P HIL A D E L P H I A T H E AT R E CO MPA N Y at the
A Vicious Circle of Famous (and Notorious) Literary Mentors and Their Protégés Carrie Chapter
PTC Dramaturg
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” —Ernest Hemingway
In SEMINAR there is the power dynamic – a percolating mixture of elation, envy, greed, and ingenuity - which exists in teacher-student relationships. In the best case scenario, both parties find a synergy of respect and achievement with the worst case scenario being a sea of dissonance. History is full of examples where greatness has begotten greatness, much to the delight or chagrin of the mentor in question.
Ezra Pound (The Cantos) and T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land), Poets
Retrospectively quoted by the New York Times as the literary embodiment of “Felix & Oscar”, this poetic pair was dubbed a true odd couple: Eliot, the tidy wunderkind, and Pound, the rascally revolutionary. After reading Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, it was Pound who implored Eliot to leave his academic destiny at Oxford in order to fully engage his inner artist (he even went one step further with confronting Eliot’s family himself with the news). This was not the first time Pound caught a whiff of genius and pursued it: he acted as an unlikely benefactor to a down-andout James Joyce as well in the form of small fund-raising and even throwing him a pair of shoes. As an editor, Ezra Pound had the grace and insight of a Greek muse in Eliot’s eyes. He challenged every convention,
Influence:
John Hamilton Mortimer’s “Literary Characters Assembled Around the Medallion of Shakespeare”, 1776
and promoted Eliot’s work with unflagging tenacity, earning the title “il miglior fabbro” (“the finer craftsman”) by his thankful protégé. While Eliot christened Pound with such a grand, Italianate allusion, Pound honored Eliot with the nickname “Old Possum.” Pound, who was raised in the Philadelphia area (and tried, without success, to finish a degree at the University of Pennsylvania), grew increasingly mercurial, though, and in his later years, he lost favor with most of his peers, even T.S. Eliot.
Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady) and Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence), Novelists/ Short Story Writers
In truth, Wharton pursued Henry James long before he took notice. She had been in his presence twice because they floated among the same circle of friends, but James never approached her. Admiring of his work and desperate for his thoughts on her writing, she sent the manuscript of her short story collection, and James only confided in one of their mutual friends about his critical response (to make the Jamesian prose short, there was variance in her voice, and he thought she wrote better when she wrote as herself ). However, by 1900, Wharton and James were sharing literary territory in various journals and magazines of the day. Struck by one particularly controversial story she wrote, James at long last wrote her a letter, excerpted here:
“Dear Mrs. Wharton, I brave your interdiction & thank you both for your letter & for the brilliant little tale in the Philadelphia repository [Lippincott’s]. The latter has an admirable sharpness & neatness, & infinite wit & point – it only suffers a little, I think, from one’s not having a direct glimpse of the husband’s provoking causes – literally provoking ones. . . The subject is really a big one for the canvas – that was really your difficulty. But the thing is done. And I applaud, I mean I value, I egg you on in, your study of the American life that surrounds you. Let yourself go in it & at it – it’s an untouched field, really: the folk who try, over there, don’t come within miles of any civilized, however superficially, any ‘evolved’ life[…]Do send me what you write, when you can kindly find time, & do, some day, better still, come to see yours, dear Mrs. Wharton, most truly, Henry James” Three years later, after a slew of correspondence, Wharton and James met in person, an encounter that led to a steadfast friendship as well as many adventures as travel companions. The latter is especially well chronicled in a Wharton “road trip” piece about their time “motoring” together.
Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury) and Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), Novelists/Short Story Writers
A tri-cornered hat of inspiration, Sherwood Anderson became the torchbearer for two of our country’s greatest novelists. Faulkner fell in line first. He was besotted with Anderson’s short stories, and sought him out as a mentor, a task Anderson heartily accepted. He encouraged Faulkner to infuse his work with his experiences as a young man, in order to create a more complex humanity for his characters and their environment. He soon found publishers for Faulkner’s work, and, like true fraternity brothers, the two lived together in a conflicted state of mentorship and resentment. As time went on, their contentious relationship worsened: Anderson accused Faulkner of exaggerating his past, so Faulkner flexed his claws, lambasting Anderson’s work in public (in particular, Winesburg, Ohio). Anderson then connected with Ernest Hemingway, but it was a brief flurry of an affair; their correspondence did not make it to even six months. However, the two writers bonded over their similar approaches to writing, and even at their first meeting, Hemingway craved Anderson’s advice. For example, Anderson was the one who first planted the seed of world travel in Hemingway’s head, encouraging him to indulge in the Paris scene (for better or worse) and to write about his war encounters as much as his experiences with love. But, Hemingway never quite conquered his jealousy with regard to Anderson’s prestige factor and his luck with the ladies, and the pair did
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not separate on good terms. Still, to this day, Hemingway’s legacy cannot escape the impact of their time together – in the eyes of many scholars, he remains the closest descendant of Anderson’s writing.
Richard Wright (Native Son) and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Poets/Novelists
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Wright and Ellison represent divergent forces in search of a common goal. Both writers sought to give the African-American man and his experiences a showcase in American literature. Originally a student of music and sculpture, Ralph Ellison had no designs on a writer’s life – until he met Richard Wright in 1937. Langston Hughes acted as the conduit between the two men, by introducing Ellison to Wright’s poetry, and later to Wright himself. Though Wright was stretched thin between his writings and activity with black communist groups in New York City, he agreed to take Ellison on as his young mentee. Wright’s most significant contribution to Ellison’s career occurred through the Federal Writers’ Project, a position he dutifully secured for his new charge. Its effect was enormous. His eventual novel, Invisible Man, would come out of those interviews and essays Ellison conducted and compiled through the Project. However, with the publication of Wright’s Native Son, Ellison broke ties with his mentor. His reason for the split had to do with Wright’s approach to his characters, which he felt
was overly simple, angry, and hopelessly repressed. In his own writing, Ellison made the choice to portray the African –American identity with greater emphasis on articulation, perseverance, and positive strength.
Joyce Carol Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys) and Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated), Novelists
Marianne Moore (Tell Me, Tell Me) and Elizabeth Bishop (Exchanging Hats), Poets
In 1934, a college librarian arranged a meeting between “poor Vassar girl”, Elizabeth Bishop, and the venerable Marianne Moore. The two met outside the NY Public Library on a bench, and soon developed a devoted camaraderie, even though they formally addressed each other as “Miss Moore” and “Miss Bishop” for over two years. Bishop maintains that Moore’s “enlightening” stream of letters and presence in her life constantly inspired her as a writer. Though they laughed off speculations of a mentoring relationship, their effect on one another became abundantly clear, particularly in Bishop’s poem, “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” in which she summons her friend over the Brooklyn Bridge to “come flying.” The poets also paralleled each other in their writerly habits, both taking years revising single poems and finding their muse in the beauty of nature.
As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Foer worked on his Creative Writing thesis with his teacher and advisor, author Joyce Carol Oates. His thesis would later become the novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which resulted in a $500,000 advance and The Guardian First Book Award. Strangely enough, Foer never imagined pursuing the life of an author, until he enrolled in Oates’s class. It was Oates who pulled him aside to persuade him otherwise. During a school break, Oates did something she never did before, she wrote a personal letter to Foer delivered to his home in Washington, D.C., detailing his artistic potential: “You appear to have a very strong and promising talent coupled with that most important of writerly qualities, energy.” Enclosed was also a reading list composed by Oates with Foer’s emergent style in mind. He was only 18 years old.