to by the of the perhaps the of to have than as the of by and the Diver and the to the for the that one that to the very that that the very as his was in a that Dick is in the the and are to the that into its It may be that the a and is to the but on from for “the of his and and are the main as in a A discussion of book chapter at the that the to an on the that of her in the As Donaldson on de a a at her de in the an their and and A and a after their de was a in a second when her the of was to at a and the of studies that the in the of the to Tender is not and de in their to the novel is not A second to the that a of R. a to in of the to the of the late the of and in Tender was from a also the and the during the two years in which the was to his of is the he that is Fitzgerald’s at than it his in he and in a for that one of this the Donaldson as to the is that Fitzgerald this Donaldson “the that was of it on to his The very on the to which the of and Fitzgerald’s as the essay that Tender Is the is a novel that does not have to take in an to the War Between the Sexes” is such a de that one can it the essays that can but its rather and the American is a of Fitzgerald’s most novel that its general as the at the and Literary in New in an when that was the for book in the the essay a and specific who may not have or to its and pleasures the it can as a American of the novel as “the first that American in Donaldson Fitzgerald to James as a who the and the for and the As he and to the than most who are off by her and that his Donaldson together a of and and an of and is his discussion of as to is for the of As he are at and like the in a that the of the of is the one with which are This of of the the of a literary and her previously appeared as a core chapter in The Impossible that that on literary for for an after nearly years it was first I West to it to make it This is a good for the key of and is a master in the and that into literary From The of Fitzgerald: An American Life Donaldson have and to their of as the of the with was The to the essay is the that the to into his of The and the that an American the of found in is and Scott Fitzgerald, A Marriage by with the and her in of is so in its of that one scholars would its on such say, Fitzgerald’s with Fitzgerald is a of the in the not just his but efforts such as and his The appeared in the of The Fitzgerald in and as the for not one but two in Works and and of The The have from one a into the that is a . . . that articles have published that will be in a book by James L. 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Rickie-Ann Legleitner

In Kendall Taylor's The Gatsby Affair, we find a biography that more carefully explores the life of Edouard Jozan, the French pilot who infamously had an “affair” of some sort with Zelda Fitzgerald in the summer of 1924 as her husband raced to complete The Great Gatsby, and who inspired numerous creative works from both Fitzgeralds while considerably impacting their marriage. Deborah Pike's The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald provides a serious treatment of Zelda's extensive writing and visual art, asserting her role as a legitimate modernist artist.Taylor's biography provides a detailed account of the lives of both Fitzgeralds and of Jozan, opening with a timeline that runs from 1896 to 2006, showing the progression of each individual's life—a helpful visual that traces when their lives met, overlapped, and diverged. Each dense chapter offers critical insights into the historical moment as well as compelling details about the lives of individuals who existed on the periphery of the famous duo, such as Jozan's friends Rene Silvy and Bobbe Croirer. Although every Fitzgerald biography offers its own interpretation of the minutiae of the Fitzgeralds' lives and complicated relationship, Taylor interviewed and carefully researched the family and friends of the Fitzgeralds and of Jozan, creating a more complete picture of the “affair” and its aftermath. As Taylor points out, “Although Edouard has always interested Fitzgerald followers, there has been little agreement about his impact on their lives, and in an otherwise well-researched case history, the pilot has remained a mystery” (xi). This book effectively fills that gap.Of course, in any discussion of the summer of 1924, one must put quotation marks around the word “affair” for the simple reason that available evidence neither confirms nor denies an actual physical relationship between the aviator and the 23-year-old wife who was bored and restless while her husband wrote. Were Zelda and Jozan lovers or was their five-week Riviera encounter a flirtation that trespassed into emotional adultery? Biographers typically take a stand at one extreme or the other and read texts such as The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz for corroboration. To a certain extent Taylor sidesteps the ambiguity of the evidence and simply asserts that the summer romance was indeed a “petite aventure, a brief affair with a willing partner” that left Scott “the proverbial mari trompé, or cuckolded husband” (71). Readers expecting a case to be made and a position staked against claims in previous Fitzgerald biographies may be thrown for a bit of a loop; for a measured assessment of clues and presumed proof (or the lack of it), one must turn to Scott Donaldson's chapter “Summer of '24: Zelda's Affair” (172–86) in his The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015).Refreshingly, Taylor does not come across as biased toward either of the Fitzgeralds, but instead offers an assessment that is critical and validating of both individuals' flaws, talents, aspirations, and misadventures. Following the contemporary trend, Taylor gives careful attention to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's upbringing in Alabama as well as to her time in various mental institutions at the end of her life, showing how her experiences run parallel to her husband's own pitiable downfall. She is not portrayed as secondary to her husband, and Jozan is also given substantial attention beyond his role in the couple's marital woes.Indeed, the major contribution of this book is its robust understanding of Jozan, including insights into his upbringing, disposition, romantic motivations, and career and marital aspirations. For this background, Taylor is deeply indebted to Jozan's daughter, Martine Jozan Work, who contacted the author shortly after the publication of her 2003 biography of Zelda, Sometimes Madness is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage, offering insights about her father, who died in 1981. Additionally, Taylor provides a clear discernment of the cultural context, a large contributor to the drama that ensued: “It was accepted that a young officer, unprepared to wed, would take a mistress. Wives held particular appeal, rivaling single women, by offering pleasure without responsibility” (71). Taylor provides a reasonable and insightful assessment of what Jozan's intentions were in his brief pursuit of Zelda, why the relationship inevitably had to end, and why the Fitzgeralds were never able to recover.For Fitzgerald, Taylor sees this event as opening old wounds, as “He had not forgotten Zelda's reluctance to marry and her involvement with the aviator replicated Ginevra King's selection of a naval pilot over him” (79). Taylor astutely assesses the motivations and reactions of the Fitzgeralds, substantially building on her previous Fitzgerald scholarship in Sometimes Madness is Wisdom. She also provides closure to the narrative by investigating the suspicious circumstances surrounding Zelda's tragic death, and by exploring the misfortunes and deaths of the Fitzgeralds' family and friends. She recounts the much later passing of Jozan, a life that after Nancy Milford publicly identified him as Zelda's elusive French aviator in Zelda: A Biography (1970) was continually overshadowed by his brief involvement with the Fitzgeralds: “Instead of being celebrated for his own impressive accomplishments, Edouard and his fame became linked to the Fitzgeralds in the literary cosmos” (205).The one weakness in The Gatsby Affair is its secondary focus on the supposed sexual assault of Zelda Sayre during her teens in Montgomery, Alabama; while other critics have acknowledged this possible attack, Taylor goes further to suggest that this trauma resurfaced after Edouard's rejection, thereby causing her mental breakdown: “Trauma can generate psychoses, sometimes the brain's way of coping, and in this instance calamitous forces were released, a Greek tragedy—French style—triggering profound depression that culminated in Zelda's first suicide attempt” (xiii). She provides support for these claims by offering a close reading of Zelda's often autobiographical writing and by identifying similar events in the lives of her adolescent friends John Sellers and Peyton Mathis (the possible assailants). But it is difficult to prove any causal chain, especially one tied to a precipitous mental break. Taylor goes on to examine the repeated misdiagnoses and mistreatment that Zelda faced while in various mental institutions: “Asylums dismantle people, rarely reassemble them, and Zelda's internment only worsened preexisting conditions, leaving deep psychic scars” (137). This investigation is an honest assessment of the shortcomings of the mental health system at this time as well as the damage it did to Zelda's life and art. However, it seems contradictory to assert the cause for a mental collapse and then to critique a system that offers rushed, generalized, and improper diagnoses.Overall, this biography is well worth reading for any seasoned Fitzgerald scholar or new enthusiast. It is carefully researched, and it delivers original considerations of the role Jozan played in the lives and art of both Fitzgeralds, while also acknowledging how his brief encounter with the couple would come to overshadow his many achievements. It establishes the affair as a pivotal moment that would markedly influence the lives and art of both Fitzgeralds, supplying new insight into a complex and often misunderstood relationship. As Pike claims, “Distinguishing fact from fiction is no easy task” (15), and Taylor provides a well-crafted biographical narrative.Pike's monograph offers a fresh and thorough interpretation of the life and works of Zelda Fitzgerald both in relation to her husband and as an artist in her own right. She contends that, “A serious artist on her own terms, rather than solely her husband's muse, she merits a place in literary modernism” (4). Pike's research is thorough, as is her knowledge of biographical, historical, and literary scholarship on both Fitzgeralds, making for a well-informed and nuanced analysis of Zelda's life, her published and unpublished writings, and her visual art.Pike employs Deleuze and Guattari's theory of minor language and literature to support her claim that Zelda's writing from the margins, be that from her husband's shadow, from her position as a Southern wife and mother, or from her time in mental institutions, enables her to speak in a unique voice that breaks with the conventions of major literature—or to create work that truly encapsulates the modernist ideal to “make it new.” As Pike states, “I see her work as violently alive, experimentally modernist, and offering a new mode of experience” (31). In her overview of scholarship on Zelda, she singles out the lack of serious studies of much of her work and the tendency to look at her writing only in comparison with that of her husband. She additionally utilizes Hélène Cixous's theory of uniquely feminine writing and Julia Kristeva's conceptions of madness in her feminist and psychoanalytic analyses, as well as many cultural, historical, and literary critics to support and complicate her arguments. Her book offers a sophisticated and serious look at the complete range of Zelda Fitzgerald's work.In her examination of Zelda's texts as reactions to her position in her marriage and in society, Pike dissects a transcript of the famous May 28, 1933, meeting between the Fitzgeralds and Dr. Thomas A. C. Rennie to address “the issue of Zelda's writing and its effect on their marriage” (121). This transcript is alluded to in Taylor's biography and elsewhere, but Pike offers numerous block quotations to show Fitzgerald's and Dr. Rennie's debasing of Zelda's art, especially for its lack of exchange value in a patriarchal, capitalistic society. She further uses this transcript to analyze the different depictions of madness in Tender Is the Night (glamorous) and Save Me the Waltz (experiential), affirming Zelda's writing in a minor language to validate her own experiences and assert her identity. Similarly, she frames Zelda's early letters and magazine publications in relation to modern capitalism and advertising, offering a close reading that boasts that “F. Scott Fitzgerald may have documented the Jazz Age, but it was Zelda Fitzgerald who defined the flapper through her keen journalistic observations” (60). Pike acknowledges Scott's contributions to major literature, but she also asserts Zelda's voice as a minor modernist.In her effort to position Zelda as an artist, Pike offers readings of many texts that have been critically neglected, markedly expanding Zelda's oeuvre. In Zelda's asylum letters, Pike finds that her “writing is subversive; it does not imitate current patterns but makes up a different language” (31); this language is uniquely her own, and through it “she reinscribes an authenticity into her being” (99). Pike examines Zelda's unfinished novel Caesar's Things as a surrealist autobiography that shares striking similarities to the autobiographies of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn in its unstructured depiction of madness, claiming that the text “shares the revolutionary potential of female surrealist writings” (152). She admits to the problem of Zelda not being a surrealist or her using methods of automatic writing, but her framework opens up new modes of analysis, and affirms that Caesar's Things has a critical place in Zelda's collected works. Pike identifies Zelda's artwork as “conservative American modernism” (183), and offers a fresh study of her drawings and paintings, which are provided as illustrations. In her examination of Zelda's diary from the last years of her life, Pike refuses to dismiss her religiosity as symptomatic of her madness, and contends that the diary is a mystic's “journey toward enlightenment, toward artistic and spiritual self-consciousness” (214). Pike is innovative in her approach to each of Zelda's texts, and while her readings are theoretically driven, they are also clear and compelling.Admittedly, some of the analyses in The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald become more difficult to follow as Pike focuses on works such as the unfinished novel and diary that are challenging to read and only available in the Princeton University archive. But her investigation provides a strong argument as to why these materials should be digitized or otherwise published for wider readership and additional scholarship. Moreover, her bibliography delivers a comprehensive list of valuable resources for Zelda scholars working across disciplines—including literature, women's studies, history, art, psychology, and linguistics. This monograph is a significant work that further legitimizes Zelda Fitzgerald as an artist and a modernist.

Barbara Taylor

In June 1795, the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft traveled to Scandinavia to sort out some business matters for her lover, Gilbert Imlay. She was accompanied by her one-year-old daughter, Fanny, and her maid Marguerite, but as she moved northward, they were left behind to be gathered up on the return journey. It was a wretched period in Wollstonecraft's life. Imlay, who prior to Fanny's birth had been a devoted paramour, had been seeing other women since. She clung to him desperately, as if life itself were at stake—as it had been two months earlier when, wild with misery at his betrayals, she had attempted suicide. Now, journeying through strange lands with neither lover nor child, she was wracked by the grief of abandonment. Yet, as always, the literary professional was on the qui vive, alert to possibilities. Shortly after returning to London, Wollstonecraft brought out a volume of letters addressed to an errant lover, but in fact written for publication and never sent to Imlay. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden was one of her best-received works, a favorite especially with the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, who enjoyed her self-portrayal as a melancholy solitaire, a companionless voyager in a loveless world. The image of the lone woman, shorn of all intimate ties, was touching but also pleasurably outré, a startling contrast to the familial, male-oriented feminine ideal of the late eighteenth century.1 The “generality” of women, Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “fly” from solitude as from a “fearful void.”2 Trained to submission, leached of inner resources, most women find aloneness intolerable. Against this, she set her own profound responses to solitude, offering up a repertoire of intense—and divided—reactions to her Scandinavian sojourn. The agonies of a forsaken heart were set against the exaltations of a mind freed from constraint. “Here I am writing quite alone,” she reported from Portor in Norway, after a hair-raising sea journey, “something more than gay, for which I want a name.”3 Yet returning to her lodgings in Tonsberg, she quailed at entering the room, “without lighting-up pleasure in any eye—I dreaded the solitariness … and wished for night to … close my eyes on a world where I was destined to wander alone.”4 A farewell meal with some fellow travelers on the final leg of the trip left her stricken with sorrow, and something more: “I then supped with my companions, with whom I was soon after to part for ever—always a most melancholy, death-like idea—a sort of separation of soul; for all the regret which follows those from whom fate separates us, seems to be something torn from ourselves.”5 What are we left with, who do we become, when we are alone? Solitude has been a key feature of human experience in all times and places. Yet little of its story has been told. Can such a powerfully personal experience have a history? If it can, then biography must surely be a chief route into it, just as a historical understanding of the solitary self is likely to yield valuable insights into the biographical subject. Biography—it will be no news to readers of this roundtable—is a controversial enterprise for historians. Some of the features that have made it controversial—its belletristic character; its emphasis on individual agency at the expense of larger historical forces; its flattening of complex causal connections to fit a linear life narrative—are less pronounced today than in the past, or at any rate seem to generate less anxiety. We now possess many historical biographies that do a superb job of integrating their subjects into their historical contexts; life histories are no longer a genre apart. At the same time, the wall that once divided history from literature has been well and truly breached, with many historians incorporating life-writing and even fictional narratives into their historical monographs. A new literary boldness has entered the discipline, from which biography has been a chief beneficiary. But there is one respect in which biography remains highly problematic for historians, and that is its psychological dimension. The role of personal psychology in history is possibly the most poorly developed field of modern historical discussion, plagued by “commonsense” prejudices, on the one hand, and hard-line theoretical diktats, on the other. All historians use psychology—it is impossible to write human history without it—but the psychology that most historians deploy is of the pick-and-mix variety, blending commonplace assumptions about human motivation with bits of pop psychology, often Freudian in flavor. The exceptions to this are those historians who embrace postmodernist anti-humanism, and thus assign no causal role whatsoever to individual psychology. For these historians, the “death of the subject” decreed by Foucault and his epigones has swept subjectivity off the historical stage. The “individual coherent self”—that is, the biographical subject as traditionally conceived—has been deconstructed and dismissed as a “bourgeois fiction.” This is a development that calls for closer scrutiny. The Western self has been receiving a lot of attention recently. Studies with titles like “Making the Self,” “Constructing the Self,” and “Inventing the Self” proliferate. As the active verbs make plain, virtually all these studies present selfhood as a cultural artifact or, in a variation on this, a discursive construct. A shared narrative unfolds that begins with a pre-modern, “extensive” self (a self rooted in communal life, lacking any sense of unique individuality) and then charts a shift (via the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or the Romantic Age: the putative transition points are multiple) to the modern Western self, a “bounded, unique” individual possessing innate character and psychological interiority: the “unitary” or “deep” self, as this modern subject type is often called.6 The story is basically a retelling of the familiar tale of the rise of bourgeois individualism, with the additional twist that it is not just the individualist character type that is deemed to originate with modern commercialism, but human subjectivity in toto. Inner experience—the private universe of psychic life—is also a historical invention, we are told: there is no subjectivity, only social phenomena that produce the effects of it. As one British follower of Foucault puts it, “we are ‘assembled’ selves, in whom all the ‘private’ effects of psychological interiority are constituted by our linkage into ‘public’ languages, practices, techniques and artefacts.”7 This socio-historicist account of subjectivity, regularly paraded as a first-order heresy, is now such an article of faith in many academic circles that alternative views tend to be rejected out of hand, as in Dror Wahrman's Making of the Modern Self, where the “self within” is exposed as a cultural fabrication, a post–French Revolution “identity regime.” But subjectivity, as Stephen Greenblatt once noticed with some embarrassment, tends to “cling” on, even in its most convinced critics, long after pronouncements of its demise.8 Biography, with its focus on the complexities of an individual life, highlights the deficiencies of this culturalist approach; biographies of the solitary self point up its psychological sterility. “Detached from the whole world, what am I?” Rousseau asked at the beginning of his Reveries of the Solitary Walker. “This must now be the object of my inquiry.”9 The investigation plunged him deep into meditations on the inner life, which is where any inquirer into human solitude must follow him. Solitude is one of the great debating points in Western thought, spooling out a string of oppositions—self versus society, private versus public, country versus city, contemplation versus action—that stretch back to antiquity. Classical thinkers tended to favor sociality as more conducive to virtue, with Aristotle's denunciation of solitude as fit only for beasts or gods setting the dominant tone. Philosophical solitude of course was exempted, with the figure of Socrates standing on a lonely hillside in frozen meditation for a full day and night symbolizing the mental autarky of the great sage. For ordinary citizens, however, society was essential to fulfill their potentia. This division between a socially embedded existence and a higher, solitary life reappeared in Christian thought as the dichotomy between the city of man and the city of God, where a spiritual elite dedicated to holy living were permitted to withdraw into monasteries or other forms of religious seclusion. With the Reformation, and its democratic leveling of access to the holy, this elite physical withdrawal gave way to a universal movement into the soul: an individuated form of spiritual retreat which, unlike monasticism and eremiticism, could be accommodated by ordinary life. A righteous man, Daniel Defoe wrote, could be “as perfectly retired from the world” in the London Exchange as in a hermitage. Heavenly meditation was the “essence of solitude,” not “monkish cells and forcible retreats.” “The business is to get a retired soul … and then we may be alone whenever we please.”10 From the mid-seventeenth century, a new scientific note was heard as enlightened anatomists of human nature entered the debate. Hobbes's bleak account of man as a lone pleasure-seeking machine was countered by defenders of natural sociability who declared Hobbesian man “monstrous,” a “wolf” in human dress.11 Latter-day Stoics quoted Cicero on civic duty: “we are not born for ourselves alone, but … mutually to help one another.”12 “We are made for the Cements of Society …,” a Ciceronian correspondent wrote to the Spectator, “and Solitude is an unnatural Being to us.”13 Positions proliferated, as retirement poets hymned pastoral solitude as an escape from worldly corruption while moral sentimentalists warned that without social intercourse, men descended into egoist bestiality. Celebrations of solitude as the “school of genius” were countered by medical warnings about the debilitating effects of solitary cerebration.14 In 1757, Rousseau—Enlightenment Europe's premier solitaire—took offense at words spoken by a character in one of his friend Diderot's plays, “Only the man alone,” which no as at him. were with from who him that as Rousseau was his but the a is a strange sort of a as a for his but also solitude was a to him. “Detached from the whole world, what am I?” What is The now as in tends to in their The of of other one of course be about that is, be in the of when one one a great story about but also with is for many the most solitary of social of these are solitude, some may be for it. This is solitude is not a experience but a an of self that is to be by any between and In a solitude as an inner at the back of the in his which the soul not to itself but to with and of a unique “We have a soul to in on … … to to to and to not that in such a solitude we be in lonely be a The lone self is no but a of solitude is an The Western thought, from less alone than when to of the solitary as an of The account is a by the “The to solitude, in this is a that in as the aloneness by from his other while in her and as as a to a for his when is Solitude without such is intolerable. of alone is something which that is We are of other selves, who favorite one of this even a the history of Western solitude it to be with of course has been the key but and and an all in the were to be in a of that is, in the of the Christian by without for to one of most of my Solitary were more than by the of to my In solitude, poets with their with their with readers with fictional Rousseau with a self, an with whom a solitary The to in this was a of the the man like was less alone than when alone,” the without a and without For most of Western have with and and the as an physical the by as the religious The of is not as a in the psychology of solitude, but the by as a a of solitary for … the and of individual men in their solitude as they to in to they may the these and as reported by what were of by of a of what we may which in its and any of the of for the of this it in the into mental life of and in what the a of from the self but in a to it. is and more life in our we are at any all of this life was most of the of inner by profound of and were and solitude,” the in a of individual is to find … that which is his but by of But the individual in a of inner the of holy in fact be in gave way to of the of an its through the The was highly controversial in the eighteenth as the human of all a mental between man and was for its its wild Solitary was as conducive to an of the a of are Samuel in an which in its a with the religious to a in which and were for the living Solitude and was not “The of who their in solitary a … the from their own and which have no in of alone, mind be with and of which are truly and to be no where but in Mary Wollstonecraft as something of an A she and her it as and as a to In she a A a young of who her solitary with is to her literary Mary is a to in lonely places. Wollstonecraft the as a and it is in the of and two poets of the and meditations on solitude the Mary in a she the of But it also Wollstonecraft's own highly sense of religious Wollstonecraft was born into the but by the she wrote her her views were and she her a natural this shift of however, a sense of a to God, as her it, that during some in her life, but never left The an intimate with the most powerfully in A from alone on a an in is the she wrote in an on solitude the all and the which the and of … and the world seems to only the mind that and the mind that all of the solitary however, Wollstonecraft was of its especially for were more than more to corruption by in women was to be than and other regularly women of with In solitude, all women were to in the form of or history of the the of lone readers by who to in the of the of some of her modern into this with as and their for A with an account of an who her alone in her most for She on the … as she accompanied the to the lonely and … with by the of the she thought while she her mind have been daughter, whom she and is of course made of with a mind and heart to But her and she to She in with an with whom she life as a and her truly to her which there was a that even … could not but by now in Mary the of her life and that an could the human and … when other were as a of the to Wollstonecraft was a when she wrote the but little to her she have her or had they her Wollstonecraft wrote at one point of not have out a new The was The of a and an Wollstonecraft was by the of the but regularly a heart to all the … I have never with she wrote to the of her Scandinavian “I once thought I but it was all a She to be off from ordinary “I with who are by … and I am to … of am I thus was to of and into which she to those with is a great in my heart its own she wrote to her in after the of her with the I am a to to after A was the were in a about a solitaire, The of or, in which Wollstonecraft wrote in the final months of her life and which was at her is a tale of is an the of who little for her that she up the who that is a man of A of and by her in a which is where the in her to her she her to up of with which she then a fellow a Gilbert by a she and sorrow, and solitude all to her and Wollstonecraft that she had a of But is and all of the that Wollstonecraft for the of her it for women to who have no active or but what is a of and to to men and her own lone the Mary is a solitary of The was but lacking any or moral Rousseau wrote to his friend had of that which and to the their be but they had fictional were a to this, as the Rights of was a of the of character in Yet it was in one of those for which was who Wollstonecraft with a for her in the figure of the of his is an solitaire, a torn between and virtue, who to with and to for with her at the of and works, Wollstonecraft's a of the and it is that their is as and as for a time, at she is no longer … the in and sense was to and social Wollstonecraft Rousseau in the late when she and his for the soon she was one of his most if It was his which she to she wrote in the Rights of Woman, in the of the with him that of the “I was in with she his personal she a fellow as she in a to his Reveries of the Solitary a mind that into that world in which I have often and the that all is and of image as a especially in its his in she his account of the of in Rousseau had alone, his heart no object for his to … the him of some of the and of the of which had never been to and with which by these she wrote, all the of his heart to one and his the of his with Rousseau then to these a woman, the with whom in with In her Wollstonecraft the story as an of a in the Rights of and she the of to their in his and her readers that the of of the of the as Rousseau wrote in in the that through the what is but a of truly to be but in is but it for itself … … It its object as it into its it in like and Wollstonecraft's Mary and the profound of the solitary as it an ideal world to But the of such be in the object of her to him which, in the to be wrote of Wollstonecraft's with Imlay, Mary to her life the of her to Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian have the Scandinavian to his lover had she not attempted is impossible to but it must have been a to him to get her out of his She left and full of bleak and for the she wrote to him as her set from is … I may some or in sense of the … I will or this The trip with its many and a of and a for the final solitude of melancholy my she wrote, as one lonely after a a her with of only of which I a and misery am I thus to she to Imlay. “I have never in my life … from Yet as the solitude her writing alone in from the she into the and in the “I am more than have for a long she wrote to after a day to the she her a of that her especially the young poets of her often do my produce that of the of many she wrote after a through a solitude the its and to the of its own The sense of her to God, of my and as in this solitude a new in the history of my own she what she on The a inner as she to a life from Imlay. She had his object once of his and now of his and she “I am I will not an object of to “I am to be but I will not be The she she was a an born of her and she to from the But she was and could not “I my from to the Being in the of the sense of “I without … a I the want of it more in society, than in As the its the “I am to up by the the to which has been the of my she wrote to from life will have an of to and she to in London, she living with a new and to this “I seem to have no she had written to him from she wrote in her “I to find Solitude is the where self and other for of what Wollstonecraft have her on in the journey, on her for her other in her on the that her to life. “I have … as a off from the of … alone, some like the of made that I was part of a from which I could not … by the of … The solitary self to in an that is Wollstonecraft's solitude of some two was by her in more than been to But to it, we more than a account of subjectivity as a cultural construct. We a biographical that as well as to focus on the of human subjectivity as well as its we to of the the sense of well as of and

Alex Abramovich

Midway through the dark woods of the 1960s, Bob Dylan took his Triumph motorcycle for a country ride and lost his balance, or hit an oil slick, or (according to the mythopoetic account Dylan himself would give) stared too long into the sun and found himself momentarily blinded. The specific circumstances are cloudy. But we do know that Dylan was burned out after nine months of a grueling, seemingly endless, still-ongoing tour; that the proofs of his first novel, Tarantula , had arrived and that Dylan, who seems to have written the book in a methamphetamine haze, recognized them to be unreadable and embarrassing; that there were hundreds of hours of films to edit for a forthcoming documentary, and constant demands for new recordings. Dyan's responsibilities had multiplied exponentially, and vast sums of money were at stake. We can only imagine the toll these expectations, and others, took on his central nervous system: “Different anachronisms were thrust upon me . . . ” Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One . “Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite) - stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior - those are tough ones” (124). Bob Dylan was 25 years old. Dylan crashed his Triumph in July of 1966. His close friend, the folksinger and novelist Richard Fariña, had died in another motorcycle crash a few months earlier. The carousel was out of control.

Laurence Roth

Drawing Contracts:Will Eisner's Legacy Roth Laurence (bio) Will Eisner . The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006. Pp. xx + 498. Joann Sfar . The Rabbi's Cat. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. Pp. 152. Joann Sfar . Klezmer. Book One: Tales of the Wild East. New York and London: First Second, 2006. Pp. 144. JT Waldman . Megillat Esther. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2005. Pp. v + 172. On January 5, 2005, the New York Times published its obituary for Will Eisner, one of the most lauded figures in the world of comics and graphic novels, who had died three days earlier in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after quadruple bypass surgery. On January 6 the Times ran the following correction: "An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character The Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers."1 One can only imagine the torrent of e-mails from comics fans pointing out this crucial difference and clucking at the writer's obvious lack of knowledge about the recondite world of superhero comics. It is a difference, of course, that makes even more apt the comparison between Bob Kane's dour, night-stalking masked detective and the dapper, night-stalking masked detective who made Eisner famous in the early 1940s. Both characters were the creations of Jewish comics artists, friends in fact, who attended DeWitt Clinton High School together in the Bronx and grew up during the Depression. It was they and their peers, also primarily Jewish, primarily New Yorkers, who made the comic book form. They helped that form, as Michael Chabon writes in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, "articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreams: to [End Page 463] express the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves."2 But Batman and The Spirit also share something else in common. Because they were human rather than superhuman heroes they exemplified a different kind of balance between the "archetypal" and the "typical," Umberto Eco's terms for the mythic and the mimetic dimensions of comic book characters.3 Both Batman and The Spirit, even in their earliest incarnations, intimated that comic book protagonists and stories were capable of transcending stereotypes and reflecting temporal progression and psychological depth. This is perhaps one reason why Frank Miller chose Batman as the character with which to remake the image of the comic book superhero in the 1980s. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns presented comic book readers with a fallible hero in a surprisingly self-reflexive formula story. Eisner, on the other hand, retired The Spirit in 1952. In the latter years of The Spirit's twelve-year run Eisner tired of the demands of a formulaic comic strip, and his work evidenced an increasing interest in formal concerns, in applying to his work the visual lessons of Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, and film noir. Eisner's turn to educational and commercial work in the fifties and sixties, though a lucrative and smart career move, was, in a sense, a waiting period—waiting for comic books to catch up to him, waiting for the right opportunity to explore characters and stories in a more innovative manner. That period ended in 1972 when, as he recounted in a 1990 essay in the New York Times Book Review, he attended his first comic-book convention: "I met the new breed of comic cartoonists for the first time. Long-haired, wild-eyed and intense, they spoke the language of comics. It was a language that gave voice to their protest and social ideas. I wanted to be part of the excitement again."4 Inspired by underground and adult comics of the sixties and early seventies, Eisner took up specifically Jewish characters and topics in a new comics form to which he gave the name "graphic novel." As he says in the introduction to Norton's handsome collection of his first three graphic...

Simon Bainbridge

272 Reviews campaigns for political reform and the abolition of slavery, as well as in primitivist accounts contrasting the lives of noble savages with those of 'civilized' man, and the gradual introduction of institutional support for writers, artists, and scientists, who previously had been dependent economically on aristocratic patronage. In The Romantic Period Jarvis and his editors follow the series style-with useful endmatter, including a chronology that contextualizes significant literary works, brief bibliographies of secondary literature for each chapter, and biographies of less well known figures -xcept in one important respect: the lack of illustrations, which would have enhanced the subsections on landscape gardening, painting, architecture, and prints. However, with his dense and allusive descriptions of modern historiography and contemporary controversies, Jarvis does provide a dexterous summary of critical work on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and lecturers of ahistoricist cast eager to supplement their students' knowledge will no doubt find this volume invaluable. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON MEGAN HIATT Romantic Biography. Ed. by ARTHUR BRADLEYand ALAN RAWES. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2003. XVii+ 202 pp. ?40. ISBN O-7546-o993-6. This stimulating collection of essays investigates the wide range of issues implied by the term 'Romantic biography', examining not only biographies of writers of the Romantic period (including Wordsworth, Clare, Southey, Austen, Byron, Burns, Scott, Keats, and Shelley), but also the degree towhich the form is itself shaped by assumptions about the self and its relations to creativity and society that are themselves Romantic. The volume is framed by two polemical essays that address particularly this question, the editors' introduction, which calls for Romantic biography to become both 'less Romanticized' by escaping these assumptions and 'more Romanticized' by bringing to light the hidden contexts of Romanticism (p. xii), and Ralph Pite's excellent closing essay, 'Writing Biography that is not Romantic', which argues that biography is 'worth reforming because it is ameans of revealing the social locatedness of particular selves' (p. 178). The collection begins with four essays by writers who are both Romantic biogra phers and literary critics. In the first, Michael O'Neill shows how the poems of the period are themselves engaged with the issues at stake inRomantic biography; they offer a complex treatment of selfhood and feeling that the biographer can never hope to equal. As O'Neill argues with reference to 'This Lime Tree Bower My Prison', 'what one wants is a biography as sensitive to the fluctuations of feeling as the poem itself.Which is to say, one wants the poem' (p. 7). It is testimony to both the power of O'Neill's argument and the brilliance of his readings that at the end of his essay it is indeed the poems he discusses that the reader wants to turn to, rather than the bio graphies of their writers. With a different readership inmind, Jonathan Bate argues strongly that it is literary biography, rather than academic literary criticism, that will bring John Clare to the attention of a large potential audience who 'would be com pelled by his life and work if only they knew about it' (p. i8). Mark Storey presents the aim of his biography of Robert Southey as being 'to set the record straight, to give as true a picture as possible' (p. 34), while Kenneth R. Johnston illuminatingly discusses the challenges presented to the biographer byWilliam Wordsworth's own self-creation as aRomantic figure. A concern with the extent towhich Romantic assumptions shape the biographies of Romantic subjects is shared by the next three essays. Joe Bray contrasts Claire Tomalin's and David Nokes's biographies of Jane Austen, showing how their dif fering attitudes to the relationship between the life and the novels informs their YES, 36.2, 2006 273 presentation of the writer, particularly in relation to the mysterious gaps in her life. Alan Rawes examines Benita Eisler's treatment of a similar mystery in Byron's life, demonstrating how her emphasis on the poet's incestuous relationship with his half sister (of which there is no decisive proof) is influenced by Byron's own fictions and by the Romantic model of poetry as self-expression. Similarly, Gerard Carruthers highlights the Romantic elements...