Wilde's Salome as Femme Fatale

  

Wilde wrote Salomé in French, then worked with Lord Alfred Douglas to produce an English translation.  Strauss's opera uses a German version by Hedwig Lachmann.  My comments apply equally to each of these dramas.

    Salomé has little in common with Wilde’s other plays, those drawing room comedies with witticisms and ironic inversions falling thick and fast.  Salomé is less a play than it is a sustained tone poem on the theme of erotic desire, ratcheted up to such an intensity that the sudden murder at the end seems the only way out.  Herod, of course, obsesses over Salomé’s charms, while the young Syrian captain is driven by her to suicide, and the incestuous Herodias grouses with sexual jealousy in the background.  Salomé herself exhibits perhaps the most perverse and ardent compulsion of all, with her  insistence on kissing Iokanaan against his will, whether he be alive or dead. 

     Even without the masterful illustrations by Beardsley and such fevered later re-imaginings as Ken Russell’s 1988 film, the focus of the play is unquestionably desire.  Salomé’s transgressive character was recognized by the censors, and the play was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain and later performed in a modified version.  When Mahler sought to stage Strauss’s opera in Vienna at the Staatsoper, he was blocked by the censors.   Widely admired by musicians and composers though with a dubious reputation among others, the opera was chosen as the benefit show at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907, but the reaction of prudes on the opera’s Board of Directors led to the show’s cancellation. [1]

     But what is the meaning of all this pent-up desire?  Perhaps the core motive, underlying the harmonics and variations, is the archaic masculine fear of female sexuality expressed in the African practice of female genital mutilation, in the orthodox Jewish idea of a niddah, and in legendary figures such as Lamia, the sirens, Lilith, and Melusina.  In the neolithic period, fertility goddesses seem to have been at the center of religious activities, but later, under monarchies with pantheon headed by a male ruler, the sexual Other was revalued.  Men’s marvel at childbirth combined with helplessness in controlling lust, the predictable anxieties of courtship, and, in many cases, guilt for oppressing women to generate a fear of female supernatural power.  The gift of Eden’s fruit, which doubtless originally signified the good things of the earth, became the cause of a calamitous Fall.  The course of the Odyssey is basically a route around one dangerous female after another in search of the positive example of Penelope as the loyal wife.  Morgan le Fay, succubi, and the real-life persecutions of accused witches

     This archetype descends through myth and then legend into fiction over the centuries without losing popularity.  At the time of Wilde’s play, the mere choice of Salomé as theme was provocative.  By the late nineteenth century her story had become a favorite theme of Symbolist and Decadent authors, notably in Moreau’s paintings and Huysmans’ fiction, but also in works by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Massenet.  Salomé provided a theme lurid enough to satisfy transgressive tastes, yet remaining largely within Biblical tradition. 

     This notoriety is, in fact, however, only half of the dialectic.  The story in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, though they do not name her, tell the tale of Herodias’ daughter asking for the head of John the Baptist in a narration clearly meant as a sort of lesser crucifixion, a contest of good against evil in which the saints’ martyrdom serves a Providential purpose.  Josephus mentions her as the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas [2], but does not relate the story about John.  Though the princess of Herod’s court is not named until centuries after her time, a certain Salomé, identified in the late Book of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by Bartholomew the Apostle, and called “Salomé the temptress” is named among those visiting Christ’s empty tomb.

     Unsurprisingly, she is made a heroine even a sort of feminist by a good many recent critics.  The lead perhaps is taken by Kate Millet in her ground-breaking Sexual Politics (1970) when she notes Wiilde’s own identification with the temptress and characterizes the play as a whole as a drama of “homosexual guilt and rejection.”  Before long one critic declared "The Jewish Princess Was a New Woman" and another argued that the play was "a devastating fin-de-siecle attack on the conventions of patriarchal culture."  This attitude influenced views of the politics of the piece, and it became possible to redeem even the ethnocentric stereotypes by claiming that Wilde had written “an Orientalist play that questions the very premises of Oriental discourse.” [3]

     In fact, however, Salomé’’s actions are irredeemably reprehensible.  She is selfish and her passion perverse.  The aesthetic glow that lingers about her derives from sexual energy heightened by the late nineteenth century Romantic notion of the wicked that descended from the popular taste for the Gothic some decades earlier. [4]  Evident in Baudelaire’s title Fleurs du Mal, Verlaine’s poètes maudits, and the slightly later career of Aleister Crowley, the aesthetics are in fact not far distant from the fondness for Nazi imagery among outlaw bikers or for Satanist pentangles among heavy metal fans.  Thus, Salomé’’s behavior is first of all titillating with little or no moral implication. 

     The contemporary readings of Wilde’s protagonist derive from two new complementary innovations he had introduced into the old story.  On the one hand, Wilde emphasizes Salomé’’s agency by stressing her independence from her mother who in the gospels is responsible for asking for John the Baptist’s death.  In the play Salomé acts like a willful teen-ager and ignores her mother (who does ultimately endorse her plan).  This strengthening of her character allows some to see her as an admirable heroine, yet it is decisively undercut by her sudden and violent death at the end ordered by Herod who had earlier seemed quite under her control.  Thus the prerogatives of the patriarchy are reasserted, and the possibility emerges of treating the princess as a tragic hero.

     Such a treatment, though, is unlikely to occur to the viewer whose appreciation of the play more likely resembles that of the listener to a formal concert piece setting forth a theme followed by variations, all charged with emotional electricity.  The image clusters occur and revur like leitmotifs; mentions of the moon, doves, flowers, and the gaze that fixes the other come and go like the corridors and the verbal phrases in Last Year at Marienbad.  The play as a whole may arise, as some have said, from Wilde’s own “forbidden” loves, seen as vicious by the homophobic, but in the end it is a sustained meditation on the dynamo of erotic power itself, whatever the origin or object, here so dramatically explosive as to ruin the protagonist.  Plato himself, to whose loves Wilde appealed so ingenuously in court, would have recognized the “madness” in which the characters are caught. [5]  In the end Wilde’s Salomé is a sensual and emotional experience far more than an intellectual one.  It is less a cautionary parable of a femme fatale than it is a dramatic simulation of sexual excitement, no less powerful for the fact that it is all but universal.

 

 

 

1.  Among those shocked at Strauss’s opera was J. P. Morgan’s daughter Louisa.  The work finally came to the Wiener Staatsoper in 1918 but the Metropolitan did not stage it again until 1934.  Apart from wealthy board members, reaction in New York included the reviewer from the Musical News to whom the “conception of the story is repugnant to Anglo-Saxon minds (“Comments on Events: Salome in New York,” 32 [March 9, 1907]).  This article also quotes several other opinions, among them a writer in the New York Musical Courier who supported the play and feared that its cancellation would make New York a “laughing-stock” in Europe.

2.  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (Book XVIII, Chapter 5, 4).

3.  See Jane Marcus’ essay in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1974).  The next quotation is from Elliot I. Gilbert, “’Tumult of Image’: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome,” Victorian Studies 26 (1983) and the last from Yeeyon Im “Oscar Wilde's "Salomé": Disorienting Orientalism,” Comparative Drama, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter 2011).   For a more subtle reading see Helen Tookey, “’The Fiend that Smites with a Look’: the Monstrous/Menstruous Woman and the Danger of the Gaze in Oscar Wilde’s Salome,” Literature and Theology Vol. 18, No. 1 (March 2004).

4.  Wilde was far from alone in finding the theme attractive.  There was in fact a bit of a vogue for Salomé during the period, expressed in poetry by Heinrich Heine, Stephane Mallarmé and William Butler Yeats, fiction from Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, and Jules Laforgue, and visual art by Gustave Moreau, Lovis Corinth, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

5.  In the Phaedrus Plato explicitly says that love is madness, yet he adds that it may nonetheless bring the greatest of blessings (sec. 244).

The Appeal of Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae

 

     I had just come to the end of reading two rather long and complex books simultaneously.  One was Melville’s The Confidence Man, with its shape-shifting hero and its dense and ceaseless verbal play.  I had H. Bruce Franklin’s Library of Literature (Bobbs-Merrill) paperback edition which goes far to explicate the book’s allusions, particularly to current events and popular culture.  Melville is a lover pf polysemy and his ironies are multi-layered and glorious, but this reader, at least, sometimes felt fatigued in following his labyrinthine moves.  At the same time I was reading Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed in Constance Garnett’s old Modern Library translation (called in other English versions The Devils or Demons), that immense satire on provincial benightedness.  With this worthy volume, too, I felt on occasion saturated with the author’s lugubrious philosophy, his weakness for a mystified Russian history and religion (as charged today as ever), and his merciless compounding of detail.

     I sought then a lighter, more refreshing, breezy narrative, something to clear the mental palate, the sort of relief dependably available in Sir Walter Scott, Trollope, or Chester Himes, and I picked up my 1902 A. L. Burt edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae [1].  I was not disappointed.  Stevenson, who had a considerable name in his own day, has come to be considered a writer for children, what with Kidnapped, and Treasure Island, and Dr. Jekyll, not to mention the really charming Child’s Garden of Verses; his appeal to an adult literary audience might seem to some less than obvious. 

     In fact, though, the question of taste might well be reversed.  The most appreciated works have never had much in common with novels celebrated by the literati such as Joyce’s Ulysses.  Folk stories and songs, bestsellers, and art for the masses such as television shows have always maintained different standards from those of courtly or academic poetry and, in modern times, “high art” in general.  Though many such works are not tended and transmitted as a cultural patrimony and most may be soon forgotten, popular art may be every bit as beautiful and moving as the “high art” most often praised by elites. [2]

     All art is dialectical: in varying degrees, every work will confirm some of the consumer’s preconceptions.  (Were this not so, the work would be incomprehensible.)  Yet, just as everyone’s physical vision is largely shared, but never identical, so each view of the world must differ.  Art serves the double-edged purpose of, on the one hand, preserving and transmitting ideology through generations and, on the other, opening new possibilities for a critical view of one’s own ideas.  While oral and popular stories tend to systematically inculcate the values of the group, elite art is more likely to point toward contradictions, problems, complexities, and alternatives.  This is true to some extent of work created in a courtly setting, but much more characteristic of more recent consciously “high art,” which may even spurn a mass audience.  Popular art in general satisfies expectations; elite art twists, or surprises, or plays with them.

     No work can be wholly on one side of the spectrum.  Indeed, it is only in their tension that meaning arises.  One is the more reassured of a comforting truth if one is aware that deniers exist.  And the most strident experimentalist must depend on conventions or no one would know they are being violated.  To determine where a given work of fiction falls between these extremes is not only sociologically useful in explaining the writer’s audience, but also intellectually significant for understanding thematic concerns, and aesthetically central for determining the structural patterns experienced as beauty.

     The same tension is enacted in every aspect of a novel.  A plot may be highly conventional with a hero of unalloyed heroism and a leading lady who is always charming.  It may follow a design of retributive justice so the reader may conclude the book with the reassurance that all is right with the world, that everything gets sorted out in the end.  Individual lines and incidents may become so hackneyed as to attract both criticism from those who wish for something new and appreciation from those comforted by the familiar. 

     Narratives may also convey meaning through twisting expectation.  The recurrences in myth and folktales are so regular that they have been systematized by scholars like Stith Thompson, Vladimir Propp, and Joseph Campbell, but reliance on convention of all sorts is a matter of degree.   The white hat/ black hat cowboy movies of early days did not vanish, but they were joined in the 1950s by more ambiguous “psychological” Westerns and then by outlaw protagonists.  In Don Quixote and, centuries later in Madame Bovary Romanticism is ironized.

     In The Master of Ballantrae Stevenson's adherence to the conventions of popular literature is less rigid than in Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, or Kidnapped.  While the two brothers are clearly established as a reliably moral wronged hero and an immoral scoundrel, their roles are not entirely stable.  Toward the end of the novel, for instance, while traveling with Mr. Mackellar, James betrays some pleasanter behavior, while Henry, in the latter episodes, is clearly gripped by obsession and arrogance, necessitating his death not long after his brother’s.  He has indeed been driven to this state of mind, but he is thoughtless and self-absorbed. 

    Some have found the book’s use of supposed documents to be in a way “post-modern” and “de-centering.” [3]  The reader is in fact separated from the events by their retelling by the old retainer and further uncertainty arises since some stretches are told by the presumably less honest Chevalier de Burke or by the Master himself or by Mackellar’s darker counterpart Secundra Dass.  The fact is, of course, that early novels regularly relied on putatively documentary evidence to create the illusion of their “truth;” indeed, before the nineteenth century a great many works of fiction strive to appear to be records of lived experience.  Examples include the common omission of dates and personal names as though to protect living reputations, Robinson Crusoe’s journal, and the consistent stream of epistolary works of fiction beginning with Diego de San Pedro’s Carvel de Amor and continuing to Samuel Richardson’s popular and influential stories of hard-pressed maidens.

     Stevenson’s language is slightly elevated, but not distantly above the speech of educated, enough to convey gravitas and authority, but never reaching into the realm of extravagant rhetorical display.  the degree if his flourishes is evident in  Mr. Mackellar’s description of his trek through the wild American forest with the Master. 

The labors of Hercules, so finely described by Homer were a trifle to what we now underwent.   Sime parts of the forest were perfectly dense down to the ground, so that we must cut our way like mites in a cheese.

 The learned classical reference seems a bit off the mark when the reader reflects that the Iliad and Odyssey, though they contain scattered references to Herakles, do not, in  fact, describe the twelve labors. [4]  Thus the mention of Homer is merely decorative, suggesting that Mr. Mackellar, and perhaps the reader as well, has a unsure grasp of Greek literature.  Similarly, when a simile emerges in the next sentence, it is a rather homespun figure of speech, relating to the ordinary lived experience of all.  Likewise the diction and syntax are lifted slightly above everyday conversation, but they never slow the reader’s rapid pace through the story. 

     The thematics provide yet another example of largely conventional patterns.  The story is normative in spite of Stevenson’s own transgressive bohemianism and rejection of Christianity.  The faithful servant Mackellar, who might seem just a bit of a prig, is the index to morality within the narrative, while James is quite monstrously evil and Henry is, for a long time, better than most of us.  Honor and gentlemanliness, the most commonplace of Victorian idées reçues, govern the reader’s view of both brothers.  In a popular work the author’s assumptions typically vary little from the reader’s.  Henry’s descent into neurosis is presented as the result of intolerable pressure from his brother.  Since the primary focus is the drama (or melodrama), enacted against a background of common opinion.  Stevenson’s acceptance of social norms in this fiction is the more significant, since he was in fact irreligious, signing a letter to his friend Charles Baxter “Ever your affectionate and horrible Atheist, R. L. Stevenson, C. I. [Careless Infidel], H. A. [Horrible Atheist], S. B. [Son of Belial], etc.” [5]  He wore velveteen jackets like Oscar Wilde, grew his hair, and frequented low dives, but his fiction betrayed little of his deviations from accepted bourgeois taste. 

     Stevenson’s plot is, for the most part, plausible, though it is tinged with the fabulous and the contrived.  For him “lively literature” is not born of the accumulation of realistic detail alone, but requires artifice as well. “All representative art,” he says, “is both realistic and ideal.” [6]  The proportions are carefully managed in Ballantrae.  Henry, for instance, is at first an utterly innocent victim, a wronged hero whose virtue seems extraordinary, but he becomes something rather less as his arrogance increases with his accession to money and title and the growth of his obsession about his brother.  For his part, the scoundrel James, whose wickedness had seemed almost unlimited, is humanized as he travels with Mackellar. 

     The very conventional conflicts around inheritance and sibling rivalry are not only heightened to an extreme; they are also colored with the supernatural, as James seems to reappear almost like a spirit, most dramatically in his apparent reanimation in the novel’s climax.

     To Stevenson the turns of a well-constructed plot provide the principal pleasure of fiction.  Describing how an experience of reading might be “absorbing and voluptuous,” he says that style, psychology, and theme are all subordinate to the reader’s digging “for a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles.”  To him “drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.”  He criticizes social or thematic preoccupations, what he calls “the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate.”   His model is Sir Walter Scott, “king of the romantics,” though he recognizes Scott’s unevenness, attributing it to the fact that “as his books are play to the reader, so were they play to him.”  Of course, incident is the chief element in myth and in folk stories, as it is in such popular novelists as Scott, and the incidents are never merely “realistic.”  According to Stevenson, when a story “pleases [the reader] with every turn, when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance.” [7]

     He describes the advent of realism as “the great change of the past century.”  To him Zola with his “extreme of detail,” builds only feux-de-joie of literary tricking.”  He realizes, furthermore, that verisimilitude is a literary rhetorical effect just as fancy is, and that “realism” has not to do with “fundamental truth” but is itself “a technical method.”  He insists in the end that the reader should “begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, happily mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in design.”  This catalogue of qualities seems carelessly tossed together, really suggesting little more than a good story, a page-turner with the qualities that have always characterized popular fiction. [8]

     Stevenson’s taste is clear, though many readers may dissent, preferring novels in which style or realistic detail or theme are foregrounded.  Yet his standards are those that have underlay the most popular of works from oral fireside folktales to today’s bestsellers.  Stevenson need not be relegated to the juvenile shelves of the library.  Literature equally confirms readers’ expectations and questions them.  Neither is the more beautiful or true; they are complementary.  Yet it is always true that the radical, the innovative, the work that challenges, will require more work to consume and is unlikely to find as large an audience as fiction that, for the most part, observes convention, using variations as a seasoning rather than a program.  Many readers are likely to share my own inclination for a varied textual diet, mixing the popular now and then with the elite “high art” that prejudice would assign a more prestigious place in literature.  In fact both the high and the low have their excellences, their masterpieces, and their failures.  Each may have as well a place in the individual’s appreciation, just as most people would not wish to be confined to only sweets or only savory foods, or to vacation only in sites of natural beauty or only in densely occupied cities.  Ovid was quite right to note "there is no single sort of [hair]style alone;" one chooses what one wishes and that choice may vary from day to day. [9]  Absolute value judgements are as elusive in fiction as in clothing or coiffure.  

 

1.  The book appeared in 2002 on a shelf at the Salvation Army.  The A. L. Burt company began reprinting reference works, moving then to popular literature such as Zane Gray and Horatio Alger.  They came to specialize in juvenile series such as the twenty-four volumes in The Boy Allies adventures during WWI.  They did publish some classics as well, including the Burt’s Home Library,” which touted itself as “popular literature for the masses . . . the treasures of the world’s knowledge.” 

2.  This has altered in recent years due to the salutary appreciation of the beauty of many forms of popular and mass culture as well as the less wholesome but newly fashionable attitude that artistic value judgements are meaningless, that study of any committee-written situation comedy is precisely as rewarding as devotion to Dante. 

3.  Two critics taking this approach, one more popular and one more scholarly will serve as examples.  In his article “Meet the Master of Ballantrae” in the August 10, 2009 issue of The Guardian, calls The Master of Ballantrae, “a postmodernist pastiche of his [Stevenson’s earlier] novels and notes in  prase that “in its discontinuous structure it looks forward to the contemporary novel.“  Nels C. Pearson, in “The Moment of Modernism: Schopenhauer’s ‘Unstable Phantom’ in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (in Studies in Scottish Literature, vol. 31, no. 1 [1999]) waxes more florid, claiming that the novel “demonstrates the deconstructive relationship between an arbitrary essence and a narrative that desperately tries to unveil it.” 

4.  Several early epics on Herakles by Creophylus, Peisander and Panyassis of Halicarnassus are known, though only by reputation or a few fragments.  The Argonautica contains some brief references to the labors, and a listing occurs in Euripedes’ The Madness of Heracles, but a full account is set down only by Diodorus Siculus and later by the Pseudo-Apollodorus. 

5.  Letter of February 2, 1873. 

6.  The line occurs in his essay “A Note on Realism.”

7.  The quotations in this paragraph are from Stevenson’s essay “A Gossip on Romance.”

8.  The quotations in this paragraph are from Stevenson’s essay “A Note on Realism.”

9.  “Nec genus ornatus unun est,” Art of Love III, 135.

Little Blue Books

 

     The paperback books of the 1950s and the earlier Everyman’s Library and Modern Library made literary classics available at a modest price.  The access to great writing thus given the general public has a value rivaling that  of everyone’s favorite socialist institution, the public library.  Yet an even more accessible series – the Little Blue Books – had brought provocative ideas and beautiful poetry within the reach of everyone who could afford a cover price of ten cents.  I used to see stacks of these with their plain and numbered covers, not all, in fact, blue  – they were published until 1978 – in Chicago’s used book stores and they are traded yet today online, forming an odd niche for collectors.

    These little stapled booklets, three by five inches and never over a hundred pages, were published by the Haldeman-Julius Company of Girard, Kansas which may seem an unlikely location for a popular literary publisher.  The explanation is more unlikely yet.  Girard remains today a small town with a population of two and half thousand, a figure that has varied little since 1890.  Apart from farming, the area once included some mines, a few small mills, an iron-smelter, a tannery, and a brick-yard.  Immigrants, especially from the Balkans, were recruited to serve these industries in the middle of the American plains.  The radicalism some brought from Europe combined in Girard with the populist program of the Farmers’ Alliance and the growing power of American socialist parties.  By far the most successful of these, the Socialist Party of America (founded in 1901), had strong support in the trans-Mississippi West.

     In this context Percy Daniels, an activist in the rurally-based People’s Party (elected lieutenant governor of Kansas from 1892-94), purchased the town’s newspaper, the Girard Herald.  In 1895 Julius Wayland, who had been obliged to flee his hometown of Versailles, Indiana to avoid lynching for his radical views and who later participated in the utopian socialist Ruskin Colony in Tennessee, established the weekly newspaper, the Appeal to Reason which came to have more readers than any other socialist journal in American history, reaching 550,000 around 1910.  [1]

     The editor during the early twentieth century was Fred D. Warren.  The danger he posed to capitalism is evident from his legal challenges.   He was arrested and convicted for offering a reward for the arrest of former Kentucky governor William S.  Taylor who was on the run after being implicated in the murder of his gubernatorial rival William Goebel.  In  this case President Taft commuted Warren’s sentence, saying he did not wish for the editor to be a martyr. To Taft the paper’s views were “wild and perverted” but “for all persons of average commonsense a reading of his articles is the best antidote for the poison he seeks to instill.” [2]  At one point in 1901 the Postal Service  forbade his paper’s distribution system (sending bundles to individuals who would then resell the papers).  Before the charge was dismissed Warren had a glimpse of Leavenworth the published description of which led to a new charge, this time for obscenity (also dismissed).  The Post Office continued to seek any pretext for banning the Appeal. [3]

     In 1912 Wayland, the Appeal’s founder, committed suicide and ownership passed to his sons who sold the company to Emanuel Haldeman-Julius who had been an editor and his wife Marcet.  Persecution continued, particularly with the paper’s initial principled opposition to WWI and the new Red Scare laws.  After a few life support maneuvers, including backing the war effort and emphasizing a kind of patriotic display that anticipated the popular front strategy of the American Communist Party several decades later,  [4]  the paper ceased publication in 1922, replaced by the Haldeman-Julius Weekly which emphasized literature, art, and culture.  That same year the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company began the Little Blue Book series, sometimes called the Peoples Pocket Series or the Ten-Cent Pocket Series.  (The name persisted, though the booklets were not always blue.)

     The political partisanship of the Appeal remained in the new venture.  The first series of Little Blue Books included Rhymes of the Revolution, with an introduction by Debs, as well as editions of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Common Sense.  Works at once political and literary included William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism.  Radical critiques of Christianity were represented by Robert Ingersoll, the Lamarckian evolutionist William Henry Hudson, and Carroll Lane Fenton, a prominent opponent of creationism, while progressive social views were contained in volumes from Margaret Sanger (What Every Girl Should Know) and Marriage and Divorce by Horace Greeley and Robert Dale Owen (whose father had founded the New Harmony Community).  Literature was available in the form of stories by Poe and Chekhov and poetry by Shelley.  FitzGerald’s  “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” an extremely popular poem at the time, was accompanied by an essay by leftist attorney Clarence Darrow (who lived in Girard for a time).  Introductory philosophical texts included Will Durant on Aristotle and on Nietzsche. There was also a rhyming dictionary, for those who wished to compose lyrics themselves. 

     Later series included other self-help title, including How to Become a Writer of Little Blue Books.  These practical guides ranged from How to Cook Fish and Meats, How to Play Golf, How to Save Money, How to Improve Your Conversation, and How to Psycho-Analyze Yourself to How to Write Love Letters, Perhaps the most ambitious publication was called How We Can Live Happily. 

     Some of the literary titles were altered in time in the effort to sell more copies.  For instance, Essays on de Gourmont and Byron was reissued as Masters of Erotic Love, and Essays on Joseph Conrad and Oscar Wilde became A Sailor and a Homosexual.  Gautier’s The Fleece of Gold was retitled The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, Hugo’s The King Enjoys Himself became The Lustful King Enjoys Himself, and George Moore’s Euphorian in Texas gained the subtitle An Unconventional Amour.

     In spite of such concessions to marketing, though, the day of the Little Blue Books was passing.  While paperback competitors gained sales, government repression continued.  Hoover’s aggressive FBI investigation of the company after WWII resulted in the refusal of many stores to carry their publications and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius himself was convicted of income tax offenses before he drowned in his backyard swimming pool in 1951.  His son Henry then kept the business afloat for a twilight period until 1978 when a fire destroyed the printing plant, bringing an end to the long experiment in providing the best literature to the masses. 

     Throughout its run, the literary emphasis had remained dominant, with works by Marcus Aurelius, Washington Irving, Boccaccio, Emerson, Whitman, Carlyle, Emerson, Montaigne, De Quincy, Schopenhauer, “Michael Angelo,” Lamb, Lord Chesterfield, Goethe, George Sand, Gorky, Rousseau, Longfellow, Ibsen, Thackery, Machiavelli, Dante, and Alexander Pope.  Little Blue Books offered a liberal education in manageably brief and mercifully inexpensive increments.  They can now remind us of the fact that not so long ago, many ordinary working people not only sought to understand their place in American capitalism, but also aspired to consume the best writing with the confidence that the taste for beauty and for truth need not be confined to the ruling class.   

     I like to imagine the Little Blue Books in the pockets of factory workers, itinerant farm laborers, hobos riding the rails, and new immigrants working on their English, passed perhaps from one hand to another until they were torn and ragged.  Little Blue Books allowed those whose daily lives may have included few luxuries to form independent opinions on the issues of the day and to taste some of the finest thought and art ever produced.  The history of the Haldeman-Julius company may remind the twenty-first century that the sublime is accessible to all who reach for it, that culture belongs to everyone, and that at one time, in the very heart of America, the radical transformation of society was a genuinely popular cause.

 

 

 

1.  By comparison the Communist Daily Worker had a top circulation of 35,000. 

2.  New York Times, February 2, 1911.

3.  The legal history is detailed in Harold A. Trout, The History of the Appeal to Reason: A study of the Radical Press available at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217268777.pdf.

4.  One slogan in the late ‘thirties and early ‘forties was “Communism is the new Americanism.”