The End of the Beginning

by on 21 September 2012 in 20th Century Project

Continued from Wednesday’s entry…

When John Baines, the voiceless, invalid patriarch of The Old Wives’ Tale, expires in a moment of familial neglect, the omniscient narrator intones:

Mid-Victorian England lay on that mahogany bed. Ideals had passed away with John Baines.

William Boyd makes room for a related observation when the every-man protagonist of Any Human Heart, Logan Montstuart, confides in a 1936 journal entry:

The King died last night and Kipling died last week. It seems old England’s gone all of a sudden and I feel vaguely fearful, for some strange reason. I suppose you grow accustomed to these old men being around, always aware of their presence in the background of your life. Then they’re gone and there’s a bit less noise in the room, you look around to see who’s missing.

In other words, two men have died, and with them ideals have passed away. Even before posterity claimed these two, they’d already been transformed into something like ideals: a monarch and an icon. They were ready-made for the pantheon of what we might call a “mythic” history in contrast to a “human” history.

In a mythic history, one or more patterns (read: meanings) advance into the foreground and all inconvenient details recede. In a human history, it is clear that if there is any true meaning, it is in those details. A mythic history permits us the illusion of understanding, which we crave. From a human history, we reap the consolation of recognition – a different kind of understanding, one we come to with ourselves.

In conceiving the 20th Century Project, I set out to interpret the patina of myth and to try and glimpse the humanity beneath. It’s not necessarily a question of depth, I realized over the course of a year, but of vantage point. I read two biographies of Anton Chekhov, for instance, and from them, I learned much about the mythic Chekhov.

I only felt I’d encountered Chekhov the man when I stumbled upon editor Jean Benedetti’s The Moscow Art Theatre Letters. In introducing those letters that deal with the Theatre’s production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Benedetti writes:

Success had not diminished Chekhov’s fear of ridicule. On the contrary, if anything it was worse. His moods were increasingly volatile – an effect of his tubercular condition. He could be savage. As Gorki wrote in his short Memoir, on a bad day Chekhov hated everyone.

He also resented being labelled as a pessimist. He kept announcing his intention to write something light and amusing and seemed to imagine that he had done so. He insisted that “Three Sisters” and, later, “The Cherry Orchard” were comedies or even farces. No one else in the company – including his wife – nor his sister agreed with him. Gorki, perhaps, came nearest to the truth when he said that Chekhov diagnosed his characters like a doctor. They were what they were. One was supposed to learn from them not weep for them.

It’s appealing, somehow, to see Chekhov as betrayed by his own legacy, in part because this legend possesses an invocation: What translator/director/actor will step forward and make right this historic wrong (i.e. producing Chekhov’s latter-day plays as their author intended them)? The present – a sort of advance scout in this telling – likes to feel needed by the past in specific ways. The past, however, blissfully ignorant of its own future, is likewise preoccupied with looking still further back.

Years ago, I set down in my reading journal a few lines from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, words that resonate here:

The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellant, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.

Biographies themselves either invent history or rewrite it, because history must be invented – myths, in the more classic sense, are powerful and valuable efforts to make meaning where it otherwise eludes us. But we also need stories that acknowledge their own shortcomings, their omissions and distortions. The greater truth must occasionally make room for the lesser truth.

I enjoyed reading about Troyat’s and Pritchett’s Chekhov, for his work and life have become powerful symbols that are meaningful in themselves. In Benedetti’s Chekhov, however, I recognized someone familiar, a person, someone I might once have brushed by in the street or connected with in some small way, someone with whom I could share a flicker of understanding about life and fate and futility and hope.

In the same way, the history that most engages me is not quite history. It is, at once, my awareness of boundaries in time and the erosion of those boundaries. It is an imagined conversation with people who are remote from me – in time, geography and circumstance – and yet remain like me.

History, then, is an optical illusion: We can see the young lady or the old woman, but we cannot see both at once. We can see the stark difference of the past and then our eyes adjust and we see that there is nothing new under the sun and then our eyes adjust…and so on. Our brains don’t seem to have been built to reconcile the two, but that doesn’t mean we’ll stop trying. And perhaps there is something in that.

With this post, I conclude my initial exploration of 1900-1909. Over the next few months, I’ll be working on a dedicated site for the 20th Century Project. Expect new entries in January 2013. Thanks for reading!

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On Narrative and Prophecy

by on 19 September 2012 in 20th Century Project

Continued from Monday’s entry…

Of the twelve works dealt with this year, it’s no accident that eight were novels. Even as history continuously struggles to establish itself as unalloyed nonfiction, historians and novelists share a meaningful preoccupation with narrative.

The novel, an old art form, but one that reached a kind of zenith during the 20th century, turned out to be an exceptionally good portal on the past, in part because, in the words of Arnold Bennett:

[T]he novelist has poached, colonised, and annexed with a success that is not denied. There is scarcely any aspect of the interestingness of life which is not now rendered in prose fiction – from landscape-painting to sociology – and none which might not be.

Bennett’s words may also possess something of the “clear-eyed self-confidence of the Victorian Age,” but he’s on firmer ground than Lord Acton.

Whether we read novels or not, the same practice of narrative upon which the novel depends also forms the framework by which we find meaning in our lives and our reference point for the lives of others.

In his novel of the 20th century, Any Human Heart, the contemporary English author William Boyd refers to “narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth.” Stories aren’t just something we enjoy; they’re who we are and how we make sense of ourselves and our world.

We tell stories about the past and the future both to justify ourselves and to caution each other. And we reserve a singular awe for those people who seemed to slip the bonds of their own time and glimpse something of ours.

In this first year of the 20th Century Project, and first decade of the century, we began with one prophet and concluded with another: Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells both predicted immanent world wars (among other phenomena) with a wordiness favored by posterity.

Kipling argued for sweeping revisions to society (e.g. militarization) that would then serve as a bulwark against catastrophic change, defending the sanctity of the British Empire even as the bitterness of his own prescience overcame him: “I hate your generation,” he told a young lawyer, toward the end of his own life. He then explained: “Because you are going to give it all away.” Indeed, they did.

Wells, in contrast, put his faith in the inevitability of revolutionary change and argued that society had to transform itself (e.g. world government) so as not to be overwhelmed. In a 1919 article for The Atlantic, he wrote:

Under the lurid illumination of the world war, the idea of world-unification has passed rapidly from the sphere of the literary idealist into that of the methodical, practical man, and the task of an examination of its problems and possibilities, upon the scale which the near probability of an actual experiment demands, is thrust upon the world.

Prophets, then, are those men and women who emerge from the gloom of the past, Prometheus-like, bearing torches by which we recognize them as our comrades, perhaps our guides. Their light, however, may obscure as much as it illuminates. Do we continue to venerate Kipling because his genius stirs our ambitions or because we have yet to surrender his comforting faith in the superiority of Western civilization? In the words of Jorge Luis Borges, “Inside the mirror an Other waits in ambush.”

Prophets can only be canonized after the fact when some or all of their predictions have come to pass. At this point, we who canonize them risk becoming captive to a static exchange in a dialogue that – so long as it depends also on the ever-changing present – must itself continue to evolve.

Come back for this year’s final entry on Friday…

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Inventors of the 20th Century

by on 17 September 2012 in 20th Century Project

In 1896, the historian commonly known as Lord Acton gave a speech to the Syndics (officials) of the Cambridge University Press, in which he expressed a conviction that, in the coming years, “we can dispose of conventional history…now that all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution.”

The spirit evident in remarks that looked forward to the opening of the 20th century, coupled with our knowledge of the speaker’s stature and that of his audience, not to mention the gravity of the occasion, conveys the otherwise ineffable sense of the time period, independent of any contemporary assessment of Lord Acton’s prediction. (The word “sense,” in this instance, appropriately signals both feeling and meaning.)

Stories draw us into other worlds in a way that mere facts do not. Their worth endures even when the convictions once championed by an age have faded or disappeared entirely.

Like postcards from the past, whether recent or ancient, stories tell us something about who we once were and about ideas that may or may not still move us. And, in doing so, they offer us new vantage points from which to meditate on who we are, and to question the certitude with which we, ourselves, hold ideas and values as sacred.

Another prominent English historian, E.H. Carr excerpted Lord Acton’s remarks in the opening to his classic 1961 lecture series (later published as a book under the title What is History?).

Carr pointed to Lord Acton’s remarks and a contrary viewpoint expressed in the 1950s by Sir George Clark in order to contrast the “clear-eyed self-confidence of the Victorian Age” with the “bewilderment and distracted skepticism of the Beat Generation,” making the point that our perspective on history “consciously or unconsciously, reflects our own position in time.”

In seeking a conscious engagement with history, I must acknowledge that the 20th Century Project also belongs to the present, coinciding with the second decade in the current century and, moreover, the fourth decade in my own life.

The Project began, in the fall of 2011, with an attempt to distill the prolific literature of 100 years down to a reasonable selection of works (i.e. approximately 10-12), each of which might offer a keyhole-sized view on the year in which they were published and the group of which, together, might encapsulate some larger sense of the century itself.

I conclude this first year of reading, contemplation and writing having, in the meantime, formed a more coherent sense of the Project’s purpose. Over the course of the next nine years, I intend to consider the 20th Century itself as a collaborative project, a joint invention, one in which everyone who lived participated in some way, no matter how small, but to which some have made, at the least, a more visible contribution.

From that smaller (but by no means small) group, I’ve further specialized by selecting from those writers who either documented their own significant work or recorded their observations on and insights about the lives led around them, whether in fictional or non-fiction forms.

I have chosen and will continue to choose writers for their diversity (in geography, gender, race, subject matter and so on), their virtuosity (taking into account both critical and popular success) and because they interest me for more personal reasons, which I will share whenever relevant.

I make no claim that the writers chosen are categorically or collectively more significant than other prominent writers of the period, nor that the works chosen necessarily represent the pinnacle of each author’s achievements, but I propose that the authors themselves are each, at the very least, among the inventors of the 20th Century. (Perhaps the Project can serve as a model encouraging others to explore the lives and contributions of other significant authors and figures from the period.)

In pursuing their own divergent 20th century projects, these men and women – fired by ideas and values that they either conceived or carried forward, influencing and inspiring, or frustrating and infuriating, their contemporaries and successors – set about shaping a body of ideas that would form their legacy and our inheritance.

Even as the 20th century has concluded, its history is, in Carr’s words, “an unending dialogue” between the period of 1900 through 1999 and our own fast-flowing, ever-changing present. With my own 20th Century Project, I aim to participate in that dialogue and, if I can, to push it in new directions, by mining my own observations for insight and by amplifying more contemporary voices that have something new to say about something old.

It is both our responsibility and privilege to explore our inheritance from the 20th century and seek to assess its worth. Our successors will make their own assessment and they may come to different conclusions, but theirs will be the richer for having ours as a point of comparison and contrast.

To be continued on Wednesday…

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1909: Futurist Manifesto

by on 31 August 2012 in 20th Century Project

Just a few years ago, museums and publications around the world marked the 100th anniversary of Futurism, a movement born as a manifesto written and published on the front page of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro in 1909.

The author and proponents of the Futurist Manifesto, F.T. Marinetti and friends, did not so much predict the coming wars as profess an intense desire for them. Item nine of the 10-point manifesto reads: “We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”

An audio recording uploaded to the web as part of the New York MOMA’s “celebration” of the Manifesto’s 100th anniversary features a spirited reading of excerpts from the document, including an alternative (though still comparable) translation of the preceding lines. It’s hard to imagine the MOMA holding a similar event to commemorate, say, the anniversary of Mein Kampf, also a landmark document and one expressing some similar sentiments. So what is the difference?

As we move into the next decade, first into those years in which war seemed inevitable to some and impossible to others, and then onto the battlefield and beyond, I’ll be seeking to understand not only what happened but how and why we remember it and what we gain and lose by way of selective memory.

Can we approach history with anything like surgical precision? Can we carve away those bits we don’t like and embrace, for instance, the Futurist Manifesto merely as “one of the first documents to celebrate the automobile as an object of beauty and to cite speed and acceleration as aesthetic elements“?

And what of the 20th century itself and its terrible wars? Did the years of overwhelming violence bludgeon it into a shackle-like chain of “beautiful ideas which kill”? Or is it still possible to view it, with equal legitimacy as – to paraphrase the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson – “something more, a bringer of new things,” as truly bountiful years in which writers, scientists, artists, statesmen and so many others followed knowledge “like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought”?

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Making Literary History, Part II

by on 29 August 2012 in 20th Century Project

Writing in The Bookman, Professor William Lyon Phelps expressed his appreciation for Gene Stratton-Porter’s work, but he also made plain his sense of its limitations.

It’s not “idealism” that mars her novels, he writes, but “sentimentality,” which reigns over the average human breast even as it revolts the “elite” minority.

Phelps did not consider Stratton-Porter a “literary artist,” but he acknowledged her novels as part of what made her a “wonderful” woman.

Any attempt to meaningfully engage the 20th century by way of its significant published works must eventually run up against the question: When it comes to literature in history, what are we to do with the “wonderful” women and men of each era?

By “wonderful,” we mean those authors who wrote for some larger purpose than to tell a story and whose work showed noteworthy weaknesses in style and – to varying extents – substance even as readers have continuously proved willing to overlook these deficiencies.

These dual transgressions have nonetheless left authors vulnerable to criticism and condemnation by a literary establishment that has long based its own stature, in part, on declaring itself the legitimate guardian of posterity.

In an era when the masses have seized control of publishing, few contest the notion that the literary establishment will have to change with the times. Phelps would have been especially unlikely to do so.

His own decision to teach the first American university class on the modern novel in 1895 attracted such attention from the media of his day that he opted (under pressure) to teach it outside Yale’s official curriculum for several years – where it found a devoted following among students – and it may have delayed his receiving tenure.

Try and imagine a contemporary university curriculum in which the modern novel is not a fixture, and you’ve made it more than half way across the gap that separates readers of the 21st century from the sensibilities dominant about 100 years earlier. Reading some of the popular historical literature may take us the rest of the way.

Then and now, we read to transcend ourselves, but also to know ourselves and each other. There lies the beginnings of harmony between the more rarefied denizens of the literary world – W.E.B. Du Bois, Anton Chekhov, Henry James – and their more popular cousins – Booker T. Washington, Upton Sinclair, Gene Stratton-Porter.

The work of the latter group may tell us less about the real people of that era – or at the very least, they certainly tell us less eloquently – but they do speak to something in how those real people might have wanted to see themselves and to be seen. In asking ourselves, in turn, how our own self-image or aspirations have changed, we can also begin to see ourselves from a novel vantage point.

Books like A Girl of the Limberlost and Up from Slavery may ask less from readers but they yield up more to those of us willing to think about what we’ve read. And when it comes to literature, both great and “wonderful,” that will always be a choice and not an obligation.

Image: William Lyon Phelps at Yale.

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Making Literary History, Part I

by on 27 August 2012 in 20th Century Project

Among the authors assembled on these pages over the last eleven months, Gene Stratton-Porter’s name may be the most obscure to all but those contemporary readers who stumbled upon her work in their youth (such as myself) or came to her later in life by way of a book club or a latter-day fondness for what is now considered young adult literature.

Writing on “The Why of a Bestseller” in The Bookman: a Review of Books and Life, the Yale professor and literary critic William Lyon Phelps suggests in Dec. 1921 that “Posterity is far more cruel than the contemporary public; contemporaries abuse but posterity forgets.”

Both in her own time and in years since, critics, academics and (all but local) historians have mostly conspired against Stratton-Porter but readers have continuously intervened on her behalf, particularly when it comes to A Girl of the Limberlost.

Phelps characterized Stratton-Porter as a “public institution like Yellowstone Park,” by virtue of her books having sold nine million copies each of which, he estimates, are likely to have been read by five people amounting to a total readership, at the time, of about 45 million.

More than 20 years later, the historian Frank Luther Mott would devise a system by which he compared the top selling books from 1665 onwards and named Stratton-Porter as one of just three American authors who had written five bona fide bestsellers over the course of nearly 300 years (the other two being Harold Bell Wright, whose books haven’t stood the test of time, and James Fenimore Cooper).

Popularity, as Phelps points out, is not necessarily a “true indication of greatness,” but it may nonetheless achieve something greater than itself.

Phelps credits Harold Bell Wright’s adventure stories, for instance, with coaxing many young people into what he charmingly describes as the “garden of printed pages.” He bestows that and warmer words on Stratton-Porter:.

Gene Stratton-Porter lives in a swamp, arrays herself in man’s clothes, and sallies forth in all weathers to study the secrets of nature….She is primarily a naturalist, one of the foremost in America, and has published a number of books on flora and fauna, illustrated with photographs of her own taking. These books – which are closest to her heart – have only a moderate sale. Thus she hit upon the plan of writing sentimental novels, in which her observation of nature is brought to the attention of America. I have no doubt that she has led millions of boys and girls into the study of natural objects; that she has accomplished in this way, much permanent good.

“If she is not a literary artist,” Phelps concludes, then “she is anyhow a wonderful woman.” But what, then, of literary posterity?

To be continued…

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Tough and Tender

by on 24 August 2012 in 20th Century Project

While David Lodge’s earlier novel Author, Author takes as its anchor the friendship between Henry James and George Du Maurier (better known as Rebecca’s grandfather), in A Man of Parts, Lodge imagines H.G. Wells deeply engaged in a series of dialogues – with himself as well as the many, many women who passed through his life and between his sheets.

H.G. Wells’s open devotion to free love made him popular with some young women who found him a desirable mentor. The most important of these relationships were intellectual as well as emotional.

The world, H.G. believed, could be made better, and the women with whom he fell in love generally subscribed to the same creed. In an imagined 1908 conversation with Amber Reeves, soon to become his mistress, Wells tells her about William James’s then-latest published work, Pragmatism:

She listened attentively as he outlined James’s distinction between two basic types of mental make-up. The Tender-minded was rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, monistic, dogmatic. The Tough-minded was empiricist, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, pluralistic, skeptical. Idealist philosophers and Christian apologists were typically tender-minded. Scientists and engineers were tough-minded. ‘You might find you can classify people in the social services that way,’ he concluded.

‘Yes, I can see that might work,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Thank you. But which type are you?’

‘Well, basically tough-minded. Most people who’ve had a scientific education are. But the point is that both are unsatisfactory on their own. As James says, quite rightly, the tender-minded are on the back foot these days, mainly because of Darwinism and advances in the physical sciences. But tough-mindedness alone leads eventually to pure materialism, which doesn’t satisfy the human spirit, because it leads only to death – death of the individual and in the long run the death of the planet. So no hope. The tender-minded offer transcendence in one form or another – God, the Absolute Mind, personal immortality…’

‘But those ideas have no logical foundations,’ Amber objected.

‘Exactly. But we can’t just dismiss them. There must be some non-materialistic principle to make life meaningful, purposeful, hopeful. Pragmatism, James says, values an idea not in the abstract but for what its practical consequences are. For instance, does it or does it not contribute to the betterment of human life? Socialism triumphantly passes the pragmatic test.’

‘It’s both tough-minded and tender-minded?’

‘Exactly.’

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The Skeptoptimist, Part II

by on 22 August 2012 in 20th Century Project

On Monday, we left the title character of H.G. Wells’s 1909 novel in prison, after she joined a suffragette raid on the British parliament.

An experience so often characterized in literature as having a radicalizing effect does no such thing for Ann Veronica. Instead she finds herself “in a phase of violent reaction against the suffrage movement” – entirely because of how much she dislikes the girl in the neighboring cell. (Wells does himself credit by never forgetting the personal that undergirds the political.)

Once again, while she’s alone in her cell, skeptoptimism rears up, breaking in on the fearsome discomfort of prison life and a torrent of oppressive thoughts. Ann Veronica acknowledges that the slavery she resisted before has its attractive sides, at which the vital question of the doubt-stricken revolutionary springs to her lips: “Am I becoming reasonable or am I being tamed?”

Neither novel nor character ever quite answers that question on an ideological level, then again, the novel refuses to rest on an ideological stance, because it is no mere intellectual project but a genuine cri de coeur on the part of its author, inspired by an intensely passionate (and doomed) affair with Amber Reeves, the brilliant teenaged daughter of one of Wells’s fellow Fabians.

Wells, in turn, is not a “utopian pessimist” as The New Yorker‘s Adam Kirsch would have him, but a fellow skeptoptimist, uniquely capable of grasping that life (in the words of Jean de La Bruyère) may be a “tragedy for those who feel,” but it is also “a comedy for those who think.”

In his novelization of Wells’s life, A Man of Parts, David Lodge defines the use of “parts” in the title phrase as articulating a man’s “personal abilities or talents” or, more euphemistically, his “private parts.” The phrase does equally well as an expression of Wells’s tendency to inject parts of himself into each of his characters.

In Ann Veronica, he is Capes, of course, the science teacher who deeply respects his first wife but prefers a “hot-blooded marriage” with the protagonist.

But Wells is also Ramage, the successful businessman who unsuccessfully woos Ann Veronica, insisting to her that love is “the chief thing in life, and everything else goes down before it. Everything, my dear, everything!”

Even as he delights in satirizing Ann Veronica’s father, finding in him the embodiment of the reader that would denounce the novel after its publication, Wells peers out from behind the character’s stodgy bluster to wryly observe that his daughter – and by extension, women – have somehow metamorphosed from “all hair and legs” to “all hat and ideas.”

Lastly, Wells is Ann Veronica herself, because the “wrappered life” she describes so vividly and despises so utterly can only have originated in the drapers’ apprenticeship from which the young Wells gratefully escaped.

And also because her author, like her, wanted so much to take life itself “by the throat,” only to discover, as Ann Veronica does from the prison floor, mindful of the humor that forms the keen edge of pathos, that:

“It hasn’t GOT a throat!”

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The Skeptoptimist

by on 20 August 2012 in 20th Century Project

In The New Yorker, the writer Adam Kirsch refers to Ann Veronica as a “topical” novel, by which he appears to mean a novel that can be summed up in fewer words than one hand has fingers – “about the suffragette movement” – but it is really nothing of the sort.

No matter the paucity of time travel machines and invisible men, Ann Veronica better belongs to that body of scientific romances that Kirsch claims as Wells’s defining contribution to the 20th century canon.

The principal scientist in this story is the title character herself, not because she studies science, though she does, but because she approaches social life and its turbulence with a scientist’s skepticism – the only ‘ism,’ paired with optimism, that she’s ultimately prepared to embrace.

Ann Veronica is, in short, a skeptoptimist, someone who questions all that surrounds her without giving up hope that there is something worth holding out for.

Viewed through the scratched surface of that monocle, the paths that her “well-bred” contemporaries tread so thoughtlessly seem to warp and mutate into an alien landscape, one easily given over to wild visions of, for instance, the primordial past:

Great vistas of history opened, and she and her aunt were near reverting to the primitive and passionate and entirely indecorous arboreal – were swinging from branches by the arms, and really going on quite dread-fully [sic] – when their arrival at the Palsworthys’ happily checked this play of fancy, and brought Ann Veronica back to the exigencies of the wrappered life again.

Freedom within – and not from – that “wrappered” life, in her father’s vocabulary, means only having a bicycle and the ability to go about on it during “reasonable hours.”

“One runs about,” Ann Veronica later observes with the gentle irony of the skeptoptimist, “but it’s on condition one doesn’t do anything.”

What Wells typically refers to as Ann Veronica’s “temperament,” initially prompts her to absent herself from her father’s house by taking long walks on which she contemplates “sometimes quite difficult problems.”

Skeptoptimism soon becomes the vehicle that conveys her to London and beyond the restraining currents of contemporary thought, allowing her to observe people and ideas critically:

There were moments when she doubted whether the whole mass of movements and societies and gatherings and talks was not simply one coherent spectacle of failure protecting itself from abjection by the glamour of its own assertions.

The most forceful challenge to Ann Veronica’s detachment comes not from society, the predictable source, but from her own thoroughly roiled passions, that is her love for her science tutor and the self-denying aspects of that love.

“I will not be the slave to the thought of any man,” she swears, raising one fist heavenward, nor “slave to the customs of any time.” Horrified to find herself in thrall to the emotional equivalent of a tractor beam, she proclaims a radical desire to break free not only from family and society, but gender, culture and time itself – to travel forward in time, even if only in her own mind.

The vow kicks off a chain of events that lead to Ann Veronica’s participating in a suffragette raid on the British parliament that lands her in prison for a month. Thus, the question: Must a novel that treats a real 1908 incident necessarily be a novel “about the suffragette movement”?

To be continued…

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Friday Fun: H.G. Wells and Orson Welles

by on 17 August 2012 in 20th Century Project

In 1940, both H.G. Wells and the man he referred to as his “little namesake” Orson Welles were interviewed together on KTSA radio. Orson Welles was, at the time, 25 years old and had begun making Citizen Kane. They spoke about the panic caused by Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast of Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

When Welles first broadcast the radio drama, thousands of Americans raised such a fuss that (as Orson Welles mentions) Adolf Hitler himself mentioned it in “the great Munich speech” and that the panic, in Welles words “was supposed to show the corrupt condition and decadent state of affairs in democracies that The War of the Worlds went over as well as it did.”

When I broadcast the same program in 2000 on my college radio station, I received one call from a man who wanted to know why he couldn’t listen to the baseball game.

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