What’s Under London? Discover London’s Forbidden Underworld

in Architecture, History, Technology | June 14th, 2024

When the words Lon­don and under­ground come togeth­er, the first thing that comes to most of our minds, nat­u­ral­ly, is the Lon­don Under­ground. But though it may enjoy the hon­or­able dis­tinc­tion of the world’s first rail­way to run below the streets, the stal­wart Tube is hard­ly the only thing buried below the city — and far indeed from the old­est. The video above makes a jour­ney through var­i­ous sub­ter­ranean stra­ta, start­ing with the paving stone and con­tin­u­ing through the soil, elec­tric cables, and gas pipelines beneath. From there, things get Roman.

First comes the Billings­gate Roman House and Baths and the Roman amphithe­ater, two pre­served places from what was once called Lon­dini­um. Below that lev­el run sev­er­al now-under­ground rivers, just above the depth of Win­ston Churchill’s pri­vate bunker, which is now main­tained as a muse­um.

Far­ther down, at a depth of 66 feet, we find the remains of Lon­don’s tube sys­tem — not the Tube, but the pneu­mat­ic tube, a nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy that could fire encap­su­lat­ed let­ters from one part of the city to anoth­er. More effec­tive and longer lived was the lat­er, more deeply installed Lon­don Post Office Rail­way, which was used to make deliv­er­ies until 2003.

At 79 feet under­ground, we final­ly meet with the Under­ground — or at least the first and shal­low­est of its eleven lines. The Tube has long become an essen­tial part of the lives of most Lon­don­ers, but around the same depth exists anoth­er facil­i­ty known to rel­a­tive­ly few: the Cam­den cat­a­combs, a sys­tem of under­ground pas­sages once used to sta­ble the hors­es who worked on the rail­ways. Fur­ther down are the net­work of World War II-era “deep shel­ters,” one of which host­ed the plan­ning of D‑Day; below them is a still-func­tion­al facil­i­ty instru­men­tal to the defeat of dif­fer­ent ene­mies, typhus and cholera. That would be Lon­don’s sew­er sys­tem, for which we should spare a thought if we’ve ever walked along the Thames and appre­ci­at­ed the fact that it no longer stinks.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Lon­dini­um Became Lon­don, Lute­tia Became Paris, and Oth­er Roman Cities Got Their Mod­ern Names

The Lost Neigh­bor­hood Buried Under New York City’s Cen­tral Park

“The Won­der­ground Map of Lon­don Town,” the Icon­ic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Sub­way Sys­tem

Under­ci­ty: Explor­ing the Under­bel­ly of New York City

The Genius of Har­ry Beck’s 1933 Lon­don Tube Map–and How It Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Sub­way Map Design Every­where

Paris Under­ground

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Harvard Removes the Human Skin Binding from a Book in Its Collection Since 1934

in Books, Harvard, History, Libraries | June 12th, 2024

In June of 2014, Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty’s Houghton Library put up a blog post titled “Caveat Lecter,” announc­ing “good news for fans of anthro­po­der­mic bib­liop­e­gy, bib­lio­ma­ni­acs, and can­ni­bals alike.” The occa­sion was the sci­en­tif­ic deter­mi­na­tion that a book in the Houghton’s col­lec­tion long rumored to have been bound in human skin — the task of whose retrieval once served, they say, as a haz­ing rit­u­al for stu­dent employ­ees — was, indeed, “with­out a doubt bound in human skin.” What a dif­fer­ence a decade makes: not only has the blog post been delet­ed, the book itself has been tak­en out of from cir­cu­la­tion in order to have the now-offend­ing bind­ing removed.

“Har­vard Library has removed human skin from the bind­ing of a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s book Des des­tinées de l’âme (1880s),” declares a stren­u­ous­ly apolo­getic state­ment issued by the uni­ver­si­ty. “The volume’s first own­er, French physi­cian and bib­lio­phile Dr. Ludovic Bouland (1839–1933), bound the book with skin he took with­out con­sent from the body of a deceased female patient in a hos­pi­tal where he worked.” Hav­ing been in the col­lec­tion since 1934, the book was first placed there by John B. Stet­son, Jr., “an Amer­i­can diplo­mat, busi­ness­man, and Har­vard alum­nus” (not to men­tion an heir to the for­tune gen­er­at­ed by the epony­mous hat).

“Bouland knew that Hous­saye had writ­ten the book while griev­ing his wife’s death,” writes Mike Jay in the New York Review of Books, “and felt that this was an appro­pri­ate bind­ing for it — ‘a book on the human soul mer­its that it be giv­en human cloth­ing.’ ” He also “includ­ed a note stat­ing that “this book is bound in human skin parch­ment on which no orna­ment has been stamped to pre­serve its ele­gance.” This copy of Des des­tinées de l’âme isn’t the only book rumored — or, with the pep­tide mass fin­ger­print­ing (PMF) tech­nol­o­gy devel­oped over the past decade, con­firmed — to have been bound in human skin. “The old­est reput­ed exam­ples are three 13th-cen­tu­ry Bibles held at the Bib­lio­thèque Nationale in France, write the New York Times’ Jen­nifer Schuessler and Julia Jacobs.

Jay also men­tions the espe­cial­ly vivid exam­ple of “an 1892 French edi­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug, adorned with a skull emblem, is gen­uine human skin: Poe en peau humaine.” In gen­er­al, Schuessler and Jacobs note, the largest num­ber of human skin-bound books “date from the Vic­to­ri­an era, the hey­day of anatom­i­cal col­lect­ing, when doc­tors some­times had med­ical trea­tis­es and oth­er texts bound in skin from patients or cadav­ers.” Now that this prac­tice has been retroac­tive­ly judged to be not just deeply dis­turb­ing but offi­cial­ly prob­lem­at­ic (to use the vogue term of recent years) it’s up to the anthro­po­der­mic-bib­liop­e­gy enthu­si­asts out there to deter­mine whether to put the items in their own col­lec­tions to the PMF test — or to leave a bit of macabre mys­tery in the world of anti­quar­i­an book-col­lect­ing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Old Books Bound in Human Skin Found in Har­vard Libraries (and Else­where in Boston)

When Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Recy­cled & Used to Make the First Print­ed Books

Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Man­u­script in the World

A Mes­mer­iz­ing Look at the Mak­ing of a Late Medieval Book from Start to Fin­ish

3,500 Occult Man­u­scripts Will Be Dig­i­tized & Made Freely Avail­able Online, Thanks to Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How the 13th-Century Sufi Poet Rumi Became One of the World’s Most Popular Writers

in History, Poetry, Religion | June 12th, 2024

The Mid­dle East is hard­ly the world’s most har­mo­nious region, and it only gets more frac­tious if you add in South Asia and the Mediter­ranean. But there’s one thing on which many res­i­dents of that wide geo­graph­i­cal span can agree: Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥam­mad Rūmī. One might at first imag­ine that a thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry poet and mys­ti­cal philoso­pher who wrote in Per­sian, with occa­sion­al for­ays into Turk­ish, Ara­bic, and Greek, would be a niche fig­ure today, if known at all. In fact, Rumi, as he’s com­mon­ly known, is now one of the most pop­u­lar writ­ers in not just the Mid­dle East but the world; Eng­lish rein­ter­pre­ta­tions of his verse have even made him the best-sell­ing poet in the Unit­ed States.

“The trans­for­ma­tive moment in Rumi’s life came in 1244, when he met a wan­der­ing mys­tic known as Shams of Tabriz,” writes the BBC’s Jane Cia­bat­tari. She quotes Brad Gooch, author of Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love, describ­ing them as hav­ing an “elec­tric friend­ship for three years,” after which Shams dis­ap­peared. “Rumi coped by writ­ing poet­ry,” which includes 3,000 poems writ­ten for “Shams, the prophet Muham­mad and God. He wrote 2,000 rubay­at, four-line qua­trains. He wrote in cou­plets a six-vol­ume spir­i­tu­al epic, The Mas­navi.” He did all this work in ser­vice of what, in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above, Stephanie Honchell Smith calls his ulti­mate goal: “the reuni­fi­ca­tion of his soul with God through the expe­ri­ence of divine love.”

How is such a love to be accessed? “Love resides not in learn­ing, not in knowl­edge, not in pages in books,” Rumi declared. “Wher­ev­er the debates of men may lead, that is not the lover’s path.” He pur­sued it through devo­tion to Shams’ Sufism, “par­tic­i­pat­ing in rit­u­al­ized danc­ing and preach­ing the reli­gion of love through lec­tures, poet­ry, and prose.” Lat­er in life, he shift­ed “from ecsta­t­ic expres­sions of divine love to vers­es that guide oth­ers to dis­cov­er it for them­selves,” incor­po­rat­ing “ideas, sto­ries, and quotes from Islam­ic reli­gious texts, Ara­bic and Per­sian lit­er­a­ture and ear­li­er Sufi writ­ings and poet­ry.” Per­haps there can be no full appre­ci­a­tion of Rumi’s work with­out a schol­ar’s under­stand­ing of the lan­guages and cul­tures he knew. But if his sales fig­ures are any­thing to go by, the long­ing into which his com­plex work taps is uni­ver­sal.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Mys­ti­cal Poet­ry of Rumi Read By Til­da Swin­ton, Madon­na, Robert Bly & Cole­man Barks

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

500+ Beau­ti­ful Man­u­scripts from the Islam­ic World Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Down­load

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Ani­mat­ed (622‑1453)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Romans Stashed Hallucinogenic Seeds in a Vial Made From an Animal Bone

in History | June 10th, 2024

What’s pop­u­lar in the metrop­o­lis soon­er or lat­er makes its way out into the provinces. This phe­nom­e­non has become more dif­fi­cult to notice in recent years, not because it’s slowed down, but because it’s sped way up, owing to near-instan­ta­neous cul­tur­al dif­fu­sion on the inter­net. Well with­in liv­ing mem­o­ry, how­ev­er, are the days when what­ev­er was cool in, say, New York or Los Ange­les would take time to catch on in the rest of the US. This went for fash­ions, movies, and bands, of course, but also for mind-alter­ing sub­stances: dis­tant-future archae­ol­o­gists are as like­ly to unearth a Vel­vet Under­ground album and the remains of its own­er’s stash in the ruins of Cleve­land as those of Chelsea.

A rough­ly anal­o­gous dis­cov­ery from the ancient world was recent­ly made by Dutch zooar­chae­ol­o­gists Maaike Groot and Mar­ti­jn van Haasteren and archaeob­otanist Lau­ra I. Koois­tra, who this past Feb­ru­ary pub­lished a paper in the jour­nal Antiq­ui­ty on “evi­dence of the inten­tion­al use of black hen­bane (Hyoscya­mus niger) in the Roman Nether­lands.” A mem­ber of the night­shade fam­i­ly, black hen­bane is “an extreme­ly poi­so­nous plant species that can also be used as a med­i­c­i­nal or psy­choac­tive drug,” the researchers write. It may have been the lat­ter pur­pose that encour­aged the cre­ation of a pecu­liar arti­fact: “a sheep/goat bone that had been hol­lowed out, sealed on one side by a plug of a black mate­r­i­al and filled with hun­dreds of black hen­bane seeds.”

“Phys­i­o­log­i­cal reac­tions to black hen­bane were well doc­u­ment­ed through­out the Ancient Mediter­ranean world,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Elaine Velie. She quotes Greek philoso­pher Plutarch as describ­ing its effects as “not so prop­er­ly called drunk­en­ness” but rather “alien­ation of mind or mad­ness.” Pliny the Elder “dis­cussed the plant’s med­i­c­i­nal, hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry, and poten­tial­ly lethal effects, not­ing that although it could be tak­en to heal ail­ments rang­ing from coughs to fever, the drug could also cause insan­i­ty and derange­ment. The Greek and Roman physi­cian Dioscorides wrote that black hen­bane and its close cousins could alle­vi­ate pain, but cause dis­ori­en­ta­tion when boiled.”

It would be nat­ur­al to assume that this hol­lowed-out, plugged bone func­tioned as some kind of pipe for smok­ing hen­bane. Though Groot, van Haasteren, and Koois­tra don’t find evi­dence for that, nei­ther do they rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that it was the stash box, if you like, of some res­i­dent of the Roman Nether­lands two mil­len­nia ago. Groot points out to Velie the espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing ele­ment of a “poten­tial link between med­i­c­i­nal knowl­edge described by Roman authors in Roman Italy and peo­ple actu­al­ly using the plant in a small vil­lage on the edge of the empire.” Though far from Rome itself, this hen­bane stash’s own­er pre­sum­ably used it how­ev­er the Romans did. If it met with dis­ap­proval, this indi­vid­ual could have resort­ed to a still-famil­iar refrain: “Hey, it’s med­i­c­i­nal.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Drugs Used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans

Humans First Start­ed Enjoy­ing Cannabis in Chi­na Cir­ca 2800 BC

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

Pipes with Cannabis Traces Found in Shakespeare’s Gar­den, Sug­gest­ing the Bard Enjoyed a “Not­ed Weed”

Carl Sagan on the Virtues of Mar­i­jua­na (1969)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Oh My God! Winston Churchill Received the First Ever Letter Containing “O.M.G.” (1917)

in English Language, History | June 7th, 2024


Win­ston Churchill is one of those pre­pos­ter­ous­ly out­sized his­tor­i­cal fig­ures who seemed to be in the mid­dle of every major event. Even before, as Prime Min­is­ter, he steeled the resolve of his peo­ple and faced down the Third Reich jug­ger­naut; even before he loud­ly warned of the Nazi men­ace before it was polite to do so; even before he was pil­lo­ried in the press for the dis­as­trous Gal­lipoli inva­sion dur­ing WWI, Churchill was a famous and con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure. As a young cav­al­ry offi­cer, he left his post in India to report on the bloody colo­nial cam­paign in the Swat Val­ley in present-day Pak­istan. His huge­ly pop­u­lar arti­cles pushed the mil­i­tary slang word “sniper” into pop­u­lar use. Dur­ing the sec­ond Boer War, Churchill was not only cap­tured at gun­point by future South African prime min­is­ter Louis Botha but he man­aged to suc­cess­ful­ly escape from his POW camp. And after being pushed out of the gov­ern­ment fol­low­ing Gal­lipoli, he returned to the mil­i­tary as a Lieu­tenant Colonel and com­mand­ed a bat­tal­ion of troops in France. He also won a Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture in 1953 and was, as we’ve recent­ly seen, a pret­ty good painter too.

Add to this one more tri­umph: he unwit­ting­ly had a hand in shap­ing the speech pat­terns of teenaged girls some 50–60 years after his death. Churchill was the recip­i­ent of a mis­sive con­tain­ing the first ever usage of the oft-texted acronym “O.M.G.”. Accord­ing to the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, O.M.G.’s ori­gins can be traced back to a let­ter to Churchill from Admi­ral John Arbuth­not Fish­er, sent on Sep­tem­ber 9, 1917. After com­plain­ing about the state of affairs of the Navy dur­ing the war, Fish­er clos­es with the fol­low­ing lame joke: “I hear that a new order of Knight­hood is on the tapis – O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) – Show­er it on the Admi­ral­ty!!”

Churchill’s rela­tion­ship with Fish­er was com­plex. While he was the First Lord of the Admi­ral­ty, Churchill brought Fish­er out of retire­ment in 1911 to head the roy­al navy. Their rela­tion­ship went south in 1915 fol­low­ing the fail­ure of the Dar­d­anelles cam­paign. Churchill was still round­ly blamed most­ly because of Fisher’s loud, pub­lic protes­ta­tions. (In fact, had the naval offi­cers pushed through the Dar­d­anelles to Con­stan­tino­ple, as Churchill com­mand­ed, the war would have like­ly end­ed years ear­li­er than it did.) Yet, much to his wife’s dis­may, Churchill remained cor­dial enough with Fish­er to exchange friend­ly notes.

The first online usage of O.M.G., by the way, came on a usenet forum about soap operas in 1994. Churchill does not appear to be con­nect­ed to that instance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Win­ston Churchill Gets a Doctor’s Note to Drink Unlim­it­ed Alco­hol While Vis­it­ing the U.S. Dur­ing Pro­hi­bi­tion (1932)

What Hap­pens When Mor­tals Try to Drink Win­ston Churchill’s Dai­ly Intake of Alco­hol

Win­ston Churchill Goes Back­ward Down a Water Slide & Los­es His Trunks (1934)

Win­ston Churchill’s List of Tips for Sur­viv­ing a Ger­man Inva­sion: See the Nev­er-Dis­trib­uted Doc­u­ment (1940)

Jonathan Crow: You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. 

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The Roads of Ancient Rome Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

in History, Maps | June 5th, 2024

Sasha Tru­bet­skoy, for­mer­ly an under­grad at U. Chica­go, has cre­at­ed a “sub­way-style dia­gram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.” Draw­ing on Stanford’s ORBIS mod­el, The Pela­gios Project, and the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary, Tru­bet­skoy’s map com­bines well-known his­toric roads, like the Via Appia, with less­er-known ones (in somes cas­es giv­en imag­ined names). If you want to get a sense of scale, it would take, Tru­bet­skoy tells us, “two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzan­tium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.”

You can view the map in a larg­er for­mat here. And if you fol­low this link and send Tru­bet­skoy a few bucks, he can email you a crisp PDF for print­ing. Find more focused, relat­ed maps by Tru­bet­skoy right here:

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Trav­el Today

An Inter­ac­tive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actu­al­ly Lead to Rome

How to Make Roman Con­crete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Last­ing Build­ing Mate­ri­als

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Behold the Codex Gigas (aka “Devil’s Bible”), the Largest Medieval Manuscript in the World

in Books, History | June 5th, 2024

Bar­gain with the dev­il and you may wind up with a gold­en fid­dle, super­nat­ur­al gui­tar-play­ing ability, or a room full of gleam­ing alchem­ized straw.

Whoops, we mis­at­trib­uted that last one. It’s actu­al­ly Rumpel­stilt­skin’s doing, but the by-morn­ing-or-else dead­line that dri­ves the Broth­ers Grimm favorite is not dis­sim­i­lar to the ulti­ma­tum posed to dis­graced medieval monk Her­man the Recluse: pro­duce a giant book that glo­ri­fies your monastery and includes all human knowl­edge by sun­rise, or we brick you up Cask of Amon­til­la­do-style.

Why else would a book as high-mind­ed as the Codex Gigas (Latin for Giant Book) con­tain a full-page glam­our por­trait of the dev­il garbed in an ermine loin­cloth and cher­ry red claws?

Per­haps it’s the 13th-cen­tu­ry equiv­a­lent of “sex sells.” What bet­ter way to keep your book out of the remain­der bin of his­to­ry than to include an eye-catch­ing glimpse of the Prince of Dark­ness? Hedge your bets by posi­tion­ing a splen­did vision of the Heav­en­ly City direct­ly oppo­site.

Notable illus­tra­tions aside, the Codex Gigas holds the dis­tinc­tion of being the largest extant medieval illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script in the world.

Weigh­ing in at 165 lbs, this 3‑foot-tall bound whale required the skins of 160 don­keys, at the rate of two pages per don­key. (Ten pages devot­ed to St. Benedict’s rules for monas­tic life were lit­er­al­ly cut from the man­u­script at an unknown date.)

It’s a lot.

A Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary con­clud­ed that the sprawl­ing man­u­script would’ve required a min­i­mum of 5 years of full-time, sin­gle-mind­ed labor. More like­ly, the work was spread out over 25 to 30 years, with var­i­ous authors con­tribut­ing to the dif­fer­ent sec­tions. In addi­tion to a com­plete Bible, the “Devil’s Bible” includes an ency­clo­pe­dia, med­ical infor­ma­tion, a cal­en­dar of saints’ days, Flav­ius Jose­phus’ his­to­ries The Jew­ish War and Jew­ish Antiq­ui­ties and some prac­ti­cal advice on exor­cis­ing evil spir­its.

The actu­al let­ter­ing does seem to come down to a sin­gle scribe with very neat hand­writ­ing. Experts at the Nation­al Library of Swe­den, where the Codex Gigas has come to a rest after cen­turies of adven­tures and mis­ad­ven­tures, iden­ti­fy it as Car­olin­gian minus­cule, a pop­u­lar and high­ly leg­i­ble style of medieval script. Its uni­form size would’ve required the scribe to rule each page before form­ing the let­ters, after which 100 lines a day would have been a rea­son­able goal.

You can have a look for your­self on the Library’s web­site, where the entire work is view­able in dig­i­tized form.

Cer­tain­ly the dev­il is a great place to start, though his appear­ance may strike you as a bit com­i­cal, giv­en all the fuss.

Begin your explo­rations of the Codex Gigas here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of Mak­ing Deals with the Dev­il: Nic­colò Pagani­ni, Robert John­son, Jim­my Page & More

The Medieval Ban Against the “Devil’s Tri­tone”: Debunk­ing a Great Myth in Music The­o­ry

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

See Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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James Joyce Picked Drunken Fights, Then Hid Behind Ernest Hemingway

in History, Literature | June 4th, 2024

Ernest Hem­ing­way seemed to feud with most of the promi­nent male artists of his time, from Wal­lace Stevens and T.S. Eliot to F. Scott Fitzger­ald. He had a “very strange rela­tion­ship” with Orson Welles—the two came to blows at least once—and he report­ed­ly slapped Max East­man in the face with a book. All his blus­ter and brava­do make his warm friend­ship with James Joyce seem all the more remark­able. They are a lit­er­ary odd cou­ple if ever there was one: Joyce the labyrinthine thinker of Byzan­tine thoughts and cre­ator of sym­bol­ic sys­tems so dense they con­sti­tute an entire field of study; phys­i­cal­ly weak and—despite his infa­mous car­nal appetites—intel­lec­tu­al­ly monk­ish, Joyce exem­pli­fies the artist as a reclu­sive con­tem­pla­tive. Hem­ing­way, on the oth­er hand, well… we know his rep­u­ta­tion.

Hemingway’s 1961 obit­u­ary in The New York Times char­ac­ter­ized Joyce as “a thin, wispy and unmus­cled man with defec­tive eye­sight” (per­haps the result of a syphilis infec­tion), and also notes that the two writ­ers “did a cer­tain amount of drink­ing togeth­er” in Paris. As the nar­ra­tor of the rare film clip of Joyce informs us above, the Ulysses author would pick drunk­en fights, then duck behind his burly friend and say, “Deal with him, Hem­ing­way. Deal with him.” (That scene also gets men­tioned in The Times obit­u­ary.) Hem­ing­way, who con­vinced him­self at one time he had the mak­ings of a real pugilist, was like­ly hap­py to oblige. Joyce, writes Hem­ing­way biog­ra­ph­er James R. Mel­low, “was an admir­er of Hemingway’s adven­tur­ous lifestyle” and wor­ried aloud that his books were too “sub­ur­ban” next to those of his friend, of whom he said in a Dan­ish inter­view, “he’s a good writer, Hem­ing­way. He writes as he is… there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than peo­ple know.”

Joyce, notes Ken­neth Schyler Lynn in Hem­ing­way, real­ized that “nei­ther as a man nor as an artist was [Hem­ing­way] as sim­ple as he seemed,” though he also remarked that Hem­ing­way was “a big pow­er­ful peas­ant, as strong as a buf­fa­lo. A sports­man. And ready to live the life he writes about. He would nev­er have writ­ten it if his body had not allowed him to live it.” One detects more than a hint of Hem­ing­way in Joycean char­ac­ters like Dublin­ers’ Igna­tious Gal­la­her or Ulysses’ Hugh “Blazes” Boylan—strong, adven­tur­ous types who over­awe intro­vert­ed main char­ac­ters. That’s not to say that Joyce explic­it­ly drew on Hem­ing­way in con­struct­ing his fic­tion, but that in the boast­ful, out­go­ing Amer­i­can, he saw what many of his semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal char­ac­ters did in their more bull­ish counterparts—a nat­ur­al foil.

Hem­ing­way returned Joyce’s com­pli­ments, writ­ing to Sher­wood Ander­son in 1923, “Joyce has a most god-damn won­der­ful book” and pro­nounc­ing Joyce “the great­est writer in the world.” He was “unques­tion­ably… stag­gered,” writes Lynn, “by the mul­ti­lay­ered rich­ness” of Ulysses. But its den­si­ty may have proven too much for him, as “his inter­est in the sto­ry gave out well before he fin­ished it.” In Hem­ing­way’s copy of the nov­el, “only the pages of the first half and of Mol­ly Bloom’s con­clud­ing solil­o­quy are cut.” Hem­ing­way tem­pered his praise with some blunt crit­i­cism; unlike Joyce’s praise of his writ­ing, the Amer­i­can did not admire Joyce’s ten­den­cy towards auto­bi­og­ra­phy in the char­ac­ter of Stephen Dedalus.

“The weak­ness of Joyce,” Hem­ing­way opined, was his inabil­i­ty to under­stand that “the only writ­ing that was any good was what you made up, what you imag­ined… Daedalus [sic] in Ulysses was Joyce him­self, so he was ter­ri­ble. Joyce was so damn roman­tic and intel­lec­tu­al.” Of course Stephen Dedalus was Joyce—that much is clear to any­one. How Hem­ing­way, who did his utmost to enact his fic­tion­al adven­tures and fic­tion­al­ize his real life, could fault Joyce for doing the same is hard to reck­on, except per­haps, as Joyce cer­tain­ly felt, Hem­ing­way led the more adven­tur­ous life.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce Reads a Pas­sage From Ulysses, 1924

Vir­ginia Woolf Writes About Joyce’s Ulysses, “Nev­er Did Any Book So Bore Me,” and Quits at Page 200

Ernest Hem­ing­way to F. Scott Fitzger­ald: “Kiss My Ass”

James Joyce’s “Dirty Let­ters” to His Wife (1909)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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