COLUMNS
Talk Show #15 with Kevin Brockmeier, Sloane Crosley, Sophie Gee, Samantha Hunt, and Melissa Pritchard
/ Jaime Clarke
07.17.08
Talk Show #15: Historical Person You'd Like to Meet
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. Recently he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised. Visit Kevin at www.kevinbrockmeier.com.
Sloane Crosley is the author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake, a book of humor essays published by Riverhead Books. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, New York Observer, the Village Voice, Playboy, Teen Vogue, Salon, Black Book, Radar and Maxim. She lives in Manhattan. Visit Sloane at www.sloanecrosley.com.
Sophie Gee is an Assistant Professor of English at Princeton. Her novel The Scandal of the Season, an historical romance, was published by Scribner in August 2007. Visit Sophie at www.sophiegee.com.
Samantha Hunt is the author of two books, The Invention of Everything Else, a novel about the life of Nikola Tesla, and The Seas—for which she was awarded a National Book Foundation award for writers under 35. Visit Samantha at www.samanthahunt.net.
Melissa Pritchard has published six books of fiction, most recently Disappearing Ingénue and Late Bloomer (Doubleday/Anchor). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Pushcart Prize Stories and The O.Henry Awards, among other publications. She is working on a new collection, and her biography of Arizona philanthropist Virginia G. Piper will be published in May 2008. She teaches at Arizona State University. Visit Melissa at www.public.asu.edu/~melissap/.
—Name a historical person you'd like to meet and why.
Brockmeier: James Agee. He wrote one of my favorite novels, A Death in the Family, and a few years ago, I decided to read the Library of America edition of his collected film criticism. It's a volume of great wit, passion, and clarity, as valuable (to me at least) as anything by Pauline Kael, but my enjoyment of it was hampered slightly by the fact that all of the movies Agee discusses were released decades before I was born, and roughly ninety percent of them I have never seen. I was seized by a fantasy of traveling back in time to show him some more recent films so that I could find out what he made of them. Agee, I recognize, is a relatively recent figure, and even in the circle of modern-American-literature lovers he does not have the cultural currency of, say, Hemingway or Faulkner, but I think it's fair to consider him a "historical person," insofar as history is ongoing and he's no longer in it.
Crosley: Guy de Maupassant. First off, he wins the award for Writer with The Most Serious Moustache of All Time. You may even be able to chop “writer” off of that distinction. Beyond that, I think it would be fascinating to meet one of the most prolific short story writers in history knowing what I/we know now: that he is most famous for a single story. And one that’s probably one of the shorter tales he wrote and almost nothing like the rest in form or topic. “The Necklace” is truly amazing and ingenious but it’s also a fluke in a way, wrapped up with a heavy punch line. He’s not the only writer that’s ever happened to, but the irony that “The Necklace” itself is based around a simple misunderstanding... I just wonder how he’d feel about that, if he would see the connection or if he would have picked it out as standing the test of time. Also he grew up with Flaubert as a kindly uncle figure and led a pretty privileged life so if I could go back in time and meet him, I’m pretty sure I’d have a nice French chateau to stay in and some great dinner companions.
Gee: I'd like to meet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an eighteenth century English noblewoman who ended up being one of the most brilliant and eccentric figures of all time. She was born at the end of the seventeenth century, and she could have been an idle aristocrat like other women of her class. But instead she became a celebrated intellectual, a poet and an intimate friend of Alexander Pope, John Gay and other famous writers of the time. In 1712 she eloped with a man named Edward Wortley, forfeiting her inheritance, and went to live in Turkey in 1716, where her husband was the British Ambassador. She discovered a form of smallpox inoculation already used in Turkey, and after first having her own children inoculated, she introduced the treatment into England, where she persuaded the King of England to inoculate his children. She was a brilliant, unconventional woman living in the historical period that I find most exciting. Instead of being trapped by the conventions of her social world, she defied them.
Hunt: I’d like to meet dead people from my family. I never knew my mom’s dad. But perhaps that’s not what you mean by historical, maybe historical has to have famous in there also. Then, the inventor Nikola Tesla. I’ve been writing a novel about him for four years and despite his having lived until 1943, I’ve never been able to find a film or recording of his voice. I’d like to hear him speak since he’s been in my head for so long.
Pritchard: One name insists, that of a place, not a person: Netley Abbey, a 13th century Cistercian monastery, now a ruin, inland from Southampton Water in southern England, six miles south of the former site of the Royal Victorian Military Hospital and Lunatic Asylum, and an hour’s ferry ride from the city of Southampton, former eighteenth century resort spa for English royalty, aristocracy and the likes of novelist Jane Austen, painter John Constable, poet Thomas Gray and the great Gothic aesthete, Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, and his ‘Committee of Taste,’ all of whom paid homage to Netley Abbey. Chosen for its wild, remote location, an ascetic monastery funded by Henry III and designed by the French Gothic architect, Abbot Suger, Netley Abbey, in its near one-thousand-year history, has adapted itself, reflected and borne every human vagary and longing—for spiritual rigor, wealth, sensation, victory over death, for romance and morbid expression, for theater, paganism, reclusivity and intrigue. A shimmering timeline of English history, including its Kings and Queens, has passed through this place, originally, ironically selected for its isolation, its inaccessibility.
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. Recently he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised. Visit Kevin at www.kevinbrockmeier.com.
Sloane Crosley is the author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake, a book of humor essays published by Riverhead Books. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, New York Observer, the Village Voice, Playboy, Teen Vogue, Salon, Black Book, Radar and Maxim. She lives in Manhattan. Visit Sloane at www.sloanecrosley.com.
Sophie Gee is an Assistant Professor of English at Princeton. Her novel The Scandal of the Season, an historical romance, was published by Scribner in August 2007. Visit Sophie at www.sophiegee.com.
Samantha Hunt is the author of two books, The Invention of Everything Else, a novel about the life of Nikola Tesla, and The Seas—for which she was awarded a National Book Foundation award for writers under 35. Visit Samantha at www.samanthahunt.net.
Melissa Pritchard has published six books of fiction, most recently Disappearing Ingénue and Late Bloomer (Doubleday/Anchor). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Pushcart Prize Stories and The O.Henry Awards, among other publications. She is working on a new collection, and her biography of Arizona philanthropist Virginia G. Piper will be published in May 2008. She teaches at Arizona State University. Visit Melissa at www.public.asu.edu/~melissap/.
—Name a historical person you'd like to meet and why.
Brockmeier: James Agee. He wrote one of my favorite novels, A Death in the Family, and a few years ago, I decided to read the Library of America edition of his collected film criticism. It's a volume of great wit, passion, and clarity, as valuable (to me at least) as anything by Pauline Kael, but my enjoyment of it was hampered slightly by the fact that all of the movies Agee discusses were released decades before I was born, and roughly ninety percent of them I have never seen. I was seized by a fantasy of traveling back in time to show him some more recent films so that I could find out what he made of them. Agee, I recognize, is a relatively recent figure, and even in the circle of modern-American-literature lovers he does not have the cultural currency of, say, Hemingway or Faulkner, but I think it's fair to consider him a "historical person," insofar as history is ongoing and he's no longer in it.
Crosley: Guy de Maupassant. First off, he wins the award for Writer with The Most Serious Moustache of All Time. You may even be able to chop “writer” off of that distinction. Beyond that, I think it would be fascinating to meet one of the most prolific short story writers in history knowing what I/we know now: that he is most famous for a single story. And one that’s probably one of the shorter tales he wrote and almost nothing like the rest in form or topic. “The Necklace” is truly amazing and ingenious but it’s also a fluke in a way, wrapped up with a heavy punch line. He’s not the only writer that’s ever happened to, but the irony that “The Necklace” itself is based around a simple misunderstanding... I just wonder how he’d feel about that, if he would see the connection or if he would have picked it out as standing the test of time. Also he grew up with Flaubert as a kindly uncle figure and led a pretty privileged life so if I could go back in time and meet him, I’m pretty sure I’d have a nice French chateau to stay in and some great dinner companions.
Gee: I'd like to meet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an eighteenth century English noblewoman who ended up being one of the most brilliant and eccentric figures of all time. She was born at the end of the seventeenth century, and she could have been an idle aristocrat like other women of her class. But instead she became a celebrated intellectual, a poet and an intimate friend of Alexander Pope, John Gay and other famous writers of the time. In 1712 she eloped with a man named Edward Wortley, forfeiting her inheritance, and went to live in Turkey in 1716, where her husband was the British Ambassador. She discovered a form of smallpox inoculation already used in Turkey, and after first having her own children inoculated, she introduced the treatment into England, where she persuaded the King of England to inoculate his children. She was a brilliant, unconventional woman living in the historical period that I find most exciting. Instead of being trapped by the conventions of her social world, she defied them.
Hunt: I’d like to meet dead people from my family. I never knew my mom’s dad. But perhaps that’s not what you mean by historical, maybe historical has to have famous in there also. Then, the inventor Nikola Tesla. I’ve been writing a novel about him for four years and despite his having lived until 1943, I’ve never been able to find a film or recording of his voice. I’d like to hear him speak since he’s been in my head for so long.
Pritchard: One name insists, that of a place, not a person: Netley Abbey, a 13th century Cistercian monastery, now a ruin, inland from Southampton Water in southern England, six miles south of the former site of the Royal Victorian Military Hospital and Lunatic Asylum, and an hour’s ferry ride from the city of Southampton, former eighteenth century resort spa for English royalty, aristocracy and the likes of novelist Jane Austen, painter John Constable, poet Thomas Gray and the great Gothic aesthete, Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, and his ‘Committee of Taste,’ all of whom paid homage to Netley Abbey. Chosen for its wild, remote location, an ascetic monastery funded by Henry III and designed by the French Gothic architect, Abbot Suger, Netley Abbey, in its near one-thousand-year history, has adapted itself, reflected and borne every human vagary and longing—for spiritual rigor, wealth, sensation, victory over death, for romance and morbid expression, for theater, paganism, reclusivity and intrigue. A shimmering timeline of English history, including its Kings and Queens, has passed through this place, originally, ironically selected for its isolation, its inaccessibility.