TODAY: Exhibition Opening
Please join us February 15, at 4:30 pm on the Beinecke Library mezzanine for the opening of the Beinecke’s spring exhibition, “Remembering Shakespeare.”
New from Beinecke Collections
In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein’s posthumous works, among them her incomparable Stanzas in Meditation. Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein’s poem exists in several versions: a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklas’ work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript.
This edition of Stanzas in Meditation is the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein’s original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem’s several versions. This record of Stein’s multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author’s radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein’s relationship with Toklas. The editors’ preface and poet Joan Retallack’s introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein’s poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate.
Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Stein’s oeuvre.
Order from Yale UP: Stanzas in Meditation
New Exhibition: Remembering Shakespeare
Image: William Shakespeare, Shake-Speares Sonnets,London: G. Eld for T.T., 1609, (Eliz 194).
This exhibition is part of Shakespeare at Yale, a multi-venued celebration for the spring of 2012 that will display the extraordinary resources that exist at the University for the study and enjoyment of Shakespeare. For more information, visit: Shakespeare at Yale.
New Scholarship from Beinecke Collections
Susan Barbour, “The Origins of the Prose Captions in H. D.’s Helen in Egypt“, Review of English Studies, 2011 (advanced access published November 18, 2011). (Full text of the article is available online: Barbour-H. D.)
H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, written between 1952 and 1955 and published posthumously in 1961, is a major work of a modernist poet at the height of her powers. Yet critical attention to it has been relatively sparse, most likely due to the puzzling effect created by the dynamic combination of poetry and prose. Conventional readings of this poem have either ignored the prose segments altogether or interpreted them through psychoanalytic, feminist and postmodernist perspectives. But an important letter H.D. wrote to Norman Holmes Pearson on the 3rd of February, 1955 reveals that she decided to include the prose segments after she had visited a nearby recording studio where she had made the spontaneous decision to give brief introductions to the poems. The letter furthermore indicates that she envisioned her own translation of Euripides’ Ion to be a model for crafting the prose interludes—and indeed Euripidean drama and its criticism turns out to offer crucial perspectives for understanding how they function. This essay seeks, therefore, to problematize conventional readings of this poem and offer new considerations of its hybrid textuality by situating it within the contexts of Euripidean drama and twentieth century theories of orality. When read in this light, Helen in Egypt reveals itself to be a reflection of its compositional process both structurally and at the level of its narrative, thereby constituting a unique example of a reflexive modernist text that fuses poetry and prose as well as oral and textual consciousness.
H. D.’s letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 3rd of February, 1955, appears in the Norman Holmes Pearson Papers (ZA Pearson); related collections and resources include the H. D. Papers (YCAL MSS 24) and Image Guide and the Bryher Papers (GEN MSS 97) and Image Guide.
Image: H. D in Egypt
New from Beinecke Collections
Ida: A Novel
a new edition, edited by Logan Esdale; published by Yale University Press
Gertrude Stein wanted Ida to be known in two ways: as a novel about a woman in the age of celebrity culture and as a text with its own story to tell. With the publication of this workshop edition of Ida, we have the novel exactly as it was published in 1941, and we also have the full record of its creation. Logan Esdale offers informative critical commentary and judiciously selected archival materials to illuminate Stein’s experience of authorship from the novel’s beginning in early summer 1937, through the various drafts and negotiations with her publisher, to the reviews that greeted the book’s publication. Stein’s careful and systematic preservation of all Ida-related materials for her archive at the Yale University Library was a conscious decision, and an invitation for us to study the complexity of her creative process.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was born in Allegheny, PA, of German-Jewish immigrants. She moved to Paris in 1903 and lived in France for the rest of her life. She published Ida: A Novel in 1941, eight years after she became famous for her best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Logan Esdale teaches at California State University, Long Beach.
Beinecke Collections: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers Finding Aid (YCAL MSS 76); Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers Image Guide
Terry Tempest Williams Archive
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of American writer, poet, naturalist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams.
The author of more than a dozen books including The Secret Language of Snow (1984), Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991), Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape (1995), Leap (2000), and Finding Beauty in a Broken World (2008), Williams calls attention to the relationship between our natural environment and social justice. A fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience to protest nuclear testing in Nevada, and served on the boards of The Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy’s Utah Chapter, the advisory board of the National Parks and Conservation Association, and on the President’s Council for Sustainable Development. She has collaborated with artists and photographers such as Mary Franks, Emmet Gowin, Richard Misrach, Meridel Rubenstein, and Debra Bloomfield. Her essays on ecological and social issues have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion, and The Progressive. In 2006, The Wilderness Society presented William’s with its Robert Marshall Award, the highest honor the society bestows.
Ms. Williams, whose ancestors were among the earliest Mormon pioneers to settle the valley of the Great Salt Lake, grew up in Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah in 1978 with a degree in English and a minor in biology. She taught on the Navajo reservation at Montezuma Creek, a settlement of fewer than 500 in the southeast corner of Utah, and earned a master’s degree in Environmental Education in 1984. From 1986 through 1996 she worked as curator of education and naturalist in residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History. Ms. Williams, who was recently a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah.
“For more than a quarter of a century,” observes George Miles, William Robertson Coe Curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, “Terry Tempest Williams has written lyrically about life and the landscape of her Utah home. She has joined with artists, writers, and scientists to increase our appreciation of the wonder and fragility of the world we inhabit and to make us more aware of how the damage we cause that world rebounds to harm us individually and to diminish our society. Her diaries, journals and drafts reveal the extraordinary originality of her creative process while her correspondence with colleagues from around the county illuminates the concerns and efforts of a generation of American environmental activists.”
Ms. Williams’ papers, which comprise 204 boxes, arrived in New Haven this summer. The library’s archivists are organizing the papers and preparing a guide to them, after which they will be opened for consultation.
Questions about the Williams’ papers may be directed to George Miles, Curator of Western Americana, at George.Miles@yale.edu or to Nancy Kuhl, Curator of American Literature for Poetry, at Nancy.Kuhl@yale.edu.
Photo: Terry Tempest Williams
New Exhibition
Exile as Destiny: Czeslaw Milosz and America
He had his home, posthumous, in the town of New Haven,
In a white building, behind walls
Of translucent marble like turtle shell
—Czesław Miłosz, from “Beinecke Library.” Provinces. New York: Ecco Press, 1991.
The life of Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), Polish poet, novelist, diplomat, and Nobel Laureate, spanned a time of political upheavals and social turmoil. He lived in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, in the Paris of exiled literati, and in the United States, perched atop the Berkeley hills with a view of San Francisco Bay. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library celebrates the centennial of Czesław Miłosz, renowned author of Bells in Winter, Captive Mind and Native Realm, with an exhibition drawn from the library’s holdings. The manuscripts, documents, and photographs on display reveal lesser-known aspects of Miłosz’s multifaceted relationship with America, with his adopted home in California, with fellow émigré authors, and with the English language.
Related Conference: Milosz and America
Exorcism
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has acquired Eugene O’Neill’s “lost” one-act play, “Exorcism” (1919). The play, along with a facsimile of the typescript, will be published in a cloth edition by Yale University Press in February 2012, featuring an introduction by the noted American playwright Edward Albee. The New Yorker has acquired first serial rights and will publish the play in its entirety, with an introduction by theater critic John Lahr, in the magazine’s Fall Books issue, October 17, 2011 (on newsstands October 10). A short video of the actor Tommy Schrider reading from “Exorcism” will be featured on The New Yorker’s website and iPad application: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/10/eugene-oneill-exorcism-reading.html .
“Exorcism,” set in 1912, is based on O’Neill’s suicide attempt from an overdose of veronal in a squalid, Manhattan rooming house. The play premiered at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City on March 26, 1920. Following a few performances, however, O’Neill chose, abruptly, to cancel the production and to retract and destroy all known copies of the script. O’Neill biographers have speculated that the play, produced as O’Neill’s father was dying, was perhaps too revealing of O’Neill’s own demons and potentially distressing for his parents.
Despite long-held presumptions that the play was irrevocably lost, O’Neill’s second wife, Agnes Boulton, apparently retained a copy of the play, which she gave as a Christmas gift to the writer Philip Yordan after her divorce from O’Neill. Yordan is perhaps best known for his O’Neill-inspired play, and later film, Anna Lucasta, starring an all-black cast. The typescript, with edits and emendations in O’Neill’s own hand, was discovered by a researcher working in Yordan’s papers, together with the original envelope; the label is inscribed, “Something you said you’d like to have / Agnes & Mac” (Morris “Mac” Kaufman was Boulton’s third husband).
O’Neill, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and the only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1936), returned to many of the issues that surface in “Exorcism” in his heavily autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night, published posthumously in 1956 and considered to be his masterpiece. The discovery of “Exorcism,” after ninety years, adds significantly to O’Neill’s biography, intimating the overwhelming role that suicide would take in his personal life along with the issue’s influence and impact on his work. The play also marks a pivotal moment in O’Neill’s prolific career, providing further insight into the later works for which he is now revered.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is the principal repository for the Eugene O’Neill Papers. A detailed description of the papers is available online: Eugene O’Neill Papers Finding Aid (YCAL MSS 123). Some materials from the collection can be viewed online: Eugene O’Neill Papers Image Guide. Related materials and collections may be located using the Beiencke Library’s various research tools: Guide to Research Tools.
For inquiries about the play, or the Eugene O’Neill Papers, please contact Louise Bernard (louise.bernard@yale.edu<mailto:louise.bernard@yale.edu>), Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature for Prose and Drama, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
For inquiries about the play’s publication in book form this February, please contact Brenda King (brenda.king@yale.edu<https://connect.yale.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=73c3409735984d659ba72031b6fc15e7&URL=mailto%3abrenda.king%40yale.edu>), Publicity Director, Yale University Press.
Image: Photograph of Eugene O’Neill, inscribed to his son [1927].
A Manifesto of Queer Modernism
A Manifesto of Queer Modernism
a lecture by Tirza T. Latimer, California College of the Arts
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
5:30pm
The Loria Center
190 York Street, Room 351
Queer friendship circles, like the ones that formed around Gertrude Stein in the early twentieth century, played a pivotal role in the incubation of modernism and its propagation on American terrain. Stein’s network consisted largely of art world figures who shared sexual as well as aesthetic affinities. They honed practices (such as portraiture) and initiated trends (such as neo-romanticism), that celebrated their sentimental and artistic connections. They exchanged all manner of tributes: photographs, paintings, collages, word portraits, and musical compositions. They produced collective works and undertook interdisciplinary efforts–neither typically referenced in histories of modernism. For instance, the 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts–composed by Virgil Thomson to Stein’s libretto, choreographed by Frederick Ashton, and performed by a Harlem chorus resplendent in Florine Stettheimer’s costumes–has not been widely touted as an important modernist event. Yet, its makers meant, Tirza T. Latimer argues, to train a spotlight on alternate forms of modernist practice.
Image: Photograph of the stage set for Four Saints in Three Acts, from the Florine Stettheimer Papers
Introducing Aeon
Introducing AEON: The future is now!
Aeon is an online registration and requesting service designed specifically for special collections and research libraries.
Beginning on Monday, October 3, the Beinecke Library will discontinue use of all paper call slips in favor of Aeon online requesting. Yale faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and staff will be able to access their account using their NetID. Visiting researchers who have registered with us will be assigned a username and password at the desk.
We believe this new system will lead to greater efficiency and a higher level of service. However, as with any new technology, there may be some issues within the first few weeks that could lead to slight delays in your requests. Thank you for your patience.
For AEON info on the Beinecke home page: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblinfo/brblvisi.html
For additional information on AEON: http://www.atlas-sys.com/products/aeon/
For questions: Moira.fitzgerald@yale.edu
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