http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/ Researching the British poet, radio dramatist, and translator Henry Reed (1914-1986), author of "Naming of Parts." en-us steef@solearabiantree.net (Reeding Lessons) Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:37:42 GMT Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:37:42 GMT steef@solearabiantree.net 60 http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/images/reedportrait.jpg http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/ 98 98 Reeding Lessons Julian Potter, writing of his father's days as a radio writer and producer, in Stephen Potter at the BBC: 'Features' in War and Peace (Orford, Suffolk: Orford Books, 2004), devotes a short sub-chapter to Henry Reed's 1947 adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick for the Third Programme. The Third was all of four months old when Moby Dick: A Play for Radio from Herman Melville's Novel aired in two parts on the evening of January 25th, 1947, and the play helped substantiate the new programme's reputation in providing dramatic productions for discerning listeners. Stephen Potter (Wikipedia) produced the radio version of Moby Dick, and his correspondence and diaries lend some idea of what an arduous task such an undertaking could be: a year in the making; acquiring a composer and getting the music just so; editing Reed's script; with delays owed to casting and illness—everything down to the wire until just before broadcast. Julian Potter falls victim to one of the classic blunders, however: he gets Reed's name wrong. Throughout the book he mistakenly confuses Henry Reed with the author Henry Green. This is simply unconscionable, and can only be forgivable if one supposes the senior Potter referring to Reed by Christian name only in his interoffice memos and diary entries. Here is the section from Potter at the BBC concerning the production of Moby Dick, with Reed's name properly amended (pp. 195-197): Moby Dick Stephen's longest single production was Moby Dick, a radio adaptation of Melville's novel by Henry [Reed]. It lasted two-and-a-quarter hours and was of a length that only listeners to the Third were expected to tolerate. [Reed] had written it while working during the war as a cryptographer at Bletchley. Presumably he had a broadcast in mind, but at the time he affected to despise radio. He was converted by The Dark Tower [by Louis MacNeice]. After hearing it, he wrote to MacNeice in January 1946, 'I have always thought your claim for radio's potentialities excessive; I now begin, reluctantly, to think you may be right.' Stephen had read [Reed's] adaptation and promoted it: at a lunch with [Sir George] Barnes on 31 January it was agreed that he should ... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/awhaleofablunder http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/awhaleofablunder Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:37:42 GMT Reeding Lessons Field trip, Saturday, June 28th, 2008: Distance: 253.7 mi. (round trip) Drive time: 4.25 hr. Avg. speed: 57.5 mph Gas: 8.5 gal. (@ $4.01/gal.=$36.09) Avg. mpg: 29.85 Dr. Pepper: 20.0 fl. oz. H2O: 1.0 litre Chewing gum: 6 pcs. Libraries: 1.0 Library time: 3.0 hr. Cigarettes: 11 Avg. cph: 1.52 Photocopies: 169 (@ $0.08/pg.=$13.52) Motets: 20... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/vitalstatistics http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/vitalstatistics Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:42:51 GMT Reeding Lessons Here's a taste of an article by Michael Millgate, famed Hardy biographer and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto (Millgate, previously). The article is titled "Sources," and it deals with the responsibility of biographers to obtain evidence for their subjects which is 'as direct, as specific, and as authentic as possible,' and the problems they face attempting to do so. The article is from the June/September 2006 issue of English Studies in Canada (p. 55-62): Most literary biographers... are by the nature of things less likely to encounter their subjects in the flesh than to find themselves dealing with families, friends, executors, lawyers, agents, servants, and so forth, and such relationships can present difficulties of their own. My former colleague Richard Purdy, Thomas Hardy's distinguished and (let me assure you) always dignified bibliographer, kept a secret on-the-spot record of his important conversations with Hardy's widow in the years immediately following Hardy's death but was deeply embarrassed, so he once told me, by the need to excuse himself for the frequent washroom visits that gave him his only opportunities to jot down whatever had just been said. The English poet and playwright Henry Reed spent several years working on an eventually abandoned biography of Hardy and later drew upon that experience in an aciduously amusing radio play called A Very Great Man Indeed, dedicated to the proposition that the friends of the deceased, though ostensibly helpful, may prove in practice to possess not just defective or selective memories but their own personal agendas, ranging all the way from simple self-promotion to active revenge. Researchers early in the field often have access—for good or ill—to just such a roster of first-hand and even intimate witnesses, what might be called the usual suspects. As time passes, however, deaths occur, and as new researchers enter the field they typically resort to rounding up a series of second-tier players much less closely connected to the subject. Thomas Hardy's reputation, for one, has suffered a good deal from the publication of belated interviews with townsfolk whose memories yield up little more than ancient gossip and with former servants still incapable, forty and fifty years later, of forgiving a great man's small tips. That one-sentence summary of A Ver... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/millgatemention http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/millgatemention Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:11:04 GMT Reeding Lessons Okay, let's see: if I get up early Saturday, I can get my laundry done by about eleven a.m., get home and put my clothes away, and then point the car west toward the nearest library with a subscription to the PN Review. PN Review 180 (vol. 34, no. 4 [Mar/Apr 2008]: p. 36-41) apparently contains Henry Reed's translations of Eugenio Montale's "Mottetti," twenty poems (motets) originally published in Italy, in Montale's Le occasioni (The Occasions, 1939). This is wonderful news! Here's the description from EBSCOHost's database: The article provides information on Henry Reed's translations of poetry by Eugenio Montale. It was previously noted that Reed's completed but unpublished translations of Montale are lively even though Montale himself was an abundant source of pessimism. The manuscripts of Reed's translations of Montale's poems are housed in the Special Collections of the Main Library of the University of Birmingham in England, where Reed completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies. The sequence of poems known as Mottetti, translated by Reed, is presented.The last time Reed's translations of the Mottetti came to my attention was in 2006, when I found a mention by Harry Thomas in his collection of Montale translations (London: Penguin, 2002; New York: Handsel, 2005). And now they're in print! The subsequent issue of PN Review (May/Jun 2008) contains two letters to the editor in response to Reed's translations. If they turn out to have significant new information, I'll have to buy copies of both issues! Individual copies are available for purchase from Carcanet Press.... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/henryreedinthepnreview http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/henryreedinthepnreview Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:19:27 GMT Reeding Lessons Please, keep in mind that this is a work in progress, extremely rough. I've been toying around with it since last fall, when I was trying to find the original location of Bowen's Court (#15, below). Allow me to present The Life and Times of Henry Reed: A Google Map (βeta). Click this image to go the map page, and then you can follow the labeled locations, zoom in and out, and switch between road map and satellite views. And of course, remember, "Maps are of time, not place." I used one of the Google Maps API Demos to kludge the map into The Poetry of Henry Reed pages. It should be relatively browser-friendly, though I've really only test-driven it in Firefox. If you have problems, try looking at my original Henry Reed map in Google. I've already received one comment which allowed me to amend my timeline of Reed's life, and I'm updating the map on almost a daily basis.... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/henryreedgooglemap http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/henryreedgooglemap Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:11:39 GMT Reeding Lessons Dr. William Turner Levy, who died this past January, was an author, professor, and an ordained Episcopal priest (LA Times obituary), who called among his friends First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the director Frank Capra, and T.S. Eliot. Levy chronicled his friendship with the poet in Affectionately, T.S. Eliot, The Story of a Friendship: 1947-1965 (.pdf). T.S. Eliot, Pencil and Chalk Drawing from life, by his sister-in-law Theresa G. Eliot, 1955. A strange convergence took place on Sunday, April 27, 1958, when Eliot was returning from appearing at an exhibition of his first editions and personal papers at the University of Texas at Austin. He and his second wife, Valerie Fletcher, stopped in New York to pay Levy a visit. Eliot arrived wearing a ten-gallon hat, having been made an honorary sheriff (I'm not making this up). After attending church with Levy's parents, the group retired to Levy's study for a martini brunch. Levy proudly showed off some books and papers he had purchased: I next showed Tom another new acquisition, two pages in Dylan Thomas's handwriting, from a notebook which he had used during his poetry readings. The pages contained the poem "Chard Witlow" [sic] by Henry Reed, a facetious take-off on Tom's "Burnt Norton." Tom gave it a close scrutiny, and remarked, "You know, I've been chairman of the British group that has been raising funds for Dylan Thomas's family. Caitlin, his wife, asked me to—a very sad business." Thomas's death in New York had left his family almost penniless. Tom removed his fountain pen from inside his breast pocket and wrote on the bottom of the second of the two pages. When he finished, he handed it to my parents, who read it and passed it to Valerie. When it reached my hands, Tom said,... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/cowboytom http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/cowboytom Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:09:41 GMT Reeding Lessons This snippet from My Sister and Myself: The Diaries of J.R. Ackerley (edited by Francis King, 1982) made me laugh: ... http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/pickupjoe http://www.solearabiantree.net/reedinglessons/post/pickupjoe Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:23:09 GMT