Overboard

1931 saw the publication of a remarkable detective novel. The Floating Admiral had been written by 12 members of the Detection Club, London’s society of mystery writers:

  1. Victor Whitechurch
  2. G.D.H. Cole and Margaret Cole
  3. Henry Wade
  4. Agatha Christie
  5. John Rhode
  6. Milward Kennedy
  7. Dorothy L. Sayers
  8. Ronald Knox
  9. Freeman Wills Crofts
  10. Edgar Jepson
  11. Clemence Dane
  12. Anthony Berkeley

They had written a chapter apiece, serially, without communicating. Each inherited the manuscript from the last and had to make some private sense of the story, including their own complications, before passing it on to the next contributor. To ensure fair play, each writer had to supply a satisfactory solution to the snowballing mystery when they turned in their own chapter.

Amazingly, it worked. Jacques Barzun wrote, “These members of the (London) Detection Club collaborate with skill in a piece of detection rather more tight-knit than one had a right to expect. There is enough to amuse and to stimulate detection; and the Introduction by Dorothy Sayers and supplements by critics and solvers give an insight into the writers’ thoughts and modes of work.”

Here it is.

| Literature

Observation

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Reading books in one’s youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depth of one’s own experience.

— Chang Ch’ao

| Literature

The Art of Living

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When I am going out for an evening I arrange the fire in my stove so that I do not fail to find a good one when I return, though it would have engaged my frequent attention present. So that, when I know I am to be at home, I sometimes make believe that I may go out, to save trouble. And this is the art of living, too, — to leave our life in a condition to go alone, and not to require a constant supervision. We will then sit down serenely to live, as by the side of a stove.

— Thoreau, Journal, Feb. 20, 1841

| Literature

The Beautiful City

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Plato’s Republic itself does not begin, as some of the modern writers would have it, with some such sentence as, ‘Human civilization, as seen through its successive stages of development, is a dynamic movement from heterogeneity to homogeneity,’ or some other equally incomprehensible rot. It begins rather with the genial sentence: ‘I went down yesterday to the Piraeus, with Glauco, the son of Aristo, to pay my devotion to the goddess; and desirous, at the same time, to observe in what manner they would celebrate the festival, as they were now to do it for the first time.’

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937

| Language · Literature

Decalogue

Jonathan Franzen’s “10 rules for novelists”:

  1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
  2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
  3. Never use the word then as a conjunction — we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
  4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
  5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
  6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
  7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
  8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
  9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
  10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

(From The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, 2018.)

| Literature

Amen

The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

— Morning prayer recited by Robert Louis Stevenson to his household at Villa Vailima, his last residence in Samoa

| Literature

Illumination

The Tyrians having been much weakened by long wars with the Persians, their slaves rose in a body, slew their masters and their children, took possession of their property, and married their wives. The slaves, having thus obtained everything, consulted about the choice of a king, and agreed that he who should first discern the sun rise should be king. One of them, being more merciful than the rest, had in the general massacre spared his master, Straton, and his son, whom he hid in a cave; and to his old master he now resorted for advice as to this competition.

Straton advised his slave that when others looked to the east he should look toward the west. Accordingly, when the rebel tribe had all assembled in the fields, and every man’s eyes were fixed upon the east, Straton’s slave, turning his back upon the rest, looked only westward. He was scoffed at by every one for his absurdity, but immediately he espied the sunbeams upon the high towers and chimneys in the city, and, announcing the discovery, claimed the crown as his reward.

— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1869

| History · Literature

“The Prison Poet’s Farewell”

‘John Carter,’ the young English convict whose poems brought him pardon, left a farewell message to his friends within the walls of his Minnesota prison. This ‘last will and testament,’ first printed in the weekly Prison Mirror, published in the penitentiary, was reproduced in The St. Paul Dispatch:

‘This is the last will and testament of me, Anglicus. I hereby give and bequeath my collection of books (amounting to some 6,000 volumes) to Mr. Van D., in memory of the not altogether unpleasant hours we spent together, hours marked by no shadow of animosity at any time. We could not be happy, but we were as happy as we could be. To Dr. Van D. I leave my mantle of originality, and what remains of the veuve cliquot, in memory of encouragement when I most needed it.

‘To the editor I leave my space on this journal and the best of good wishes in memory of his unfailing courtesy and forbearance.

‘To Uncle John and to Sinbad go my heartiest wishes that we may meet soon in some brighter clime.

‘To Mr. Helgrams, my best dhudeen and the light of hope.

‘To young Steady and to Mr. D. M., my poetic laurels, which they are to share in equal measure.

‘To the boys in the printing office, the consolation of not being obliged to set up my excruciating copy.

‘To the tailors (and to the boss tailor in particular, ‘Little Italy,’) my very best pair of pants.

‘To Jim of the laundry, — but nothing seems good enough for Jim, the best soul that ever walked.

‘To Porfiro Alexio Gonzolio, a grip of the hand.

‘To Davie, pie, pie again, and yet more pie.

‘To the band boys — why, here’s to ’em! May they blow loose.

‘To my fellow pedagogues, “More light,” as Goethe put it, more fellowship; it would be impossible to wise them. They know where I stand and I know where they stand.

‘Lawdy! lawdy! If I hadn’t forgotten Otto and his assistant. Here’s all kinds of luck to ’em, and no mistake about it.

‘Finally to all those not included hereinbefore (for various reasons), here’s to our next merry meeting. To those in authority, thanks for a square deal. To mine enemy — but I mustn’t bul-con him.

‘Gentlemen, I go, but I leave, I hope I leave my reputation behind me.

‘Anglicus.’

— New York Times, July 9, 1910

| Crime · Literature

In a Word

chartaceous
adj. made of paper

admarginate
v. to add or note in the margin

subdititious
adj. fraudulently substituted for a person or thing

prepense
n. malice aforethought

Alexander Pope made use of every scrap of paper that offered a clean surface — nearly the entire first draft of his translation of the Iliad was written on the backs of envelopes, bills, miscellaneous letters, and stray bits of paper. Jonathan Swift suggested that other writers might turn this to their advantage: They could print their own works in editions with wide margins, lend these to “paper-sparing Pope,” wait for him to fill in the spaces with poetry — and then sell this as their own.

| Language · Literature

First Steps

Tennessee Williams wrote for Weird Tales! The 16-year-old author, writing under his given name, Thomas Lanier Williams, published “The Vengeance of Nitocris” in the magazine’s August 1928 issue. An Egyptian queen invites her enemies to a banquet, where she opens sluice gates to drown them in the waters of the Nile:

[T]he black water plunged in. Furiously it surged over the floor of the run, sweeping tables before it and sending its victims, now face to face with their harrowing doom, into a hysteria of terror. In a moment that icy, black water had risen to their knees, although the room was vast. Some fell instantly dead from the shock, or were trampled upon by the desperate rushing of the mob. Tables ware clambered upon. Lamps and candles were extinguished. Brilliant light rapidly faded to twilight, and a ghastly dimness fell over the room as only the suspended lanterns remained lit. And what a scene of chaotic and hideous horror might a spectator have beheld!

He received $35 for the story, his first published work. “[I]f you’re well acquainted with my writings since then,” he wrote later, “I don’t have to tell you that it set the keynote for most of the work that has followed.”

The full text is here.

| Literature