Good morning, everyone. Did Andrew Marvell spy for the Dutch? Annotations in his Mr. Smirke suggest he did: “Andrew Marvell’s poems and prose works exhibit many traces of his extensive European travels, and his work overseas as a tutor and diplomat is well known. A recently uncovered manuscript from the Wellcome Library, however, throws new light on his covert connections abroad. It is a copy of the first edition of Marvell’s prose pamphlet Mr. Smirke; or, The Divine in Mode (1676), which includes annotations by him in the margin. This makes it the only literary manuscript we know of that features Marvell’s own hand. But it also provides compelling evidence for something that scholars have long suspected but were unable to prove: that in the 1670s Marvell belonged to a pro-Dutch “fifth column” working in the interests of William of Orange, the future King William III of England.”

Sam Wasson reviews Woody Allen’s memoir: “Allen grew up in Brooklyn, raised by a rascally Runyonesque father and what sounds like a hideous mother, though he defends her at every turn. Psychoanalysts, start your engines. He remembers the early years in Dickensian detail, which might be too much for some readers, but for those curious how this boy nebbish became a giant, this early run is comparable to the rich and heart-swelling first part of Moss Hart’s Act One—a long, leaping aria to jazz, girls, the movies, baseball, and New York, as sung by their greatest fan. Allen’s not misanthropic here, though he’ll try to convince you otherwise. He still knows there’s no meaning and no God, and the portions are still too small, but—and I may be wrong—he seems to have actually enjoyed writing this book. I can’t say the same for any movie he’s made in the last 20 years, rendered as they are in mostly lifeless masters and one-liners verging on self-parody, as if cribbed from the depths of Without Feathers and dumped into Final Draft in a hurry to make it to the Knicks on time.”

LeRoy Panek recommends ten underappreciated classic mysteries.

Jenny McCartney suggests watching the 2003 French film Triplettes de Belleville (or Belleville Rendez-Vous if you’re in the UK)—a favorite in our family. Watch it if you haven’t already. The cycling scenes are the best.

Kevin Blankinship reviews Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives: “Writing a book about Thomas Jefferson means entering a very crowded field. From 1990 to 2017, the University of Virginia Press alone put out sixty-eight titles on the man, while hundreds more were issued by other publishers. With new tomes every year about the Adamses, Franklin, Hamilton, Jackson, Jay, Livingston, Madison, Monroe, Randolph, and Washington, many of them generously publicized by PBS or C-SPAN’s Book TV, talking about the founders has become a sort of American intellectual industry. No framer or father is exempt from tribute or scorn from scholars, pundits, and the average citizen on subjects from the legacy of slavery to the intent of the authors of the Constitution. These men are the Greek pantheon of twenty-first-century America. What’s left for a young scholar to say? Jeffrey Einboden, professor of English at Northern Illinois University, is aware of what such challenges mean for his own book, Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives, which tells the story of two African Muslim slaves on the run in Kentucky who appeal to President Jefferson for their freedom. ‘It runs the risk,’ admits Einboden, ‘of overshadowing Muslim slaves yet again, eclipsing their experiences by placing them in proximity to a towering figure in the American mind.’ But with such an enthralling premise as Arabic slave writings in the early United States—including archival jewels unearthed for the first time—the book makes a new contribution despite the odds.”

A forgotten story by Frances Hodgson Burnett to be republished later this year: “The British-American Hodgson Burnett is best remembered today for her The Secret Garden, the 1911 tale of a girl who comes from India to the isolated Yorkshire moors, and 1886’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, about a poor boy from Brooklyn who discovers he has inherited an English estate. But 10 years before she died in 1924, Hodgson Burnett began writing a series of sketches that mixed autobiography with fiction. Published in Good Housekeeping magazine, the stories appeared under the title The Romantick Lady – a ‘cipher for the author’s imaginative and more fanciful side’, said British Library editor Johnny Davidson. One of them, ‘The Christmas in the Fog’, published in April 1915, was recently found among the British Library’s papers.” The British Library says it will publish other stories by women in the anthology who “pioneered and developed the ‘weird tale’ in the early 20th century,” which is weird use of the word “pioneered.”

Essay of the Day:

In Lapham’s Quarterly, Don James McLaughlin tells the story of Walt Whitman, the Gilchrist women, and a painting:

“Scholarship on Whitman’s relationship with the Gilchrist family tends to fall prey to the overplayed conceit of the unrequited crush. The story begins with a kernel of truth: euphoria did strike Anne when she first encountered Whitman’s verse. Gilchrist was well-established in the world of Victorian letters; in 1863 she had published an influential biography of William Blake that her late husband had begun and she, with the help of the Rossetti brothers, had finished. In 1869, at the age of forty-one, Gilchrist wrote to Rossetti of Leaves of Grass, ‘I had not dreamed that words could cease to be words, and become electric streams like these.’ In May 1870, with the assistance of Whitman’s close friend (and origin of the ‘Good Gray Poet’ moniker) William Douglas O’Connor, she published a stirring essay derived from her correspondence with William Rossetti in the Boston-based monthly magazine The Radical, titled ‘A Woman’s Estimate of Walt Whitman.’

“Upon receiving a transcription of Gilchrist’s letters in advance, Whitman, then fifty, responded that he had never received a ‘eulogium so magnificent.’ In their ensuing correspondence, Gilchrist positions herself as Whitman’s equal, inhabiting the second-person address of Leaves with the goal of crafting an epistolary companion to his verse: ‘In May 1869 came the voice over the Atlantic to me. O the voice of my Mate: it must be so—.’ Whitman appreciated her frankness, but also attempted to set boundaries: ‘My book is my best letter, my response, my truest explanation of all…You understand this better & fuller & clearer than any one else…Enough that there surely exists between us so beautiful & delicate a relation, accepted by both of us with joy.’

“Their friendship deepened over the next half-decade. Then, in January 1876, Whitman received the startling news that Gilchrist had decided to relocate herself and the three youngest of her four children from London to Philadelphia.”Read the rest.

Photo: Villeneuve

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