Images via the excellent and highly recommended Bibliodyssey. The full 800 plus pages of the book in high-res scans are housed here on the website of the Library of Congress project The Atlantic World: America and the Netherlands.
This is just an automatic copy of Public Domain Review blog.
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/29/arnoldus-montanus-new-and-unknown-world-1671/
In most countries around the world, 2011 saw the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald enter the public domain. Scott Donaldson, author of the biography Fool For Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald, explores the obscuring nature of his legend and the role that women played in his life and work.
With Fitzgerald as with no one else in American literature save Poe, the biography gets in the way. Never mind that F. Scott Fitzgerald is the author of one exquisite short novel as perfect as anything in our literature and of another longer, more chaotic novel of tremendous emotional power. Never mind that he has written a couple of dozen stories that by any standard deserve the designation of “masterful.” Ignoring those legacies, much of the general public still tends to think of him in connection with the legends of his disordered and difficult life, and to classify him under one convenient stereotype or another. So diminished in stature, Fitzgerald becomes the Chronicler of the Jazz Age, or the Artist in Spite of Himself, or – most prevalent stereotype of all – the Writer as Burnt-Out Case: a man whose tragic course functions as a cautionary tale for more commonsensical aftercomers. His saga offers an almost irresistible temptation to sermonizers, overt or concealed. It is not right to ride on top of taxicabs or disport oneself in the Plaza hotel’s fountain, not right to drink to excess or abuse a “lovely golden wasted talent.” Go thou and do otherwise.
This warning usually remains implicit, of course. It is not the homily but the tale of star-crossed lovers that commands attention – handsome brilliant erratic Scott married for good or ill to beautiful willful unstable Zelda. There is an arresting poignancy in the way the two of them – Scott more than Zelda, perhaps – considered the alternatives and chose the sweet poison. Somehow, in the repeated retellings of this tale, the Fitzgeralds have come to stand for a kind of generic nonspecific glamour, now sadly departed. In 1980 the opening party for an exhibit of Fitzgeraldiana at the National Portrait Gallery drew an enormous crowd determined to celebrate a vanished past. The band played Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman numbers from the 1940s, the decade following Fitzgerald’s death. A few women attempted flapper costumes, but for the most part the clothes were as anachronistic as the music. One chap, aiming for colonial elegance, danced in a pith helmet. The details that mattered so much to Fitzgerald, a man precisely in tune with his times, mattered very little to those come to the party to memorialize his legend. Zelda and Scott, Scott and Zelda – they are fixed so securely in the collective mind as lovable reckless youths for whom it all went disastrously wrong that it has been difficult to set that image aside and concentrate on the work that established him as one of the major literary artists of the twentieth century.
Henry James, himself a biographer as well as a novelist, understood that the entire truth about anyone could never be told. “We can only take what groups together,” he said. What most grouped together in Fitzgerald’s work and life, I came to realize over several decades in the classroom and five years of intensive research, was an overweening compulsion to please. He wanted to please other men, but did a poor job of it. His Princeton classmates considered him over-inquisitive and frivolous. Zelda’s father thought him unreliable. Ernest Hemingway, the closest of friends in the mid-1920s, eventually came to regard him with something like scorn. Fitzgerald was far more successful in pleasing women. Readers of his fiction might expect as much, for he is one of our more androgynous writers, with a rare capacity to put himself in the place of characters of either sex. “All my characters are Scott Fitzgeralds,” he acknowledged. “Even my female characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds.” The set of instructions Fitzgerald drew up, at 18, for his younger sister Annabel provides convincing evidence along these lines. In this remarkable document he coached his sister in the finer points of attracting boys: how to groom herself, how to dance, what to talk about, how to flatter. And the androgyny is everywhere evident in the stories and novels, too, which is probably why most female college students are attracted to his fiction.
Equipped with this sensitivity, Fitzgerald played the game of courtship well. As a youth he was a notoriously successful flirt. “I’ve got an adjective that just fits you,” he would tell a dancing partner early in the evening, and then withhold the laudatory word to build up her expectations. He was good-looking, and at ease in the company of girls. He listened to them as few other boys did, and made it clear that he cared tremendously what they thought of him. Later, as a married man, he continued to woo women. He couldn’t help it. He needed their approval, which is to say their love and adoration. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald may have been the most important woman in his life, but she was not and could not be the only one.
Fitzgerald suffered a tremendous setback when Ginevra King of Lake Forest, north of Chicago – one of the wealthiest and most beautiful debutantes of her day – spurned him in order to marry a young man of her own class. The rejection devastated Fitzgerald, even as it supplied him with the basic subject matter of much of his fiction. There are probably more characters in his stories and novels modeled on Ginevra than on Zelda Sayre, who caught him on the rebound. By altering the circumstances of the plot, Fitzgerald played variations on the age-old theme of the battle of the sexes.
What is unusual about Fitzgerald’s treatment of this theme is its escalation – in the work as in the life — from the courting game of his adolescence to the fierce battle of his young manhood to the outright war of his maturity. Perhaps, we are inclined to think, Amory Blaine will not suffer unduly from his jilting by Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald’s first novel. But Gatsby dies for Daisy in his 1925 masterpiece, and Dick Diver is stripped of his vitality and tossed aside by Nicole and her family in 1934’s Tender is the Night. In Fitzgerald’s fictional treatment of the war between the sexes, it is almost always the man who ends up defeated. By repeatedly depicting the downfall of his male figures, Fitzgerald was imagining what might well have happened (had not Zelda been afflicted with schizophrenia) and also – it seems to me – excoriating himself for his weaknesses. Tender, in particular, is a novel about the enervating effects of charm. Compelled to please everyone around him (and particularly women), Diver dissipates away his life’s work and his usefulness as a human being. The real Fitzgerald, like his invented protagonist, came to despise himself for this “fatal pleasingness,” a self-disgust that characteristically emerged under the influence of alcohol. Drinking runs like an inner malaise through Fitzgerald’s life and that of many of his male characters. His triumph came in the last years of his life, when – supposedly down and out in Hollywood – he cast aside this obsession, quit drinking, and went back to being what he called “a writer only.”
One of America’s leading literary biographers, Scott Donaldson has written eight books about 20th century American authors. These include Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scott (1972), By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (1977), Fool for Love, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), John Cheever: A Biography (1988), Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (1992), winner of the 1993 Ambassador Book Award for biography, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (1999), Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (2007), named the best biography of the year by Contemporary Poetry Forum, and Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days (2009). This present article is excerpted from the preface to a new paperback edition of his Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald from the University of Minnesota Press.
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/26/a-few-words-about-f-scott-fitzgerald/
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/24/gurdjieffs-harmonium-improvisations-1949/
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/22/maps-from-geographicus/
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/21/hydriotaphia-urn-burial-and-the-garden-of-cyrus-1658/
In 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the first ever book that could be described as ‘mathematical fiction’. Ian Stewart, author of Flatterland and The Annotated Flatland, introduces the strange tale of the geometric adventures of A. Square.
Edwin Abbott Abbott, who became Headmaster of the City of London School at the early age of 26, was renowned as a teacher, writer, theologian, Shakespearean scholar, and classicist. He was a religious reformer, a tireless educator, and an advocate of social democracy and improved education for women. Yet his main claim to fame today is none of these: a strange little book, the first and almost the only one of its genre: mathematical fantasy. Abbott called it Flatland, and published it in 1884 under the pseudonym A. Square.
On the surface — and the setting, the imaginary world of Flatland, is a surface, an infinite Euclidean plane — the book is a straightforward narrative about geometrically shaped beings that live in a two-dimensional world. A. Square, an ordinary sort of chap, undergoes a mystical experience: a visitation by the mysterious Sphere from the Third Dimension, who carries him to new worlds and new geometries. Inspired by evangelical zeal, he strives to convince his fellow citizens that the world is not limited to the two dimensions accessible to their senses, falls foul of the religious authorities, and ends up in jail.
The story has a timeless appeal, and has never been out of print since its first publication. It has spawned several sequels and has been the subject of at least one radio programme and two animated films. Not only is the book about hidden dimensions: it has its own hidden dimensions. Its secret mathematical agenda is not the notion of two dimensions, but that of four. Its social agenda pokes fun at the rigid stratification of Victorian society, especially the low status of women, even the wives and daughters of the wealthy.
Flatland’s inhabitants are triangles, squares, and other geometric figures. In the planar world’s orderly hierarchy, one’s status depends on one’s degree of regularity and how many sides one has. An isosceles triangle is superior to a scalene triangle (all sides different) but inferior to an equilateral triangle. But all triangles must defer to squares, which in turn defer to pentagons, hexagons, right up to the pinnacle of Flatland society, the Priestshood. Referred to as ‘circles’, the priests are actually polygons with so many sides that no one can distinguish them. The sons of squares are usually pentagons, the grandsons hexagons, so there is a general progression along the greasy pole (there is no ‘up’ in Flatland).
But what of the wives and daughters? Flatland’s women are mere line segments, actually very thin triangles, whose social standing is zero. Their intelligence is little greater. They are required by law to wiggle from side to side so that they can be seen, and to emit loud cries so that they can be heard, because a collision with a woman is as fatal as one with a stiletto. Abbott took a bit of stick from some of his female contemporaries, who failed to appreciate his irony. But we know from his own life, including his daughter’s education, that he did a lot to improve the status of women and to ensure they received the same level of education as men.
Abbott wasn’t particularly good at, or keen on, mathematics, but his book tackled an issue of great interest in Victorian times, the notion of four (or more) dimensions. This idea was becoming fundamental in science and mathematics, and it was also being invoked in areas like theology and spiritualism, because an invisible extra dimension was just the place to locate God, the spirit world, or ghosts. Charlatans like the American medium Henry Slade were exploiting conjuring tricks to claim access to the Fourth Dimension. Legitimate hyperspace philosophers were speculating about the role that additional dimensions might play in illuminating the human condition.
Flatland approaches this topic by way of a dimensional analogy, widely used ever since, and not entirely Abbott’s own invention. The difficulties facing a three-dimensional Victorian attempting to grasp the geometry of four dimensions are similar to those facing A. Square attempting to grasp the geometry of three. Among Abbott’s sources for this analogy were frequent social encounters with eminent scientists such as the physicist John Tyndall, whom he met at George Eliot’s house in 1871. Tyndall may have told Abbott about the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, who gave public lectures on non-Euclidean geometry using the image of an imaginary two-dimensional creature living on a mathematical surface. Another likely source is the outrageous Charles Howard Hinton, who wrote his own book about a two-dimensional world in his 1907 An Episode of Flatland: How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension.
Abbott’s mathematico-literary legacy is a series of Flatland spin-offs: Dionys Burger’s Sphereland, Rudy Rucker’s short story ‘Message Found in a Copy of Flatland’ and his novel The Fourth Dimension, Alexander Keewatin Dewdney’s The Planiverse, and my own Flatterland. But what he was really trying to tell his readers was more subtle. Just as a humble square can transcend his plane world and aspire to the Third Dimension, so the women and the lower classes of Victorian England could transcend the confines of their stratified society and aspire to a higher plane of existence. More than 120 years later, it is a message that has lost none of its urgency.
Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick and the author of numerous popular mathematics books, including Flatterland and The Annotated Flatland. His most recent book is Mathematics of Life.
Flatland : a romance of many dimensions (1884) by Edwin Abbott Abbott
An Episode of Flatland: How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907) by Charles Howard Hinton
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/19/aspiring-to-a-higher-plane/
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/18/dutch-fashion-reel-1969/
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/18/betty-boop-minnie-the-moocher-1932/
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/17/suddenly-1954/
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/09/17/the-phantom-of-the-opera-1925/