Posts Tagged ‘Martin Evans’

We began on November 19, 2009. And we’ve been going ever since. For years we’ve anticipated this special tenth anniversary (alright, alright, we’re eleven days late; we’ve been busy).

What did we imagine? We had envisioned champers and brie and little pink cakes! We had hoped for international acclaim and cybercards and cyberroses … oh well, why bother? Instead: one solitary woman at a computer, cranking out books and articles (and even the occasional blogpost) faster than any reasonable person should.

However, the occasion of our tenth anniversary was not entirely unmarked. The Book Haven has made it’s debut appearance in The Smithsonian Magazine, with this paragraph in the current issue, on a subject we know startlingly little about. It generated a scholarly query last week in my inbox, so it’s good to know our July 11, 2018, post is getting some attention

The end result, according to a blog post by Stanford University’s Cynthia Haven, was a masterful collection of 1,299 gouaches, 340 transparent text overlays and a total of 32,000 words. One painting finds the artist cuddling in bed with her mother; another shows a seemingly endless parade of Nazis celebrating Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Germany’s chancellor while swastikas swirl above their heads.

Maybe next year?

Read more here.

What else has happened, since we last wrote about ourselves, five years ago, here? Some time ago, we hit a record high of 45,000 hits in a month. However, gone are the days when we used to wake up in the morning, pull the laptop out from under the bed, and compulsively check our numbers on Google Analytics. We have our following, and we get our bouquets and our punches … and our letters. Like this one a few days ago, from the U.K.: “I am just writing a very quick thank you for introducing Edna St Vincent Millay to me. I had been searching for Sara Teasdale and found a wonderful article written by you at The Book Haven. If it wasn’t for your article I wouldn’t  have found and fallen in love with Edna.” We’re glad you did, sir!

This year alone: We’ve posted on the controversy surrounding the Stanford University Press here and here. After the death of the notable Johns Hopkins polymath and bibliophile Richard Macksey, we were quoted in The Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun and wrote about his passing here and here and here. We’ve forged a partnership with The Los Angeles Review of Books to create an Entitled Opinions channel, as well as a series of articles.

Books, books, books. We’ve written about many books. We wrote about our debut in Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Nation, plus reviews of Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. (Too many to list – put it in the Book Haven search engine). Plus… we were named a 2018-19 National Endowment for the Humanities public scholar, the inaugural Milton Cottage resident, and oohhh, so much more.

Sorry, maybe for 2020.

The Book Haven broke the national news of President Trump‘s plans to scuttle the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts – but other media outlets were close on our heels. We memorialized fallen greats at Stanford, many of them friends: Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank and theater director and Brecht protégée Carl Weber, French intellectual Michel Serres and Milton Scholar Martin Evans, and of course, the French theorist René Girard. And, this month, another cherished friend, the French scholar Marilyn Yalom.

The Book Haven has taken you to Bergen, Sigtuna and Stockholm, Kraków and London, Warsaw, Paris, and Avignon, among other locales.

We’ve described how we brought about the acquisition of Russian Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky Papers at Stanford, and our debut on Russian TV … and later the acquisition of Russian poet Regina Derieva‘s papers.

We’re still here. So many excellent blogs and online journals have folded – Elegant Variation, House of Mirth, Bookslut – and journals, too, such as Quarterly Conversation and Smart Set. We’re still here, and looking forward, in six weeks time, in joining you for the brand new decade for all of us.

C’mon, December, we’re ready to take you on – to the end of the year and beyond. Our vision going forward is 2020.

Happy birthday to us! Long may we live!

Martin and Milton. “He filled the room, with his crisp voice and laugh.” (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Recent thoughts have turned my mind again to the late Prof. Martin Evans, one of the leading John Milton scholars in the world – well, perhaps it’s no surprise, given my recent Milton Cottage residency (see here). Poet Kenneth Fields of the Stanford English Department penned this little tribute at the time of the Welshman’s death in 2013. It was never published … till now.

Ken with cup

There has never been a time when Martin Evans was not at the center of the English Department, and I’ve been here for a long time. Martin was a man of great enthusiasms. He loved food and wine, he loved teaching, he loved Milton and the Renaissance, he loved his wife, the unfailingly charming Mariella, and he loved his children. He also loved being a contrarian. But it was not enough for him to be contrary; he wanted to be right. He once complained about a former colleague, “What I hate about him is that in any conversation, he always heads for the moral high ground, usually getting there ahead of me.” Few people got anywhere ahead of Martin. He filled the room, with his crisp voice and laugh. I always thought his voice resembled that of his countryman Richard Burton, but without the deepening and coarsening effects of cigarettes and booze. I cannot think of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” without hearing Martin’s voice reading it at department Christmas parties.

About a year ago I asked several of my colleagues what they told students who were preparing to write papers. Martin’s reply was the shortest and the best: “I tell them to take me on an intellectual journey from point A to point B.” I pass this nugget on to my students every quarter, always careful to cite him, and to deliver it in Martin’s declarative voice. It’s a deceptively simple remark that needs to be passed on, and can stand some attention. First, intellectual. Second, a journey. From A to B means that there must be an A, must be a B—how often do we realize about even our own writing that there’s no A, no B? Finally, “take me on a journey.” Many of us have been taken on journeys by Martin. I intend to keep and broadcast that little sutra until I reach point B myself. Were Martin to hear me say the line that now comes to me, “They are all gone into the world of light,” he’d recognize his fellow Welsh poet, and he’d complete the sentence.

Milton’s Literary Garden:  all the flowers he wrote about are here.

The stampede towards STEM is not irreversible, and not everyone who begins in science and technology stays there. Some are saved by literature in the end. Take John Dugdale Bradley, a Cambridge-trained Chartered Chemical Engineer and a Stanford MBA who now finds himself a later-life a champion of John Milton – the writer the Stanford’s late Prof. Martin Evans called the most learned poet in the English language. 

He began as a neighbor

But the Stanford graduate began as a neighbor first. He and his wife moved to a cottage a few minutes away from Milton’s Cottage in Buckinghamshire. As he visited the cottage regularly, he got to know the man whose spirit still haunts it. From small beginnings he gradually became more involved in saving this literary jewel. Now as a Trustee he is leading the effort to raise a $5 million Endowment Fund to generate income to operate, preserve and enhance the cottage, museum, and literary garden in perpetuity. This mission includes the dissemination of Milton’s legacy and his eloquent promotion of all the freedoms we enjoy today. He spoke at Stanford recently, and so the Book Haven invited him to tell us about the cottage in a guest post.

Where Milton wrote “Paradise Lost.”

In 1665, John Milton fled London’s Great Plague with his wife and daughters. It was the last major outbreak of the bubonic plague in England. He sought safety in a small, rural, secluded cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, about 25 miles northwest of the heart of London. It is the only Milton residence that survives today. Within these walls he completed Paradise Lost and was inspired to write its sequel, Paradise Regain’d. These late, great works ensured his enduring poetic legacy and universal recognition as one of the world’s greatest writers.

In the study, Milton, who had become blind, completed Paradise Lost by dictating to his wife or daughters every day. Here are rare first editions of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained on public display along with the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost and some 200 translations into many languages.

In the museum’s old kitchen, displays many of his other works including Areopagitica and Lycidas, the romantic poem lamenting ‘a promising young life cut short’ in tribute to this college friend Edward King of Christ’s College Cambridge.

The parlour where Milton received his guests and where he encouraged debates on the issues of the day contains his parliamentary works including the ‘Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’ [published in support of and shortly after the execution of King Charles I] and a Proclamation from King Charles II calling for Milton’s most controversial books to be handed in and burnt. Other works are about divorce and ‘the Irish question.’

Where Milton received guests and (we hope) kept warm.

Alongside the cottage, is a registered Grade 2 literary garden is filled with most of the trees, shrubs, plants and herbs mentioned in Milton’s works. The garden is worth a visit in its own right.

As well as early editions of his best-known poetic works, including Lycidas, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d, the cottage includes a treasure-trove of his iconic prose writings, many of which focus on freedoms in government, religion, speech and the press.  Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both revered Milton, and so the Puritan poet found a significant place in American history; his thinking and writings (particularly Areopagitica) influenced the development of the U.S, Constitution and later the First Amendment dealing with freedoms we all cherish – freedom of thought, of speech and of the press as well as religion.

And an unknown American may have inadvertently saved Milton’s Cottage for posterity.  Rumour has it that the building was to be sold,  to be shipped to the US and rebuilt there, beam by beam – so incensing the locals that they clubbed together to purchase Milton’s Cottage on behalf of the nation and keep it firmly on British soil.  That was back in 1887 and it has been in the care of a charity and open to the public as a museum ever since.

Milton’s Cottage has no permanent endowment, however – a state of affairs that the current Board of Trustees is determined to address.  We have therefore launched Paradise Maintain’d, a new endowment fund that is seeking to raise $5 million to protect and preserve this unique literary landmark in perpetuity.  Once we reach our target, the income generated will cover all of our annual core and maintenance costs as well as fund new initiatives to increase public engagement with Milton’s work.

To find out more, please visit our website here.  US donations are tax deductible: contact endowments@miltonscottage.org for further information.

Oh! And more news! The Book Haven will be visiting the Milton Cottage on site come March, when I will be honored with the inaugural residency. More from the Milton Cottage then!

Famous marginalia seems to be all the rage right now – so I thought I’d start the year with this one, John Keats‘s mark-up of his edition of John Milton‘s Paradise Lost. The relationship of Keats and Milton was a fraught one, marked by imitation, rivalry, and rejection  – a classic case of what René Girard would call “external mediation,” where the target of envious admiration exists outside the daily sphere of the desirer. After all, Milton had died well over a century before Keats was born, so it was clearly a one-sided relationship. Sometimes those are the easiest kind. You get less back-talk.

Bad case of mimetic envy

The history of this particular set of marginalia is such a complicated one that a whole book has been compiled on it: Keats’s “Paradise Lost” by Beth Lau. It’s an opportunity to read Milton’s masterpiece over Keats’s shoulder, so to speak.

In his review of the 1998 book, UC-Irvine’s Hugh Roberts writes: “Only Spenser and Shakespeare rival Milton as ‘precursor poets’ for the English Romantics, and the relationship with Milton is arguably the most interesting, as it is the most fraught with ideological and other tensions. From Blake’s assertion that Milton was ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it,’ to Shelley’s musings on the ‘strange and natural antithesis’ by which Milton’s poem had become an ideological prop to Church and State conservatives, to Keats’s ultimate conclusion – after trying to out Milton-Milton in his Hyperion – that ‘life to him [Milton] would be death to me,’ the Romantic poets made themselves unruly disciples, self-consciously reading their master’s epic against the grain.”

One Milton scholar, Martin Evans, credibly claims that Milton is the most learned poet in the English language. I suspect Keats thought so, too. Here’s own reaction, a poem on discovering a lock of Milton’s hair, is not one of his best efforts, but insightful nonetheless:

Chief of organic numbers!
Old Scholar of the Spheres!
Thy spirit never slumbers,
But rolls about our ears,
For ever, and for ever.

Read the whole poem, “Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair” here. And happy new year.

We shouldn’t have been surprised. When we were contacted by the Merton College at Oxford about republishing our obituary on the late great Milton scholar, Martin Evans in The Merton Record, we offered our enthusiastic  support. The Welshman was an amazing man and an amazing Miltonist, and it was a privilege to study Paradise Lost with him.

We made Editor Helen Morley promise to send the finished product.

When the envelope arrived from Oxford, we were pleased to find a model of this kind of academic publishing: 200 perfect-bound pages with writing that matches high production values  – and it was delightful to be a small part of it. (Also noted: it has a review of Stuart D. Lee‘s A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a professor at Merton for many years.)

From my republished piece on Martin:

Evans coined the phrase “Miltonic moment” to describe the point of crisis just before the action changes dramatically, looking at once backward to a past that is about to be transcended or repudiated, and forward to a future that immediately begins to unfold.

His first reading of Milton marked a Miltonic moment of his own: “I fell hopelessly in love with the poetry. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever read,” Evans said.

Yet Evans is remembered for being a powerful mentor as well as a revered scholar.

The poet and scholar Linda Gregerson of the University of Michigan, his student in the late 1970s, recalled, “He was immensely generous, both personally and intellectually, able to convey deep learning with extraordinary clarity. He always took a deep delight in ideas, and was just opinionated enough to make things fun.” She recalled him as “impish, with a brilliant, irreverent sense of humor.”

“He converted many of us to a lifelong inhabitation in the world of Milton studies. It’s a formidable world in many respects, not nearly so genial as the world of Shakespeare studies, for example. But Martin imbued it, and us, with a durable sense of joy.”

You can read an earlier Book Haven post on Martin here – or about his 400th birthday party for Milton here. Or here’s a treat: go here and you can listen the the Milton scholar himself, at Milton’s birthday party (which was also a celebration of his own anniversary at Stanford). Hearing him read the last words of Paradise Lost is absolutely delicious.

(See? “Lycidas” is evidently still on my mind after my post yesterday about Derek Walcott.)

Postscript on 9/19: Martin Evans’s influence was wide indeed. I just received this note from music scholar and author Ted Gioia: “I spent a lot of time with Martin Evans, both inside and outside the classroom, and learned a tremendous amount from him. My next book (on the history of love songs) is a better book because of what Martin taught me about Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio, Castiglione, etc. Because of him, I read The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus, The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis and a number of other books that prepared me (in ways I never could have anticipated at the time) to write a study of the evolution of the love song.”

“It was the most exciting thing I’d ever read.” (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

A great scholar, perhaps an even greater man. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Martin Evans died Monday morning at his home.  It’s a great loss for Stanford, and a great loss for Milton studies.  My obituary is here.

One of the intellectual highpoints of recent years at Stanford (and there has no shortage of them) was the 400th birthday celebration for John Milton, including the 10-hour marathon reading of Paradise Lost.  The event became a very intense baptism into the brilliant world of Milton studies – a world whose most eminent scholars include Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, Stanley Fish, and others.  And, of course, Martin Evans, too.

Stanford’s Jennifer Summit, Canada’s Liz Pentland looking on. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Martin, my genial host for the event, insisted that John Milton was the most learned poet in the English language, bar none.  No surprise that  I was so inspired by the caliber of minds I met at the event – and by Martin, most especially – that I attended his classes for a quarter to hear the master-teacher firsthand.  I was not disappointed.

From the obituary:

Evans coined the phrase “Miltonic moment” to describe the point of crisis just before the action changes dramatically, looking at once backward to a past that is about to be transcended or repudiated, and forward to a future that immediately begins to unfold.

His first reading of Milton marked a Miltonic moment of his own: “I fell hopelessly in love with the poetry. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever read,” Evans said.

Yet Evans is remembered for being a powerful mentor as well as a revered scholar.

The poet and scholar Linda Gregerson of the University of Michigan, his student in the late 1970s, recalled, “He was immensely generous, both personally and intellectually, able to convey deep learning with extraordinary clarity. He always took a deep delight in ideas, and was just opinionated enough to make things fun.”

Poet and Miltonist Gregerson

She recalled him as “impish, with a brilliant, irreverent sense of humor.”

“He converted many of us to a lifelong inhabitation in the world of Milton studies. It’s a formidable world in many respects, not nearly so genial as the world of Shakespeare studies, for example. But Martin imbued it, and us, with a durable sense of joy.”

It made me almost regret not being a Roundhead, and left me wishing I did not feel quite so strongly for Charles I.

Back to the 400th birthday party, when I wrote (you can read about the whole thing here, with Humble Moi at half off the lefthand side of the screen at the tale-end of this video, here, to prove I did, really attend the event):

Canadian Miltonist John Leonard made a convincing Satan. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

“Although those attending the event were invited to wear costumes, none did. And there was no prelapsarian nudity. ‘Everyone will be wearing clothes,’ promised English lecturer Alice Staveley, another organizer of the event. ‘We’re all fallen readers.’

“It’s another decision Milton would have approved. He was, after all, a Puritan. In America, however, the word ‘Puritan’ carries a lot of cargo. Evans insisted that English Puritans bear little resemblance to their dour American counterparts. For one thing, Milton ‘loved music, loved wine,’ Evans said. ‘Puritanism,’ in the American sense, is one of Milton’s many bum raps.

“The influential novelist, poet and critic Charles Williams ticked off the charges leveled at the purportedly proud and scornful Milton, rebutting his foes who maintained ‘the pride of his Satan was his own pride, and he approved it.

‘They argued over his Arianism or his Calvinism. They confined his instrument to the organ. They denied him cheerfulness and laughter (he who, it is said, used to sing while he had the gout!). They gloomed over him, as (they supposed) he, in his arrogant self-respect, gloomed over the world,’ Williams wrote in The English Poems of John Milton (1940).

“But in today’s world, so far from Bread Street and the blind prophet, Milton has few champions as unflagging as the redoubtable Evans.”

A half-century Milton legacy. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

While speaking with his former students in the last few days, one story impressed me, in particular.  I met Angelica Duran at the event several years ago, but I didn’t know her backstory until I spoke with her several days ago.  She was a first-generation Chicana graduate student when she was at Stanford, from 1994-2000, and also a single mom of two very young children.  At one point, she was going to drop out for a quarter because she was in a tailspin over her conflicting duties and overwhelming workload.  Martin told her if she took time off, she most probably wouldn’t be coming back.  “Let’s look at your schedule,” he told her.  He inspired her with his own stories about growing up in hardship as a child in Wales. She went on to become director of religious studies and associate professor of English at Purdue University and editor of the Concise Companion to Milton. Oh, and she’s still a mom, too.

Well, as his former student Dennis Danielson of the University of British Columbia, who is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Milton, Martin Evans was “not ashamed of his affections.”  Here’s part of the talk Danielson gave when the Milton Society of America named Martin as a prestigious “honored scholar” for lifetime achievement – part tribute, part roast, “that’s the way he liked it,” said Danielson.

Near the end of the quarter, after we had all got our sea legs, we had some excellent discussions, and there was a moment at which Martin expressed a magisterially-delivered opinion about the beginning of Book 11 of Paradise Lost—with which I found myself in serious disagreement. What could I do? I decided to take a big risk, and what I did was to write my final paper on the very issue about which we disagreed, explaining why I disagreed—in the form of irrefragable scholarly argument, of course.

A week later as I walked out of the quad on my way home I waved a cheerful, slightly nervous hello to Martin, who was riding by in the opposite direction on his bicycle and had no I idea how anxious I was about having stated my disagreement with him. He sailed past me, but then he turned his bike around and rode back to where I was. As usual, he wasted no words, but told me that he appreciated my paper very much, thought I should publish it, and also thought it would form the basis of a good PhD thesis. Then he turned again and without further ceremony pedaled off into the quad. It was a moment I’ll never forget, and I see it as typifying the man’s forthrightness, unselfishness, and magnanimity. What I don’t remember is whether I carried on back to my apartment on the ground or through the air.

He will be missed.  He is already.