Frank Beacham's Journal

It’s Bloomsday, the celebration of James Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece “Ulysses”

It’s Bloomsday, the celebration of James Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece “Ulysses.”

Though few have actually read the 800 page novel, it follows a day — June 16, 1904 — in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner.

Commemorations in scores of cities worldwide include Irish breakfasts of liver and kidneys (as described in the book), marathon readings, Edwardian costumes and pub crawls.

Some critics and academics today rank “Ulysses” among the greatest books ever written — a far cry from its original reception. Virginia Woolf called it an “illiterate, underbred” book. Gertrude Stein labeled Joyce “incomprehensible.” And The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice called the work vulgar and indecent, leading it to be banned in the United States until 1933.

“By the standards of today’s dirty books, ‘Ulysses’ seems pretty tame,” one critic writes. Another writer notes that most of today’s Amazon.com reviews don’t even mention the sex.

Thanks New York Times!

Lolitia, Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Nabokov's famously controversial novel, was released on this day in 1962 — 59 years ago

“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” was the question posed by the posters advertising Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s famously controversial novel, released on this day in 1962 — 59 years ago.

Four years earlier, Kubrick, director of the big-budget Roman epic Spartacus (1960), and his partner, producer James B. Harris, bought the film rights to Nabokov’s masterfully crafted novel.

Its plot revolved around the middle-aged Humbert Humbert and his unseemly obsession with young girls — whom he called “nymphets” — and with one young girl in particular, Dolores Haze — or Lolita.

Nabokov received sole credit for the screenplay, which had in fact been significantly revised by Kubrick and Harris after the novelist initially submitted a 400-page draft. He later cut it down at their request, but the filmmakers still made extensive changes.

One of Kubrick’s biggest challenges was finding an actress to play the title character. Child stars Tuesday Weld and Hayley Mills were reportedly among those actresses considered for the role.

After a nationwide casting search, the filmmakers eventually settled on 14-year-old Sue Lyon, who had appeared on television, but would be making her big-screen debut. Though the character of Lolita was only 12 years old in Nabokov’s book, her age was increased to 14 or 15 in the screenplay in order to lessen the implication of pedophilia.

James Mason starred as Humbert. Noel Coward, David Niven and Rex Harrison had all been possibilities, but had declined due to fears about playing the unsympathetic character.

In supporting roles, Shelley Winters played Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, and the famed comic actor, Peter Sellers, was Quilty, a mysterious character whose role in the plot Kubrick significantly expanded from the novel.

The film’s posters played up the controversial nature of the film’s content and the book’s reputation, using the provocative tagline above a picture of Lyon-as-Lolita, wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and a seductive expression, with a lollipop in her mouth.

Lolita received mixed reviews — The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael was one critic who raved about the film — but its acting was widely praised. The film earned one Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Kubrick himself lamented that due to opposition from the film industry’s censorship group, known as the Production Code, and the Roman Catholic League of Decency, and their threats to ban the movie, he couldn’t give proper weight to Humbert’s erotic obsession with Lolita.

When interviewed by Newsweek magazine in 1972, Kubrick said that he “probably wouldn’t have made the film” if he had known how severe the censorship standards would be.

Another big-screen Lolita was released in 1997, directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Jeremy Irons and the then-unknown 15-year-old, Dominique Swain. Though it bombed at the box office, the film was seen by many as a more accurate depiction of Nabokov’s novel than Kubrick’s had been.

William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice and other critically acclaimed novels, was born on this day in 1925

William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice and other critically acclaimed novels, was born on this day in 1925 — 96 years ago — in Newport News, Virginia.

Styron was troubled by growing up in the segregated south. His father's family had once owned slaves. An only child, he became a voracious reader and skipped ahead in school. He went to Davidson College in North Carolina, but nearly flunked out before he joined the Marines.

Styron was sent to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. When he returned, he finished his education at Duke University in North Carolina, where he studied writing. He moved to New York City, hoping to become a writer.

He finished his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, about a woman struggling against insanity and suicidal urges. However, he was called back to the Marines to serve in the Korean War before the book's publication in 1951.

His next book, The Long March (1956), about a brutal march forced on Marine recruits in training, became a critical and financial success. He won a major award, the Prix de Rome, that allowed him to travel abroad and write.

In Rome, he met his future wife, Rose Burgunder. While in Paris, he helped found the Paris Review. He made friends with Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and other writers.

His novel, Set This House on Fire (1960), was attacked by U.S. critics but praised abroad. In 1967, he explored his interest in race issues with The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), written in the voice of Nat Turner, leader of a failed slave uprising.

Some black writers attacked Styron, claiming a white writer could not accurately portray the psychology of a black slave. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. His bestselling novel, Sophie's Choice, dealing with the devastating aftermath of the Holocaust, was made into an award-winning film in 1982.

Styron struggled with severe clinical depression and suicidal urges, which he described in his memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990).

He died on November 21, 2006 at age 81.

Thanks History.com

Saul Bellow was born 106 years ago today

Saul Bellow was born 106 years ago today.

A Canadian-born American writer, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.

In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age."

His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a "huge literary influence."

As Christopher Hitchens described it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle "to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses."

Bellow's protagonists, in one shape or another, all wrestle with what Albert Corde, the dean in "The Dean's December," called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century."

Bellow died in 2005 at the age of 89.

Above, Bellow in Capri, Italy, to accept the Malaparte Prize, September, 1984

Photo by Marisa Rastellini

On this day in 1949 — 72 years ago — George Orwell's novel of a dystopian future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published

On this day in 1949 — 72 years ago — George Orwell's novel of a dystopian future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published.

The novel's all-seeing leader, known as "Big Brother," became a universal symbol for intrusive government and oppressive bureaucracy.

George Orwell was the nom de plume of Eric Blair, who was born in India. The son of a British civil servant, Orwell attended school in London and won a scholarship to the elite prep school Eton, where most students came from wealthy upper-class backgrounds, unlike Orwell.

Rather than going to college like most of his classmates, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police and went to work in Burma in 1922. During his five years there, he developed a severe sense of class guilt. Finally, in 1927, he chose not to return to Burma while on holiday in England.

Orwell, choosing to immerse himself in the experiences of the urban poor, went to Paris, where he worked menial jobs. He wrote Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933, based on his observation of the poorer classes. In 1937, Road to Wigan Pier documented the life of the unemployed in northern England. Meanwhile, he had published his first novel, Burmese Days, in 1934.

Orwell became increasingly left wing in his views, although he never committed himself to any specific political party. He went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to fight with the Republicans, but later fled as communism gained an upper hand in the struggle on the left.

His barnyard fable, Animal Farm (1945), shows how the noble ideals of egalitarian economies can easily be distorted. The book brought his first taste of critical and financial success.

Orwell's last novel, Nineteen Eighty-four, brought him lasting fame with its grim vision of a future where all citizens are watched constantly and language is twisted to aid in oppression.

Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950.

Allen Ginsberg was born 95 years ago today

Allen Ginsberg, 1954

Allen Ginsberg was born 95 years ago today.

A poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow, Ginsberg vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression.

Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem, "Howl," in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. In 1957, "Howl" attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it depicted heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state.

"Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner.

Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"

Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York’s East Village. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University at Boulder, Colorado.

At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, the poet, started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974.

Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. His poem, "September on Jessore Road," calling attention to the plight of Bangladeshi refugees, exemplifies what the literary critic Helen Vendler described as Ginsberg's tireless persistence in protesting against "imperial politics and persecution of the powerless."

His collection, The Fall of America, shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979, he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

In 1986, Ginsberg was awarded the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings in Struga, Macedonia. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.

Ginsberg died April 5, 1997, surrounded by family and friends in his East Village loft in New York City, succumbing to liver cancer via complications of hepatitis. He was 70 years old.

Here, Allen Ginsberg reads the first part of his poem, Howl

Allen Ginsberg with Frank Beacham, 1975

Leonard Cohen meets Allen Ginsberg after his concert at the Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles, 1988

Photo by Frank Beacham

Ian Fleming, English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer, best known for his James Bond series of spy novels, was born 113 years ago today

Ian Fleming, English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer, best known for his James Bond series of spy novels, was born 113 years ago today.

Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917.

Educated at Eton, Sandhurst and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing. While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War, Fleming was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force.

Flemings wartime service and his career as a journalist provided much of the background, detail and depth of the James Bond novels. He wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1952. It was a success, with three print runs being commissioned to cope with the demand. Eleven Bond novels and two short-story collections followed between 1953 and 1966.

The novels revolved around James Bond, an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6. Bond was also known by his code number, 007, and was a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve. The Bond stories rank among the best-selling series of fictional books of all time, having sold over 100 million copies worldwide.

Fleming also wrote the children's story, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, and two works of non-fiction.

Two of his James Bond books were published posthumously. Other writers have since produced Bond novels. Fleming's creation has appeared in film 25 times, portrayed by seven actors.

Rachel Carson, environmental writer, was born 114 years ago today

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt

Rachel Carson, environmental writer, was born 114 years ago today.

Carson was a marine biologist and conservationist whose book, Silent Spring, and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller, The Sea Around Us, won her a U.S. National Book Award. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths.

Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially environmental problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people.

Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter.

Here is a video on Carson’s “Silent Spring”

The first copies of the classic vampire novel Dracula, by Irish writer Bram Stoker, appeared in London bookshops on this day in 1897 — 124 years ago

The first copies of the classic vampire novel Dracula, by Irish writer Bram Stoker, appeared in London bookshops on this day in 1897 — 124 years ago.

A childhood invalid, Stoker grew up to become a football (soccer) star at Trinity College, Dublin. After graduation, he got a job in civil service at Dublin Castle, where he worked for the next 10 years while writing drama reviews for the Dublin Mail on the side.

Stoker met the well-respected actor, Sir Henry Irving, who hired him as his manager. Stoker stayed in the post for most of the next three decades, writing Irving’s voluminous correspondence for him and accompanying him on tours in the United States.

Over the years, Stoker began writing a number of horror stories for magazines, and in 1890 he published his first novel, The Snake’s Pass. Stoker would go on to publish 17 novels in all, but it was his 1897 novel, Dracula, that eventually earned him literary fame and became known as a masterpiece of Victorian-era Gothic literature.

Written in the form of diaries and journals of its main characters, Dracula is the story of a vampire who makes his way from Transylvania — a region of Eastern Europe now in Romania — to Yorkshire, England. The vampire preys on innocents there to get the blood he needs to live.

Stoker had originally named the vampire, “Count Wampyr.” He found the name Dracula in a book on Wallachia and Moldavia written by retired diplomat William Wilkinson, which he borrowed from a Yorkshire public library during his family’s vacations there.

Vampires — who left their burial places at night to drink the blood of humans — were popular figures in folk tales from ancient times, but Stoker’s novel catapulted them into the mainstream of 20th century literature. Upon its release, Dracula enjoyed moderate success. When Stoker died in 1912, none of his obituaries even mentioned Dracula by name. Sales began to take off in the 1920s, when the novel was adapted for Broadway.

Dracula mania kicked into even higher gear with Universal’s blockbuster 1931 film, directed by Tod Browning and starring the Hungarian actor, Bela Lugosi. Dozens of vampire-themed movies, television shows and literature followed, though Lugosi — with his exotic accent — remains the quintessential Count Dracula.

In a ceremony presided over by President William Howard Taft, the New York Public Library — the largest marble structure ever constructed in the United States — was dedicated in New York City on this day in 1911 — 110 years ago

In a ceremony presided over by President William Howard Taft, the New York Public Library — the largest marble structure ever constructed in the United States — was dedicated in New York City on this day in 1911 — 110 years ago.

Occupying a two-block section of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets, the monumental beaux-arts structure took 14 years to complete at a cost of $9 million. The day after its dedication, the library opened its doors to the public, and some 40,000 people passed through to make use of a collection that already consisted of more than a million books.

In the late 19th century, New York had surpassed Paris in population and was quickly catching up with London, then the world’s most populous city. Unlike these cities, however, it lacked a public library large enough to serve its many occupants.

In 1886, former New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden died, bequeathing to the city $2.4 million to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York.”

The gift remained unspent until May 23, 1895, when New York’s two largest libraries — the Astor and Lenox libraries — agreed to combine with the Tilden Trust to form a new entity that would be known as The New York Public Library. Sixteen years later to the day, the main branch of the library was dedicated in midtown Manhattan.

During the next few decades, thanks in large part to a $5.2 million gift from steel baron, Andrew Carnegie, a system of branch libraries opened throughout New York City.

Today, the New York Public Library is visited and used annually by more than 10 million people, and there are currently well over two million cardholders — more than for any other library system in the nation.

Above is the library on opening day in 1911