|
|
Documenting the quest to track down everything written by
(and written about) the poet, translator, critic, and radio
dramatist, Henry Reed.
An obsessive, armchair attempt to assemble a comprehensive
bibliography, not just for the work of a poet, but for his
entire life.
Read " Naming of Parts."
|
Contact:
|
|
|
|
Reeding:
|
|
Enclosures and Disclosures: Mercer Simpson's most recent collection of poetry.
|
|
Anathem: A monastery of cloistered scholars must save their world from catastrophe.
|
|
Balthazar: The second title in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.
|
|
|
|
Elsewhere:
|
|
All posts for "Letters"
|
|
|
20.11.2008
|
In November of 1947, Henry Reed wrote a letter to George Barnes, Controller for the BBC's Third Programme ( picture of Barnes, later the Director of BBC Television). The letter was ostensibly about a radio adaptation of The Dynasts, Thomas Hardy's epic verse drama of the Napoleonic Wars. Reed, however, took the time to expound on the art of broadcasting, specifically rejecting the idea that the dramatist's main role is to maintain the illusion for the listener. An excerpt from this letter appears in John Drakakis' Introduction to British Radio Drama:
It is a myth that Radio has any capacity for inducing in the mind of the listener anything in the nature of particularized visualization. You might, once in an evening persuade him to see one of those great stage directions; but not, I think, more than one. For when radio had to suggest a scene to the listener, it does best to give only a brief powerful hint from which, with the help of specially written dialogue designed to an end, the listener can without effort and perhaps only half-consciously, construct a scene from the innumerable landscapes or roomscapes (!) bundled away in his own memory. (p. 22-23)
Apparently, having had a total of two full-length plays broadcast in 1947 ( Moby Dick, and Pytheas), Reed felt confident enough to tell the Controller how radio works, and how their listeners listen. Reed's six-part adaptation of Hardy's Dynasts was broadcast on consecutive evenings in June of 1951. The original letter resides in the BBC Written Archives.
|
1349. Grigson, Geoffrey, ed. The Concise Encyclopaedia of Modern World Literature. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1963.
Reed is listed among the contributors to this reference work.
|
Two fortuitous happenings this weekend. Firstly: more than a week ago—before I traipsed down to Duke University and back, even—I photocopied two articles from 1961 at the university library. One was Reed's book review of Emma Hardy's Some Recollections from The Listener, and the other was a review of Three Plays, by Ugo Betti, from Prairie Schooner. In my haste to read the Listener article, I managed to leave the Schooner review on the copier output tray.
Going back to the library this evening, I re-pulled the 1961 Prairie Schooner volume from the shelf, and when I arrived at the photocopier what should I find? My copies from the previous week, neatly arranged on the adjacent work table. Buddha bless Duplication Services!
The second happening took place at the local Barnes & Noble, where I was attempting to take account of all the articles, reviews, and letters I had dug up down at Duke. B&N's wireless service conked out after an hour or so, however, so after I had finished licking the inside of my coffee cup, I went down to peruse the Poetry section on my way out. A paperback copy of The Letters of Robert Lowell (bn.com) caught my eye, and I immediately turned to the index, under "R". There was one entry for Reed, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, who had left Brazil to take a job teaching at the University of Washington, Seattle:
February 25, 1966
Dearest Elizabeth:
Wonderful your letters are pouring out again. I had terrible pictures of you despondent and lost in the new toil of teaching—lonely, cold at sea. Lizzie taught last term at Barnard for the first time in her life. Her first comment was 'the students aren't very good, but I am...[.]'
Your book is another species from almost everything else. I think even the reviewers now see that there's no one, except Marianne Moore at all comparable to you. I guess I struck Roethke under a bit more favorable circumstance. I mean last year when I came to Seattle, I was to give the Roethke Memorial reading and had worked myself into the proper state of awe...[.]
Do tell Reed to come and see us. He must have saved your heart in exile. What a difference an intelligent voice makes. Our Guadeloupe beach was restoring, but one felt stupider than the stupidest tourist—and was!
All my love,
Cal
Lowell signed all his letters to friends as "Cal". Bishop must have mentioned that Reed was also teaching at the university in a preceding letter.
I was pleased to discover that Lowell's Letters are arranged the way a collection of correspondence should be; the credit going to the editor, Saskia Hamilton. There is a substantial appendix of notes at the end of the volume, detailing all the obscure and personal references in the letters; a list of all the manuscript collections where the letters were collected from; and a list of all the addresses Lowell lived at and wrote from. At the time, in 1966, Lowell was living at West 67th Street, New York.
I have no idea if Bishop ever passed along Lowell's invitation for a visit.
|
1348. Sonzogni, Marco. Afterword to Mottetti, by Eugenio Montale, translated by Henry Reed. PN Review 180 34, no. 4 (March-April 2008): 38-41.
Sonzogni appraises Reed's translations of Montale's Mottetti, and describes Reed's manuscripts and his history with the poems and the Italian language.
|
A heartbreaking turn of events appeared this evening, in Michael Millgate's Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). In a letter dated December 7, 1936, Florence Hardy (then aged 57) mentions 'A young man from one of the universities visiting me a few weeks ago said that all the stories one heard were amusing yet the time might come when the nation would be tired of a comic Royal Family.' Millgate notes this "young man" was none other than Henry Reed. In 1936, Reed had graduated with an MA from the University of Birmingham, and he was compiling material and interviewing contemporaries for his planned biography of Thomas Hardy.
Later, Millgate produces a letter to Reed from Florence Hardy: To Henry Reed
max gate, | dorchester, | dorset.
25th Dec. (1936)
Dear Mr. Reed,
I have been thinking very long & seriously about the book we discussed when you were here, and the more I think about it the more impossible it seems. My own memory is not good & becomes worse & worse, & probably I have exaggerated in my own mind much that was told me, &, as for Miss [Katherine "Kate"] Hardy, she is an old lady in bad health, who has, during the last days lost her nearest surviving relative [cousin Polly Antell] & she will not see any stranger, nor will the doctor allow her her to do so. Moreover she would refuse to discuss any member of her family with anyone. It is possible that I built up a great deal on a few careless remarks from prejudiced persons. I should be very sorry to put into print more than is in my biography as there is not a scrap of documentary evidence to go upon.
Also, with regard to a stage version of 'The Dynasts'—I find that my husband left very special instructions about that, & any performance by amateurs, except the O.U.D.S [Oxford University Dramatic Society], is prohibited. I am sorry to be so negative on both these points, but I hope you will understand.
With seasonable wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Florence Hardy.
Reed's literary hopes and dreams were swept away in the span of two small paragraphs. According to Millgate's notes, the project Florence deems "impossible" was a biography of Thomas Hardy which Reed had suggested, to be based on his conversations with Florence and Hardy's cousin Kate. And apparently Reed was also hoping to adapt Hardy's epic verse-drama on the Napoleonic Wars, "The Dynasts," into a stage play, perhaps for the Highbury Little Theatre group, in Birmingham.
|
1347. McCarey, Peter. "...and Other Blunders." Letter to the editor. PN Review 181 34, no. 5 (May-June 2008): 3-4.
Recommendations for Reed's translations (or mistranslations) of Montale's Mottetti.
|
An unconfirmed sighting appears in the archives of a Midwestern university: a letter from a 'Henry Reed' to Father Peter Milward, S.J., in the Small Manuscript Collection of the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota: 'Reed, Henry, one ALS to Fr. Peter Milward, 1975.'
I was quick to dismiss this as coincidence, until discovering that Father Milward is a renowned Shakespeare scholar. From "Fifty Years of Milward," in the Spring, 2002 Shakespeare Newsletter:
Milward, originally from England, has spent a half century teaching at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. He is the founder or co-founder of numerous societies and organizations in Japan, most notably the Renaissance Institute, founded in 1971 to promote the scholarly vision of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in the spirit of C. S. Lewis. He is the author of over 300 books, which range from scholarship to poetry to educational guides for Japanese students.
Milward's ["Fifty Years of Shakespeare, 1952-2002"] lecture at Boston College marked the establishment of the Peter Milward Special Collection (links mine) at Burns Library, which now has a more or less complete collection of Milward's Shakespeareana, and a generous selection of his other works. Boston College's scholarly journal, Religion and the Arts, is planning a sizable volume of essays on Shakespeare and the Reformation. Milward was therefore invited as a major figure in establishing Shakespeare's Reformation contexts, especially through his landmark book, Shakespeare's Religious Background, which argued for both Catholic and Anglican contexts.
Milward, it turns out, was one of the first to argue that Shakespeare was a practicing Catholic. He has also written extensively on Gerard Manly Hopkins (he is the honorary president of the Tokyo branch of the Hopkins Society of Japan), and T.S. Eliot.
While still unlikely, it seems entirely plausible that Reed may have written Father Milward to congratulate him on some publication on Shakespeare, or to argue some minuscule point of Eliot scholarship.
|
1346. Krisak, Len. "Wrong Valves..." Letter to the editor. PN Review 181 34, no. 5 (May-June 2008): 3.
Criticizes Reed's translation of the word 'valve' in Montale's Mottetti.
|
Oscar Williams is a familiar name. His Little Treasury poetry series and other anthologies are known the world over. At least four collect poems by Henry Reed: The War Poets: An Anthology of War Poetry of the 20th Century (1945), A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, English and American (1950), A Little Treasury of British Poetry: The Chief Poets from 1500 to 1950 (1951), and An Album of Modern Poetry: An Anthology Read by the Poets (1959). There are certainly (probably) more.
Though Williams is familiar as an editor and anthologist, he was a poet in his own right, and while my Granger's lists 26 poems in various anthologies, I am pressed to find a single verse of his online.
Not surprisingly, Williams' correspondence with authors and poets is voluminous and manifold: his collected papers at Indiana University's Lilly Library contains over 11,000 items, including 6,300 photographs of the likes of Conrad Aiken, Anatole Broyard, Richard Eberhart, Robert Frost, Anne Sexton, and Dylan Thomas.
Hidden amidst this trove of treasures is a (carbon copy of a) letter from Williams to Reed, dated July 9th, 1959, and a 1963 letter to Reed, along with Reed's response (carbons, also)! See the " Index to Correspondents."
The index also contains a minor literary mystery: a letter from one Henry J. Dubester, addressed to Henry Reed and dated October 2nd, 1959.
Dubester, as near as I can figure, was Chief of the Census Library Project, at the Library of Congress, sometime in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in charge of cataloging and indexing censuses and vital statistics. The Williams collection contains letters from Dubester to an absolute litany of poets, including W.H. Auden, William Empson, Roy Fuller, Robert Graves, W.S. Merwin, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wilbur, among many others.
So, my question is (or my questions are): What was a bibliographer doing, writing to all these authors and poets? And how did copies end up collected among Williams' papers?
|
1345. Literature. British Book News, July 1946. 275-276.
A blurb announcing the publication of Reed's A Map of Verona, 'The first book of a distinguished poet and critic.'
|
Up this morning, showered, and strolled down my dead-end end street to the 7-11 for coffee and a Sunday New York Times. It's warmer this morning than it has been so far this spring, 70° already at 7:30 a.m. and I'm tempted to finally reverse the vents in the apartment — open them on the second floor and close them up downstairs — and turn on the air conditioning.
I'm listening to an encore webcast of last night's A Prairie Home Companion, an encore of a rerun. I just want to hear the Guy Noir sketch. Plus, I don't why I buy the NYT on Sundays. I only read the Styles section, Arts and Leisure, the Book Review and Magazine. Three dollars' worth of a seven dollar paper. The rest is just news-news, and I either pitch it, or use it to wash the windows.
Yesterday, I followed up on cataloguing some records from the Location Register of 20th-Century English Literary Manuscripts and Letters. Published in print as two (large) volumes in 1988, the Register is now available online as a searchable database (using Sirsi's iBistro interface, no less), including updated records and new accessions from 1988 to 2003.
A quick search for "henry reed" pulls up 23 records, which includes autograph drafts of poems, notes for plays, and personal letters from Reed to such notable figures as Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, L.P. Hartley, Emyr Humphreys, Rona Laurie, Kingsley Martin, and the actor John Phillips (who was also born in Birmingham the same year as Reed).
The Location Register is a powerful tool because it includes descriptions for individual items, not just entire collections. This is handy-dandy for locating material for a minor-Canon figure like Reed. For instance, nowhere does the University of Birmingham's description for the Papers of Henry Reed include this detail from the LocReg: Author: Reed, Henry, 1914-1986.
Title: Letters and postcards from Henry Reed to Michael Ramsbotham.
Date: 1944-1985.
Physical extent: 77 items.
General note: With 2 postcards from Reed, 1 to Col. & Mrs H.W. Ramsbotham and 1 to Mr. S. Marangos.
Call number: In Henry Reed papers, 9/1&3 Who, or what, is "Mr. S. Marangos"?
|
1344. Literature. British Book News, February 1972. 153.
A short review of Reed's two collections of plays issued by the BBC: The Streets of Pompeii and Other Plays for Radio, and Hilda Tablet and Others: Four Pieces for Radio.
|
|
|
|
1st Lesson:
Reed, Henry
(1914-1986). Born: Birmingham, England, 22 February 1914; died: London, 8
December 1986.
Education: MA, University of Birmingham, 1936. Served: RAOC, 1941-42; Foreign Office, GC&CS, 1942-1945.
Freelance writer: BBC Features Department, 1945-1980.
Author of:
A Map of Verona: Poems (1946)
The Novel Since 1939 (1946)
Moby Dick: A Play for Radio from Herman Melville's Novel (1947)
Lessons of the War (1970)
Hilda Tablet and Others: Four Pieces for Radio (1971)
The Streets of Pompeii and Other Plays for Radio (1971)
Collected Poems (1991, 2007)
The Auction Sale (2006)
|
Search:
|
|
|
Recent tags:
|
Posts of note:
|
Archives:
|
Reed @ Ma.gnolia
|
|
