Shortly after the death of William Michael Rossetti
(1829 – 1919), Welsh poet and essayist Arthur Symons
(1865 – 1945) wrote this essay remembering the man, his brother (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the friendship that the two shared with poets George Meredith and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Here is a salute to the poet Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) written by Louis Untermeyer (1885 – 1977) marking the occasion of Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln:
At 70 Sandburg is the voice of the common man, and it is only natural that his biography of Abraham Lincoln should express for all time the spirit of that uncommon man who was the common denominator of humanity.
Dashiel Hammett (1894 – 1961) had a pretty swell resume by the time World War Two came along. He had a number of celebrated novels and short stories published as well as a few well-paying gigs writing in Hollywood. It was during this period, in the Thirties, that he had created some of the wonderful characters that are still remembered to this day, such as Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) and Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man). During the war, it was rare but not unheard of, for an older man with such accomplishments to enlist in the army -and that is just what he did. This one page article clearly spells out Hammett’s period serving on an Alaskan army base; his slow climb from Buck Private to Sergeant; his difficulty with officers and the enjoyment of being anonymous.
Accompanying the article is a black and white image of the writer wearing Uncle Sam’s olive drab, herringbone twill -rather than the tell-tale tweed he was so often photographed wearing.
Drama critic Ruth Woodbury Sedgwick interviewed Irish playwright Seán O’Casey
(1880 – 1964) for the November, 1934, issue of STAGE MAGAZINE and wrote this piece which clearly illustrated his art and politics.
A review of Harold Nicolson’s 1921 biography, Paul Verlaine. Numerous aspects of Verlaine’s life and poetry are discussed as are the roots of French Symbolism.
An appreciative essay celebrating the work of Guillaume Apollinaire (born Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky: 1880 – 1918) by the high-brow art critic Paul Rosenfed (1890 – 1946).
For Apollinaire possessed the perfect adjustibility of the born poet. He would have found himself much at home in any environment into which he would have been born, whether it would have been one of pampas and herds and lonely hamlets, or one of concrete, newspapers, war and steel.
Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) interviewed his much admired friend, Joseph Conrad (1884-1941) for the pages of a fashionable American magazine and came away this very intimate and warm column:
There is a mystery first of the man himself– the mystery that the son of a Polish nobleman should run away to sea, learn English from old files of the ‘Standard’ newspapers when he was thirty, toss about the world as an English seaman, finally share with Thomas Hardy the title of the greatest living English novelist— what kind of man can this be?
Irish author, critic and dramatist, St. John Greer Ervine (1883 – 1971), believed that some of the dramatic characters populating the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) were reoccurring characters who could be counted upon to appear again and again. He had a fine time illustrating this point and thinks nothing of stooping to compare Shaw with Shakespeare:
Shakespeare primarily was interested in people. Mr. Shaw primarily is interested in doctrine…
Thirty-five years later St. John Ervine would be awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography of George Bernard Shaw.
Click here to read various witty remarks by George Bernard Shaw.
The VANITY FAIR reviews of Stephen Vincent Benet’s (1898 – 1943) book The Beginning of Wisdom
Poet and playwright W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939) had his say on the matter of theater-subscriber-book-of-the-month-club types who are more likely to attend performances because they feel they should, rather than attending for their own reasons of personal enjoyment:
And the worst of it is that I could not pay my players, or the seamstresses, or the owner of the building, unless I could draw to my plays those who prefer light amusement, or who have no ear for verse and literature, and fortunately they are all very polite.
