We Have Moved

Touring Rome’s Past

R.J.B. Bosworth’s Whispering City: Rome and Its Histories is as much of a guidebook to Rome’s recent past as it is a history. It manages to keep us partially conscious of Rome’s present while discovering the city’s struggles during the past two centuries. The maps of modern sections of the city that begin each chapter are the first hints of the close proximity of Rome’s history to visitors’ experiences today. Although the book takes us from the 1800s to the present, Bosworth first focuses the reader on a small section of the modern city, rather like a tour guide, before delving back into history. He may lead us into a food and flower market, ask us to notice a certain monument – most intriguingly, “a dark statue of a cowled figure” – and then explain that here is where Giordano Bruno, judged a heretic by the Inquisition, was burned at the stake. Or he shows us a beautiful square with a cooling fountain and a church bursting with art, only to have us examine a plaque in remembrance of two patriots who supported a united nation and were subsequently sentenced to death by a nineteenth-century pope.

Bosworth acts as a guide who has researched every loose end in the city. Framing his tour is the struggle by the obvious factions – the Roman Catholic Church, the nationalists, the fascists. However, the periods for his literary tour group, recreated with astonishing detail, are decidedly less obvious and are the heart of our excursion. While the memories of Garibaldi or Mussolini still shout even into the present decade, Bosworth makes us stop to listen closely to those unknown Romans “whose whispers can still be heard in the modern city.”  For instance, we hear from the patriot Luigi Pianciani, who dared to criticize Pope Leo XII, the pope who ordered the deaths of the two previously mentioned patriots. We hear the brief but important voices of nineteenth-century reformers like sociologist Domenico Orano and educationalist Maria Montessori, who attempted to publicize the extent of crime and poverty in the suburbs of Rome. Such names may be nearly silent in the immense crowd that is the city’s history, but we find that the smallest interruptions on our tour bring us closer to finding the “real” face of Rome.  

Underneath the Hollywood Sign

About a hundred years ago in Los Angeles, some of its boarding houses hung signs that read, “No Jews, actors, or dogs allowed.” Movies entertained the lower classes only, and major film companies produced in Philadelphia. When Charlie Chaplin built the first big studio in Hollywood in the early twentieth century, some people feared property values were going to drop. Leo Braudy’s The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon explores not only the history behind the Californian landmark but also the improbable rise to fame of both it and its town.

Hollywood today, of course, signifies much more than a physical place. For the international community, the glamorous onscreen lifestyles constitute a large portion of other nation’s perceptions of the United States. If “Hollywood” is on the evening news, it’s because somebody’s off to rehab, court, or the altar (again). What’s actually being shown on the screen, and the companies that produced the reels, seem to only comprise half of what the name means. How much did the Hollywood sign have to do with creating an umbrella term for blockbuster sales, actors’ private lives, and anywhere the red carpet is unrolled?

Quite a bit, as Braudy explains, along with its supporters, luck and aggressive marketing. Oddly enough, the Hollywood sign was not meant to lure actors or directors.  Most of us would agree with Anita Loos’s description of the town’s name as “the epitome of glamour, sex, and sin in their most delectable forms.” Developers of “Hollywoodland,” however, initially advertised the neighborhoods as family-oriented. Hoping to draw recent immigrants away from the overcrowded, unhealthy East Coast cities, developers in the 1920s promoted the rural area as safe for the children. Yet Braudy tells us that the movie business was already burgeoning at the time, suggesting that the advertisers were engaging in their own brand of Hollywood illusion.

The sign and the town have each experienced rebranding, changing with the decades’ demands. The former changed from painted wood to white metal, the wording purposefully switching from “Hollywoodland” to “Hollywood” to “Hollyweed” (temporarily). Temperance activists, producers, and classic and classless actors have contributed to the aura of the latter. Both have been what people needed them to be: perfect for a place and a people dedicated to selling fantasy.

From London, with Love: An Homage to Influences

Ivan Lett

I decided to take this column on the road and pay a visit to the very office where so many of the books I gush about begin their lives. Around London, like New York, a prideful smile spreads across my face when I see advertisements for upcoming shows like “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” at the National Gallery, London, knowing that we will be distributing the catalog when it is released this fall.

But here at Yale University Press, London, overlooking the beautiful Bedford Square, the distance of a few thousand miles hardly seems noticeable. The books are familiar, the people, whom I’ve only previously met via e-mail, are wonderful; it is in every sense to me: home. Within the larger Bloomsbury neighborhood, I’ve already been to the British Museum (smiling again at the copies of Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates in the gift shop), and I feel as though I’m long overdue to trace the walking paths of Virginia and Leonard Woolf.

Still, there is something in the name Bloomsbury that also makes me instantly think of home. Bloom. Bloom. Harold? If you have not heard his name by the time you arrive at Yale, you will have approximately 10 hours to figure it out before more than a dozen mentions have been made in your introduction to the university and you are confounded by this ubiquitous figure whom everyone seems to know. Once you learn: this guy is a big deal.

For literary die-hards like me, his contributions (an understatement) to cultural analysis through reading and literature are unmistakable. It was Bloom who rescued so many of the British Romantic poets from the wasteland of obscurity (Eliot doesn’t haunt this neighborhood, I hope), many of my favorites included: Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats. As I myself contemplate the importance of Jewish American Heritage month, I fondly remember delivering a manuscript of Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language to the professor’s house, which Bloom subsequently reviewed for the New York Review of Books. I rang the bell and stood, somewhat awkwardly, with over a thousand pages wrapped in my arms as I waited for him to answer the door. I was expected, but when he appeared, I knew that he was reading me like a text, drawing out every bit of meaning from my figure, stance, and regrettably sweaty appearance (it was quite a walk with all those pages). He smiled and re-pronounced my oddly Slavic name, and I smiled, knowing exactly that bit of surprise that comes when people expect to find themselves face-to-face with a Russian giant. The giant part is true, at least.

Bloom’s new book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, reflects exactly that inimitable quality and ability that Bloom has to read into the cultural and literary influences that shape our every day life. I flatter myself to think of my appearance as a poem or book, but I’d like to think that readers know readers once they meet, and play the parts of the stories we know ourselves to love. When asked about the subtitle to the book, he responded: “I am made desolate by all formalist or historicist attempts to sever literature from life. Why would we read at all if we did not seek the blessing of more life into a time without boundaries?” Viably a mantra for readers like myself, The Anatomy of Influence presents Bloom lending his critical eye and ear to the great tradition of writers—Shakespeare, Tennyson, Browning, Crane, to name only a few of my own favorites—who have made our modern times. “Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it," writes Bloom, “is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate.” For connecting literature to its quotidian altar, for the appreciation of art as an inextricable component of the human experience, there can surely be no higher calling.

 

Ivan Lett is Online Marketing Coordinator for Yale University Press.   

To London, with Love: British Hispanists

Ivan Lett

For many Britons, there is a certain long-standing fascination with Spain. In the early colonial and modern periods, the great Spanish empire was a Catholic rival to newly-Protestant English prowess on the seas, culminating in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. So quickly after its rise to continental power, Spain seemed to retreat to confinement in its peninsula, falling back from the main story of western European history, particularly with its focus on British and French events.

The use of the word “Spain” at this early point in its history is contested by many. In the few decades since the end of Franco’s regime, historians—natives, too—have scrambled to readdress the mythologies of Spain’s history. Interestingly, I recently caught a review in the Wall Street Journal of Stanley Payne’s new book: Spain: A Unique History. As reviewer David Pryce-Jones notes, Payne’s previous work on the subject has mainly addressed Franco and the Spanish Civil War (Payne has three books with YUP on the subject), but his new book, out from Wisconsin, deals with a longer range of Spanish history, covering the dominant grand narrative: the stereotypical view of Spain that is both romantic and demonic in its portrayal of its political, religious, and cultural development since the Reconquista. While Mr. Pryce-Jones sees the issue of stereotyping Spaniards as moot, others like myself feel that understanding national identity and its origins are central to participation in an increasingly global society, even as those defining characteristics continue to be blurred by new alignments.

Most recently on the topic, I read British historian Henry Kamen’s book Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity, in which he gives his perspective on how and why the historical myths developed and persist to show that the congruent story of national unification under the Catholic Monarchs and the associated instantaneous creation of “Spain” is more than somewhat fallacious; that, perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing is quite so simple. I’m curious to compare Payne and Kamen’s books: the former looks out to Spain’s place in the wider world while the latter focuses on how the identity developed from within.

Now that the military rivalry of the 16^th century has cooled, Spain, notably “Green Spain” in the  north, is a popular destination for British tourists, and many in Galicia have begun to explore the Celtic roots of the region to emphasize its independent identity as one of Spain’s autonomous communities. The rich histories of each community tell different stories than the all-encompassing grand narrative of Spanish, largely Castilian, history. Given the diversity of Spain’s population and culture, it’s easy to bristle at the notion that they all suddenly united overnight. And while the greenery in northern Spain may be similar to landscapes in the British Isles, I’d rather take my chances with the warmer climate and an empanada over fog and shepherd’s pie any day.

 

Ivan Lett is Online Marketing Coordinator for Yale University Press.

Going to England?

Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, recommends Berkshire from the Pevsner Architectural Guides in his weekly column, “The Best of Brit Lit,” for The Daily Beast. Check out the whole series for more books on architecture throughout the British Isles.