LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor:
As a new subscriber to The Common Review, I found myself taking time over the recent Thanksgiving holiday to read Terry Caesar’s essay on Proust. At a time for reflection on what one is grateful for, I realized that I was grateful for this new publication in my life and for Caesar’s essay. I discovered I shared many of Caesar’s experiences—reading more about Proust than reading Proust, the desire to own books as a testimony to fidelity and intention, the struggle to find time to read what one would like, and the puzzlement of missed opportunities to read classic literature. Unlike Caesar, I’ve not even managed to make my way through Swann’s Way, and unlike him, I have in my library the entire Moncrieff translation of Proust’s work. Does that make me better off or worse off?
Feeling a desire inspired by this thoughtful and well-written article, I extended my brief retreat by pulling Moncrieff ’s initial volume from my shelf and reading. “For a long time I used to go to bed early . . .” Proust continues to meditate on the experience of waking and sleeping. As the narrator hears the whistling of trains (I had never before considered Hank Williams and Proust together), he imagines a traveler hurrying to a station with the echoes of farewells punctuating the silence of the night, mingled with “the imminent joy of going home.” A few pages was all I had time for—after all, there were guests upstairs—but my, what beautiful words flowed from those pages. Mr. Caesar’s essay warns against reading Proust for “nuggets” alone, but also admits the possibility that, at times, this is the best way to read him. I hope to return to Proust soon, though it may take a while. Caesar does a wonderful job of noting how easily distractions arise. In the meantime, I am grateful for his essay, which led me to this brief retreat into the “sanctuary of reading.”
Rev. Dr. David A. Bard
Duluth, Minnesota
Dear Editor:
My displeasure at Jonathan Gross’s negative and carping review (Fall 2007) of my book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (TMWWF), was allayed when sales jumped up afterward. Apparently some readers of The Common Review are willing to think for themselves.
The Gross review is a farrago of mistakes, half-truths, innuendoes, and malus animus. Its central theme: Trust the Experts—those with advanced degrees and academic appointments, who “peer review” one another. Despite its length (4,665 words), the review fails to describe my book. Its sour, accusatory tone belies the reports of readers who, whether or not they agreed with everything, found the book a pleasure to read: “engrossing,” “intriguing,” a “suspenseful page-turner,” “funny, accurate, and deadly,” etc. One graduate student read it straight through, taking a break only to eat pizza. For a better description of TMWWF, along with eight reviews, visit paganpressbooks.com/BOOKLIST.HTM.
TMWWF has three theses: 1) Frankenstein is a great work, which has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted; 2) the real author is Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the greatest poets in the English language; 3) male love, as romantic friendship, is a central theme of Frankenstein.
Although the first and third are controversial, it is the second that provokes shock and anger. Bloggers—none intending to read my book—have called me a homosexual, a misogynist, a fascist, a bully, a geek, and a schlub (whatever that is). These responses indicate that Mary Shelley’s authorship of Frankenstein has become sacred dogma—and yet, upon examination, her authorship is no more credible than Santa Claus sliding down a chimney. The real Mary Shelley had little imagination or talent for writing English. The extratextual “evidence” for her authorship falls apart as soon as one scrutinizes it.
I analyze the authorship issue from many standpoints, but concentrate on the text itself: ideas, images, vocabulary, structure, rhythms, and sounds. Frankenstein is an intense and disturbing work, written in poetically powerful prose. It reflects Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ideas and imagination, his phrases, his intensity, his mastery of English prose. In the longest chapter of my book, “Male Love in Frankenstein,” I allow Frankenstein to speak for itself, quoting many long passages, which should be read aloud; they represent some of the most beautiful prose in the English language.
Gross claims this chapter is not original, since others have discussed homoeroticism in Frankenstein. This is unfair. Among many other things, I am the first to treat male love as a central theme; the first to connect Frankenstein passages to Shelley’s “Essay on Love,” other Shelley poems, Ancient Greek poetry, and a Goethe poem; the first to treat the Monster–De Lacy episode as the heart of Frankenstein and as an allegory on Tolerance; the first to identify De Lacy as Shelley’s mentor, Dr. Lind; and the first to decode hidden references to male love.
Gross discusses at inordinate length the Frankenstein Notebooks, edited by Charles E. Robinson, to which I devote an entire chapter in TMWWF. But he slithers away from the central issue: the false assumption, made by Robinson, Anne Mellor, and their followers, that words in Mary Shelley’s handwriting were, by this fact alone, composed by her. Since Mary routinely took dictation from Shelley and did copy work for him and other writers, the assumption is false. There exist manuscripts where all of the words in Mary’s handwriting were composed by someone else: Shelley, Byron, or Peacock. This issue is appallingly simple. By now Robinson and Mellor must know that their handwriting–authorship assumption is wrong, and it’s high time they admitted it.
Commending Mellor as among the “names to trust,” Gross disapprovingly cites my description of her Mary Shelley book as “seminally pernicious.” I defend “seminally pernicious” on two grounds: 1) Mellor first popularized the handwriting–authorship fallacy, and 2) Mellor pioneered the building up of Mary’s reputation by tearing down Shelley’s. Mellor unreasonably blames Shelley for the deaths of his children; she castigates him for spending time reading books and writing when he should have been tending to the emotional needs of his wife.
Gross insinuates that a quote from the 1897 Dictionary of National Biography is “strangely absent” from my book. No, it isn’t. The statement, with commentary, is on page 202.
Gross misleadingly charges that I am “eager to take on every scholar who has written about Frankenstein—even those like Phyllis Zimmerman . . . who anticipate [my] point of view.” Hardly. The entire first chapter of TMWWF is my enthusiastically favorable review of Zimmerman’s book, Shelley’s Fiction, which I describe as “an important, ground-breaking work of Shelley criticism.”
Gross claims that ad hominem attacks are a consistent feature of my work. This I deny. I have unsparingly attacked the ideas of my opponents, but not their persons. Here Gross is hypocritical, for he himself engages in many ad hominem attacks on me.
Amusingly, Gross quotes a passage from the 1831 introduction (not preface) to Frankenstein, as though Mary Shelley were a profound thinker, “considering the larger question of origins.” Here’s the quote: “The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise.” Compare that with the following, from Mary Shelley’s father William Godwin’s Thoughts on Man (1831): “It is like the case of the Indian philosopher, who, being asked what it was that kept the earth in its place, answered, that it was supported by an elephant, and that elephant again rested on a tortoise.” Clearly, the two quotes support my hypothesis, that Godwin wrote at least part, and perhaps all, of the 1831 introduction.
The time has come to raise Frankenstein to its deserved stature; it is a profound and moving masterpiece, fully worthy of its author, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is also time to grapple with the real ideas of Frankenstein.
—John Lauritsen, author
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein
Jonathan Gross Responds:
The explication of homoerotic themes in Frankenstein is so shopworn as to have become an occasion for apology in literary journals. For yet another example, see James McGavran’s “Insurmountable Barriers to Our Union: Homosocial Male Bonding, Homosexual Panic, and Death on the Ice in Frankenstein” (2000), published by the European Romantic Review. And the identification of De Lacy with Shelley’s mentor, Dr. Lind—one of Lauritsen’s important “discoveries”—may fail to impress readers who know that Frankenstein is neither an algebraic equation nor a roman à clef. Male love is certainly a well-documented theme in the novel, but not a central one.
And what of Mary Shelley’s talent as a writer? In over 14 years of teaching, my students have repeatedly preferred the direct style of Mary Shelley’s novel to the Latinate diction of Percy Shelley, whose contributions to the preface of Frankenstein they find high-handed and arrogant, Victor-like in its pronouncements. Mary Shelley would never have had the hubris to compare her work to Shakespeare and Homer, as Percy Shelley did in the preface he wrote to her novel. Mary Shelley read many writers, including William Godwin, but she made use of their work (and often disagreed with the moral implications therein) in ways that show her originality.
Though Lauritsen holds Percy Shelley in such high regard, his view has not always been shared. Matthew Arnold compared Shelley unfavorably to Wordsworth and Byron, and Tennyson thought him “too much in the clouds.” For those who think Percy Shelley an invincible prose stylist, I recommend St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian and Zastrozzi, two works of juvenilia by Percy Shelley, which will give them a renewed appreciation for the talents of his wife.
Mary Shelley did not need to take dictation from anyone. To suggest that she did is to falsify the historical record. Mary Shelley transcribed portions of Don Juan after the death of her husband, but she also suggested phrases that Byron incorporated into the poem. Even Byron had a higher opinion of Mary Shelley’s literary gifts than John Lauritsen. Perhaps she could even be considered a cocreator of his mock-heroic epic. But why not take the argument further? If she transcribed Cantos 10–12 of Don Juan, who’s to say she didn’t write them?