Save a Tree, Burn an Author: A Green History of Writer Recycling: Fahrenheit 451

3.F451

“This is the second time I have had the pleasure of being burned while on earth. I hope it means I shall pass through the fires of purgatory unscathed.”

James Joyce, after the New York post office burned 500 copies of Ulysses in 1922, the sequel to the Dubliners’ burn.

Before the arrival of Bertelsmann, Hachette and the four other international Publishing Super PACs with their calculators and shredders, literature was in the grip of political and papal pyromaniacs. Foreshadowing the fate of Slaughterhouse-Five, Of Mice and Men, The Satanic Verses, Harry Potter and many more, book burnings had become all the rage worldwide.

In the West, the Roman emperor Jovian Fahrenheit 451ed the Library at Antioch, inflaming the pre-Islamics; then, his Christian successor, Theodosius, lit up the Library at Alexandria. Meanwhile, in the East, Emperor Qin Shi Huang torched every title on the Chinese philosophy bestseller list (dying himself only after swallowing mercury which his wizards said would give him immortal life guarded by his 6,000 terra cotta soldiers). Later, Mao Tse-Tung, a retired librarian become Cultural Revolution director, was flattered to be compared to Qin Shi. “He buried four hundred-sixty scholars alive, we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive,” the Blessed Leader boasted to the genre readers who were left. “We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold!”[1]

Book arson climaxed with the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada, and his Italian counterpart, Savonarola. The Spanish Dominican, a closet Jew, torched the Talmud and everything else in Arabic. The Florentine Dominican – author of The Downfall of the World – expanded his own carbon imprint with Boccaccio’s Decameron, plus Ovid’s oeurve, plus all other extra-literary decadences from cosmetics to playing cards. Savonarola called his global warming campaign The Bonfire of the Vanities. The title was later pirated by Tom Wolfe whose early ambition it was “to blow up” the most vainglorious publication of the New World: The New Yorker magazine.

Whereas the southern dandy’s bonfire led him to ever-greater publishing coups in the postmodern world, Savonarola’s got him excommunicated then grilled by Pope Alex VI, the Borgia Mafia godfather. The pontiff’s attitude-adjustors racked a confession out of Savonarola, but spared his right hand so he could sign his John Hancock. Before being led in shackles to his own bonfire, the zealot jotted down his last poem, Miserere Mei — Miserable Me. The roasting of Savonarola had an SRO audience of the Florentine bloggers he hadn’t yet had an opportunity to unfollow or unfriend, much less unpublish. “The one who wanted to burn me is now himself put to the flames!” enthused one Jacopo Nardi.

Other roasted writers are too numerous to name. But their variety was impressive. The Renaissance’s first women’s libber, Hypatia, was lit up by a band of monks under the command of Peter the Reader, the pope’s censor. The Swiss YA book critic, Simeon Uriel Freudenberger, was thrown on the pyre for arguing that William Tell never shot an apple off his son’s head. Jacopo Bonfadio, the 16th century Italian Dominic Dunne who penned a tell-all on the murderous Genoese bluebloods, was beheaded then his torso torched for sodomy.

The Swiss soon devised a Cap-and-Trade two-bards-with-one-stone literary recycling m.o.: burn the books with the author. Michael Servetus, the freelance religious and drug blogger, was the debut sacrifice. The Spaniard was cooked on a slush pile of his bestseller – On the Errors of the Trinity – with one strapped to his leg for kindling. He had committed the unpardonable heresy of calling Christ “the eternal Son of God,” rather than “the Son of the eternal God.” Which even pissed off his Protestant colleague, Calvin. Adding insult to injury, Michael red-penciled John’s own gospel and overnighted the corrected copy to Switzerland. The Calvinist was apoplectic.

“Servetus has just sent me a long volume of his ravings,” he wrote a friend. He added that if his rival ever came to Geneva, “I will never permit him to depart alive!”

Troubled by the case of Servetus, John Milton wrote in “Areopagitica,” a defense of free speech: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God.” But after his Puritan protector, Oliver Cromwell, the bane of Irish writers, died along with the Reformation, Milton was imprisoned and “Areopagitica” consigned to flames.

Also destroyed was his “Eikonoklastes” (The Iconoclast). Parliament had commissioned Milton to write this essay rebutting King Charles I’s memoir “Eikon Basilike” (Royal Portrait), an apology for monarchal excesses. After the king’s essay outsold Milton’s, Cromwell had him tried for treason and beheaded. But the good Puritan Lord Protector allowed his majesty’s head to be sewed back on to avoid separation anxiety and so his son could pay his respects.

When Cromwell died of malaria, Charles II reclaimed his father’s throne, exhumed the Puritan pamphleteer, decapitated him posthumously, and displayed his head on a 20-foot pike above Westminster Hall. Here it remained for the next three decades (except for a brief removal for roof maintenance in 1781) glowering at Parliamentarian scribes scurrying through the Great Plague of London.

Spared both the Black Death and the fate of his benefactor, Milton went on to knock Dante himself off the bestseller list with Paradise Lost. The title of the blockbuster took on additional significance for the blind poet when his publisher paid him £10 for all ten volumes that had cost him his eyesight and, very nearly, his mind. He didn’t get a raise for its sunnier sequel, Paradise Regained, and soon died of kidney failure while Cromwell’s head was still a Halloween exhibit on the roof.

Finally, taking the cake, there was the sobering case of Theodore Reinking, the Dane who denounced King Christian IV for losing the Thirty Years’ War to Sweden. The crown generously gave him a choice: part with your head, or eat your book page by page. Reinking chose the latter. Again showing Scandinavian sympathy, his jailors provided him French sauce so the manuscript would go down without requiring a Heimlich.[2]

The rumination was reprised four centuries later when Steinbeck’s Irish Setter, Toby, ate the first draft of Of Mice and Men. Said the understanding author who spent the next two months rewriting his novel: “I have promoted Toby-dog to be lieutenant-colonel in charge of literature. But, as for the unpredictable literary enthusiasms of this country, I have little faith in them.”[3]

 


[1] Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution to Reform (Second Edition) (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003)

[2] P. H. Ditchfield, Books Fatal To The Authors (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1895)

[3] Robert Hendrickson, The Literary Life And Other Curiosities (New York: Viking, 1981)


David Comfort’s earlier popular nonfiction titles were released by Simon & Schuster and Kensington. Excerpts from his latest title, An Insider’s Guide to Publishing (Writers Digest Books) appear in PleaidesThe Montreal Review, Stanford Arts Review, InDigest, Writing Disorder,Eyeshot, Glasschordand Line Zero. His current short fiction appears in The Evergreen ReviewCortland Review, The Morning News, Scholars & RoguesInkwell, and Eclectica Magazine. He is a Pushcart Fiction Prize nominee, and a finalist for the Faulkner Award, Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren, America’s Best, Narrative, Glimmer Train, Red Hen, Helicon Nine, and Heekin Graywolf Fellowship.


Save a Tree, Burn an Author: A Green History of Writer Recycling: The Pen Program

The Tower 076“Oh, what a good time I had in prison.
You really ought to serve a prison term!”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, letter to his brother

 

The medieval heavyweight, Dante Alighieri, started his legendary Divine Comedy in Hell. Then he ramped up (less convincingly) to Purgatory and Paradise. Like his predecessors, the Supreme Poet composed his trilogy as an expat. “You shall leave everything you love most: this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first,” he was told in Paradiso. But proving he didn’t love Florence so much as Beatrice, he refused to pay a fine for return to his hometown. Instead, the Father of the Italian language, who moonlighted as a drug and elixir dealer, remained abroad till the bitter end when Pope John XXII burnt his lesser blogs and Tweets.

By that time The Tower of London had launched its own MFA Pen program that, in ensuing years, turned out more masterpieces than Iowa, Irvine, or Yaddo. Sir Thomas More was accepted into the exclusive retreat in 1534 for rejecting Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy. Here, before being relieved of his stubborn head, he penned the Dialog of Comfort Against Tribulation. Not only do leg irons, hair shirts, and scurvy inspire the fickle muse, but, as More showed, writers — procrastinators all — work best under a deadline.

Later, Sir Walter Raleigh was admitted into the Tower program for plotting to assassinate Henry’s grandson, the witch-hunter James I. So bracing did Sir Walter find the atmosphere that he stayed for thirteen years and almost finished a complete world history. While laboring on the final chapters, he witnessed a murder outside his barred windows; then, on hearing two completely erroneous accounts of the incident by other eyewitnesses, he burned his history. He was paroled on a foreign study junket to El Dorado, but ran afoul of the Spanish in a real estate deal. So, like Sir Thomas, Raleigh parted company with his head as well as his beloved tobacco box inscribed: “It was my companion at that most miserable time.”

A creative groundswell ensued. Soon, John Bunyan released his Puritan self-helper, Pilgrim’s Progress, from behind bars. Then came the jailbird masterpieces of Penn, Villon, and the Marquis de Sade.

Across the Channel, Voltaire was thrown in the Bastille twice, the first time for lampooning the Duc d’Orleans, the second in a case of mistaken identity. But it afforded him eleven uninterrupted months to compose his hit incest drama, Oedipus. Later, under the pseudonym Doctor Ralph, he barely escaped a third stretch for Candide, which sold 30,000 copies in a year with its tart communion sacrileges such as “Let us eat a Jesuit!”

Another smart aleck, Daniel Defoe, was imprisoned for his 1703 blog, “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” recommending that all nonconformist preachers (of whom he was one) be hanged. Barely escaping the gallows, he was pilloried and pelted with rotten vegetables. After three days in the stocks, the author of Robinson Crusoe was taken to Newgate Prison the alma mater of duelist killer, Ben Jonson, and rapist robber, Sir Thomas Malory. The nostalgic Defoe would later send his heroine, Moll Flanders, to Newgate.

A century hence, Victor Hugo, a free press activist, moved by the plight of beggars and cathedral hunchbacks, called Napoleon III a tyrant and traitor to France. Then he caught the next carriage to Brussels where he communicated with the dead in séances. Slipping across the Channel, he spent nineteen years writing Les Misérables about a fugitive bread thief. On return to the motherland during the Prussian siege, the novelist survived on animals given him by the Paris zookeepers.

Meanwhile, Russia was kicking its own leftist novelist relocation program into high gear. Irking the Tsar with populist rants, Alexander Pushkin was exiled to the provinces. Then the Father of modern Russian literature was put under house arrest at his mother’s country place. Here he continued to write, but forbidden to publish, and found time to fight twenty-nine duels in defense of his honor. Emperor Nicholas gave him a lowly court title in order to birddog his teenage wife, Natasha, a Cossack bombshell. Finally, Alex was remaindered in a duel by Natasha’s other suitor, her brother-in-law, a French playboy.

Turgenev was exiled to his country estate for eulogizing Pushkin’s successor, Gogol, another hothead and unrepentant rabblerouser. At the end of his life, Nikolai was working on Dead Souls II. The first installment had earned him kudos. But now, having found the Lord, he worried that a sequel might earn him a place in Hell. So he burnt the manuscript, explaining to horrified colleagues that the sacrifice was a joke played on him by the Devil himself. Then he took to bed and stopped eating. Vodka was poured over his head and leeches applied to his nose. Even so, nine days later, Gogol stopped breathing, though rumors persist that he was buried alive. [1]

Meantime, Nikolai’s ardent fan, Dostoyevsky, was doing five less comfortable years in Siberia which turned him from a leftist to a Tsarist. On release, but still under police surveillance, he self-exiled to Switzerland, but complained, “I can write nothing of value in this country.” Returning to the motherland, he cranked out his masterpieces. He jeered at Turgenev for living happily in Europe now, suggesting he spy on Russia through a telescope to regain inspiration, if not national pride.

After his mock firing squad execution, a stretch in the pen, then four years on a Siberian chain gang, Fyodor told his brother: “Prison saved me… I became a completely new person.” He had learned that “to be a man among men… not to allow oneself to be broken, to fall – this is life’s goal and meaning.” He feverishly set to work on his Gulag memoir, saying, “Nobody yet knows the extent of my powers or the scope of my talent.” The House of the Dead, an instant hit, revived his reputation. “My name is now worth millions!” he wrote. [2]

In 1905, Gorky did his own stretch in Dostoyevsky’s alma mater, St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. In the last eight days of his sentence he finished his play, Children of the Sun. During his more comfortable dacha house arrest thirty years later, the revolutionary activist, now a celebrity, didn’t get anything done because Stalin and everybody else was dropping by to pay their respects before poisoning him.

Having discovered how to get the best out of their geniuses, the Russians became increasingly conscientious about incarcerating them over Kafkaesque offenses.

In ’44, Stalin sent Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the Gulag for “disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda” by critiquing his pogrom policy and calling his mustache “mustachios.” While chipping coal and laying bricks, the novelist gathered all the material for his later Nobel winning novels — The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Stalin had seriously toyed with the idea of executing Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel predecessor, Boris Pasternak, during the Great Purge of ’38. Instead, he remaindered Boris’s poet friend, Titsian Tabidze, and spared the novelist, saying, “Do not touch this cloud dweller!” Two years later, the General Secretary had Trotsky ice-axed in Mexico after the publication of his Diaries in Exile and Revolution Betrayed. When, in 1958, Pasternak won the Nobel in Literature for “continuing the great Russian epic tradition,” he was told by the Soviet AWP that, if he went to Stockholm, he would not be allowed re-entry to the motherland. Calling such an exile “tantamount to death,’ the author of Dr. Zhivago declined the reward and, in a personal letter to Premiere Khrushchev, expressed his ardent hope that “I may still be of use” to Russian literature.

 


[1] James B. Woodward, Gogol’s Dead Souls (Princeton University Press, 1978)

[2] Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life (New York: Viking, 1987)

 


David Comfort’s earlier popular nonfiction titles were released by Simon & Schuster and Kensington. Excerpts from his latest title, An Insider’s Guide to Publishing (Writers Digest Books) appear in PleaidesThe Montreal Review, Stanford Arts Review, InDigest, Writing Disorder,Eyeshot, Glasschordand Line Zero. His current short fiction appears in The Evergreen ReviewCortland Review, The Morning News, Scholars & RoguesInkwell, and Eclectica Magazine. He is a Pushcart Fiction Prize nominee, and a finalist for the Faulkner Award, Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren, America’s Best, Narrative, Glimmer Train, Red Hen, Helicon Nine, and Heekin Graywolf Fellowship. 


 

 

Save a Tree, Burn an Author: A Green History of Writer Recycling: Exile

Dante_exile

“Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.”
James Joyce

Books challenge or change thinking. So, many novelists, essayists, historians, poets, pamphleteers have tended to be enemies of the status quo. Revolutionaries. Troublemakers. Stormers of the Bastille.

Since the Good Book, authors have been exiled, racked, crucified, burnt, and beheaded by monarchs and popes. Today they are remaindered by oligarchs and accountants, or bled by the thousand cuts of NYREV critics and web bloggers.

Most take up the pen to be praised and loved. But a cursory review of history reveals why this has not been the case and how the sword has proved mightier than the pen in the short run. Wrote Cervantes, the tilter at windmills: “Let none presume to tell me that the pen is preferable to the sword.”

The first step to building a Republican utopia, Plato proclaimed, was to execute poets. He might have included novelists but they weren’t around yet except for the ones in the Middle East working on the Pentateuch. And the trouble this chapbook stirred up is well known.

Plato’s teacher, Socrates, was executed for “subverting the morals of youth.” The few students who could tolerate the acropolis gadfly arranged to rescue him from death row, but he drank the hemlock instead. Why? Because he preferred death to exile. And, like most philosophers who wrote their own material – Plato simply took his dictation – he had a persecution complex. And he was fed up living without royalties.

In Rome, St. Peter suffered the same fate. The Lord’s favorite disciple, a masochist with a flair for the dramatic, requested to be crucified upside down. But not before dictating his own memoirs to Mark. As for the fisherman’s garrulous sidekick, Paul, the Romans — unable to endure another chapter to the Acts, much less another letter to the illiterate Corinthians – chopped off his head.

Which is what befell another wordy ancient: Cicero. But it was almost as if Rome’s Conscience, as he was called, wanted the axe. After Caesar’s assassination, the Republican columnist started dissing Antony. The thin-skinned tyrant exiled him to Greece. Here Cicero escaped his suicidal thoughts by blogging about such riveting topics as old age and civic duty. Meanwhile, he vented to his penpal, Atticus: “Don’t blame me for complaining. My afflictions surpass any you heard of earlier.” Eventually, the senate pardoned Cicero. But no sooner had he returned to Rome than he rattled Antony’s cage again with his op-ed Philippics in the Tribune. When Antony’s muscle arrived at his villa, the writer barred his neck, but not without one last flippant aside: “There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier, but do try to kill me properly.” And so they did: at Antony’s order, they also cut off his hands which had penned the Philippics and they spiked them, with his head, as an AWP exhibit in the forum.

These purges might have put a damper on the classic lit blogosphere had Cicero not enjoyed a groundswell in posthumous book sales in spite of being pedantic and boring. The Roman bloviator was only outsold by Lucian “the Blasphemer,” who parodied Homer’s Odyssey in his A True Story, the first Roman Sci-Fi novel, and was devoured by mad dogs.

In the years leading up to the French revolution, exile became the preferred means of silencing crazies and loose cannons. Why? Because for most men of letters, especially the gregarious Greeks and xenophobic Romans, being away from home and ignored by illiterates was a fate worse than death.

Thucydides was devastated by his twenty-year exile from Athens. But he spent the time productively in his Black Sea villa penning The Peloponnesian War that won him a ticket back home. With his colleague, Herodotus, he popularized the war novel pioneered by the blind singer, Homer. But, after returning home, Thucydides’ sons tried to have him declared mad and committed.

Ovid, another expat, was driven from Rome by Augustus for what the epic lyricist cryptically called “a poem and a mistake… worse than murder.” During his own Black Sea exile, he compiled poetry collections — but nothing worthy of his earlier masterpiece, The Metamorphoses, tracing human history from the creation to the deification of Caesar. He died alone and desolated in the Thracian gulag, ten years shy of Thucydides’ stretch.

After the fall of Greece and Rome, writers were scarcer than hen’s teeth. The new 99% troublemakers were nonreaders. Barbarians. The Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, et al exercised their own First Amendment liberties by raping, looting, and library burning. Until, at last, bookworms rose from the ashes phoenix-like and started catching hell from the Papists and their puppet kings.

 


David Comfort’s earlier popular nonfiction titles were released by Simon & Schuster and Kensington. Excerpts from his latest title, An Insider’s Guide to Publishing (Writers Digest Books) appear in PleaidesThe Montreal Review, Stanford Arts Review, InDigest, Writing Disorder,Eyeshot, Glasschordand Line Zero. His current short fiction appears in The Evergreen ReviewCortland Review, The Morning News, Scholars & RoguesInkwell, and Eclectica Magazine. He is a Pushcart Fiction Prize nominee, and a finalist for the Faulkner Award, Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren, America’s Best, Narrative, Glimmer Train, Red Hen, Helicon Nine, and Heekin Graywolf Fellowship.