Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964: “It Was Monstrous!”

In a 2013 blog post, the great Ursu­la K. Le Guin quotes a Lon­don Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment col­umn by a “J.C.,” who satir­i­cal­ly pro­pos­es the “Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal.” “Writ­ers all over Europe and Amer­i­ca are turn­ing down awards in the hope of being nom­i­nat­ed for a Sartre,” writes J.C., “The Sartre Prize itself has nev­er been refused.” Sartre earned the hon­or of his own prize for prize refusal by turn­ing down the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in 1964, an act Le Guin calls “char­ac­ter­is­tic of the gnarly and counter-sug­gestible Exis­ten­tial­ist.” As you can see in the short clip above, Sartre ful­ly believed the com­mit­tee used the award to white­wash his Com­mu­nist polit­i­cal views and activism.

But the refusal was not a the­atri­cal or “impul­sive ges­ture,” Sartre wrote in a state­ment to the Swedish press, which was lat­er pub­lished in Le Monde. It was con­sis­tent with his long­stand­ing prin­ci­ples. “I have always declined offi­cial hon­ors,” he said, and referred to his rejec­tion of the Legion of Hon­or in 1945 for sim­i­lar rea­sons. Elab­o­rat­ing, he cit­ed first the “per­son­al” rea­son for his refusal

This atti­tude is based on my con­cep­tion of the writer’s enter­prise. A writer who adopts polit­i­cal, social, or lit­er­ary posi­tions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the writ­ten word. All the hon­ors he may receive expose his read­ers to a pres­sure I do not con­sid­er desir­able. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize win­ner.

The writer must there­fore refuse to let him­self be trans­formed into an insti­tu­tion, even if this occurs under the most hon­or­able cir­cum­stances, as in the present case.

There was anoth­er rea­son as well, an “objec­tive” one, Sartre wrote. In serv­ing the cause of social­ism, he hoped to bring about “the peace­ful coex­is­tence of the two cul­tures, that of the East and the West.” (He refers not only to Asia as “the East,” but also to “the East­ern bloc.”)

There­fore, he felt he must remain inde­pen­dent of insti­tu­tions on either side: “I should thus be quite as unable to accept, for exam­ple, the Lenin Prize, if some­one want­ed to give it to me.”

As a flat­ter­ing New York Times arti­cle not­ed at the time, this was not the first time a writer had refused the Nobel. In 1926, George Bernard Shaw turned down the prize mon­ey, offend­ed by the extrav­a­gant cash award, which he felt was unnec­es­sary since he already had “suf­fi­cient mon­ey for my needs.” Shaw lat­er relent­ed, donat­ing the mon­ey for Eng­lish trans­la­tions of Swedish lit­er­a­ture. Boris Paster­nak also refused the award, in 1958, but this was under extreme duress. “If he’d tried to go accept it,” Le Guin writes, “the Sovi­et Gov­ern­ment would have prompt­ly, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly arrest­ed him and sent him to eter­nal silence in a gulag in Siberia.”

These qual­i­fi­ca­tions make Sartre the only author to ever out­right and vol­un­tar­i­ly reject both the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture and its siz­able cash award. While his state­ment to the Swedish press is filled with polite expla­na­tions and gra­cious demur­rals, his filmed state­ment above, excerpt­ed from the 1976 doc­u­men­tary Sartre by Him­self, minces no words.

Because I was polit­i­cal­ly involved the bour­geois estab­lish­ment want­ed to cov­er up my “past errors.” Now there’s an admis­sion! And so they gave me the Nobel Prize. They “par­doned” me and said I deserved it. It was mon­strous!

Sartre was in fact par­doned by De Gaulle four years after his Nobel rejec­tion for his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the 1968 upris­ings. “You don’t arrest Voltaire,” the French Pres­i­dent sup­pos­ed­ly said. The writer and philoso­pher, Le Guin points out, “was, of course, already an ‘insti­tu­tion’” at the time of the Nobel award. Nonethe­less, she says, the ges­ture had real mean­ing. Lit­er­ary awards, writes Le Guin—who her­self refused a Neb­u­la Award in 1976 (she’s won sev­er­al more since)—can “hon­or a writer,” in which case they have “gen­uine val­ue.” Yet prizes are also award­ed “as a mar­ket­ing ploy by cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism, and some­times as a polit­i­cal gim­mick by the awarders [….] And the more pres­ti­gious and val­ued the prize the more com­pro­mised it is.” Sartre, of course, felt the same—the greater the hon­or, the more like­ly his work would be coopt­ed and san­i­tized.

Per­haps prov­ing his point, a short, nasty 1965 Har­vard Crim­son let­ter had many, less flat­ter­ing things than Le Guin to say about Sartre’s moti­va­tions, call­ing him “an ugly toad” and a “poor los­er” envi­ous of his for­mer friend Camus, who won in 1957. The let­ter writer calls Sartre’s rejec­tion of the prize “an act of pre­ten­sion” and a “rather inef­fec­tu­al and stu­pid ges­ture.” And yet it did have an effect. It seems clear at least to me that the Har­vard Crim­son writer could not stand the fact that, offered the “most cov­et­ed award” the West can bestow, and a heap­ing sum of mon­ey besides, “Sartre’s big line was, ‘Je refuse.’”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Camus Wins the Nobel Prize & Sends a Let­ter of Grat­i­tude to His Ele­men­tary School Teacher (1957)

Jean-Paul Sartre & Albert Camus: Their Friend­ship and the Bit­ter Feud That End­ed It

Hear Albert Camus Deliv­er His Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech (1957)

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

An Oscar-Winning Animation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” Painted on 29,000 Frames of Glass

Ernest Hemingway’s roman­tic adven­ture of man and mar­lin, The Old Man and the Sea, has per­haps spent more time on high school fresh­man Eng­lish read­ing lists than any oth­er work of fic­tion, which might lead one to think of the nov­el as young adult fic­tion. But beyond the book’s abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate broad themes of per­se­ver­ance, courage, and loss, it has an appeal that also reach­es old, wiz­ened men like Hemingway’s San­ti­a­go and young, imag­i­na­tive boy­ish appren­tices like his Mano­lin. The 1952 novel­la rein­vig­o­rat­ed Hemingway’s career, won him a Pulitzer Prize, and even­tu­al­ly con­tributed to his Nobel win in 1954. And luck­i­ly for all those high school Eng­lish stu­dents, Hemingway’s sto­ry has lent itself to some wor­thy screen adap­ta­tions, includ­ing the 1958 film star­ring Spencer Tra­cy as the inde­fati­ga­ble Span­ish-Cuban fish­er­man and a 1990 ver­sion with the mighty Antho­ny Quinn in the role.

One adap­ta­tion that read­ers of Hem­ing­way might miss is the ani­ma­tion above, a co-pro­duc­tion with Cana­di­an, Russ­ian, and Japan­ese stu­dios cre­at­ed by Russ­ian ani­ma­tor Alek­sander Petrov. Win­ner of a 2000 Acad­e­my Award for ani­mat­ed short, the film has as much appeal to a range of view­ers young and old as Hemingway’s book, and for some of the same reasons—it’s cap­ti­vat­ing­ly vivid depic­tion of life on the sea, with its long peri­ods of inac­tiv­i­ty and short bursts of extreme phys­i­cal exer­tion and con­sid­er­able risk.

Both states pro­vide ample oppor­tu­ni­ties for com­plex char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and rich sto­ry­telling as well as excit­ing white-knuck­le sus­pense. Petro­v’s film illus­trates them all, open­ing with images of San­ti­ago’s sto­ries of his sea­far­ing boy­hood off the coast of Africa and stag­ing the dra­mat­ic con­tests between San­ti­a­go, his “broth­er” the mar­lin, and the sharks who devour his prize.

But the pro­duc­tion here, unlike Hemingway’s spare prose, makes a daz­zling dis­play of its tech­nique. For his The Old Man and the Sea, Petrov—only one of a hand­ful of ani­ma­tors skilled in this art—handpainted over 29,000 frames on glass (with help from his son, Dmitri) using slow-dry­ing oils. Petrov moved the paint with his fin­gers to cap­ture the move­ment in the next shot, and while the mag­i­cal effect resem­bles a mov­ing paint­ing, the shoot­ing itself was very tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced, involv­ing a spe­cial­ly con­struct­ed motion-cap­ture cam­era. Petrov and son began their paint­ing in 1997 and fin­ished two years lat­er, tak­ing to heart some of the lessons of the book, it seems. The film’s cre­ators, how­ev­er, fared bet­ter than The Old Man’s pro­tag­o­nist, rich­ly reward­ed for their strug­gle. In addi­tion to an Oscar, the short won awards from BAFTA, the San Diego Film Fes­ti­val, and a hand­ful of oth­er pres­ti­gious inter­na­tion­al bod­ies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Faulkner’s Review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Watch a Hand-Paint­ed Ani­ma­tion of Dostoevsky’s “The Dream of a Ridicu­lous Man”

Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er: A Free Yale Course

The Great Gats­by Is Now in the Pub­lic Domain and There’s a New Graph­ic Nov­el

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

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties

Some­times it can seem as though the more we think we know a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure, the less we actu­al­ly do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some ver­sion of The Mir­a­cle Work­er, right?—even if we haven’t actu­al­ly read Keller’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy. And Mark Twain? He can seem like an old fam­i­ly friend. But I find peo­ple are often sur­prised to learn that Keller was a rad­i­cal social­ist fire­brand, in sym­pa­thy with work­ers’ move­ments world­wide. In a short arti­cle in praise of Lenin, for exam­ple, Keller once wrote, “I cry out against peo­ple who uphold the empire of gold…. I am per­fect­ly sure that love will bring every­thing right in the end, but I can­not help sym­pa­thiz­ing with the oppressed who feel dri­ven to use force to gain the rights that belong to them.”

Twain took a more pes­simistic, iron­ic approach, yet he thor­ough­ly opposed reli­gious dog­ma, slav­ery, and impe­ri­al­ism. “I am always on the side of the rev­o­lu­tion­ists,” he wrote, “because there nev­er was a rev­o­lu­tion unless there were some oppres­sive and intol­er­a­ble con­di­tions against which to rev­o­lute.” While a great many peo­ple grow more con­ser­v­a­tive with age, Twain and Keller both grew more rad­i­cal, which in part accounts for anoth­er lit­tle-known fact about these two nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can celebri­ties: they formed a very close and last­ing friend­ship that, at least in Keller’s case, may have been one of the most impor­tant rela­tion­ships in either figure’s lives.

10-hk-twain

Twain’s impor­tance to Keller, and hers to him, begins in 1895, when the two met at a lunch held for Keller in New York. Accord­ing to the Mark Twain Library’s exten­sive doc­u­men­tary exhib­it, Keller “seemed to feel more at ease with Twain than with any of the oth­er guests.” She would lat­er write, “He treat­ed me not as a freak, but as a hand­i­capped woman seek­ing a way to cir­cum­vent extra­or­di­nary dif­fi­cul­ties.” Twain was tak­en as well, sur­prised by “her quick­ness and intel­li­gence.” After the meet­ing, he wrote to his bene­fac­tor Hen­ry H. Rogers, ask­ing Rogers to fund Keller’s edu­ca­tion. Rogers, the Mark Twain Library tells us, “per­son­al­ly took charge of Helen Keller’s for­tunes, and out of his own means made it pos­si­ble for her to con­tin­ue her edu­ca­tion and to achieve for her­self the endur­ing fame which Mark Twain had fore­seen.”

Twain wrote to his wealthy friend, “It won’t do for Amer­i­ca to allow this mar­velous child to retire from her stud­ies because of pover­ty. If she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in his­to­ry for cen­turies.” There­after, the two would main­tain a “spe­cial friend­ship,” sus­tained not only by their polit­i­cal sen­ti­ments, but also by a love of ani­mals, trav­el, and oth­er per­son­al sim­i­lar­i­ties. Both writ­ers came to live in Fair­field Coun­ty, Con­necti­cut at the end of their lives, and she vis­it­ed him at his Red­ding home, Storm­field, in 1909, the year before his death (see them there at the top of the post, and more pho­tos here). Twain was espe­cial­ly impressed by Keller’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, writ­ing to her, “I am charmed with your book—enchanted.” (See his endorse­ment in a 1903 adver­tise­ment, below.)

HelenKellerAd2

Twain also came to Keller’s defense, ten years lat­er, after read­ing in her book about a pla­gia­rism scan­dal that occurred in 1892 when, at only twelve years old, she was accused of lift­ing her short sto­ry “The Frost King” from Mar­garet Canby’s “Frost Fairies.” Though a tri­bunal acquit­ted Keller of the charges, the inci­dent still piqued Twain, who called it “unspeak­ably fun­ny and owlish­ly idi­ot­ic and grotesque” in a 1903 let­ter in which he also declared: “The ker­nel, the soul—let us go fur­ther and say the sub­stance, the bulk, the actu­al and valu­able mate­r­i­al of all human utterance—is pla­gia­rism.” What dif­fers from work to work, he con­tends is “the phras­ing of a sto­ry”; Keller’s accusers, he writes pro­tec­tive­ly, were “solemn don­keys break­ing a lit­tle child’s heart.”

twain-welcomes-keller-4

We also have Twain—not play­wright William Gib­son—to thank for the “mir­a­cle work­er” title giv­en to Keller’s teacher, Anne Sul­li­van. (See Keller, Sul­li­van, Twain, and Sullivan’s hus­band John Macy above at Twain’s home). As a trib­ute to Sul­li­van for her tire­less work with Keller, he pre­sent­ed her with a post­card that read, “To Mrs. John Sul­li­van Macy with warm regard & with lim­it­less admi­ra­tion of the won­ders she has per­formed as a ‘mir­a­cle-work­er.’” In his 1903 let­ter to Keller, he called Sul­li­van “your oth­er half… for it took the pair of you to make com­plete and per­fect whole.”

Twain praised Sul­li­van effu­sive­ly for “her bril­lian­cy, pen­e­tra­tion, orig­i­nal­i­ty, wis­dom, char­ac­ter, and the fine lit­er­ary com­pe­ten­cies of her pen.” But he reserved his high­est praise for Keller her­self. “You are a won­der­ful crea­ture,” he wrote, “The most won­der­ful in the world.” Keller’s praise of her friend Twain was no less lofty. “I have been in Eden three days and I saw a King,” she wrote in his guest­book dur­ing her vis­it to Storm­field, “I knew he was a King the minute I touched him though I had nev­er touched a King before.” The last words in Twain’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, the first vol­ume anyway—which he only allowed to be pub­lished in 2010—are Keller’s; “You once told me you were a pes­simist, Mr. Clemons,” he quotes her as say­ing, “but great men are usu­al­ly mis­tak­en about them­selves. You are an opti­mist.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

Read the Uplift­ing Let­ter That Albert Ein­stein Sent to Marie Curie Dur­ing a Time of Per­son­al Cri­sis (1911)

Helen Keller Had Impec­ca­ble Hand­writ­ing: See a Col­lec­tion of Her Child­hood Let­ters

Helen Keller Speaks About Her Great­est Regret — Nev­er Mas­ter­ing Speech

Helen Keller & Annie Sul­li­van Appear Togeth­er in Mov­ing 1930 News­reel

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

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Honoré de Balzac Writes About “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,” and His Epic Coffee Addiction

174 years after his death, Hon­oré de Balzac remains an extreme­ly mod­ern-sound­ing wag. Were he alive today, he’d no doubt be pound­ing out his provoca­tive obser­va­tions in a cof­fice, a café whose free wifi, lenient staff, and abun­dant elec­tri­cal out­lets make it a mag­net for writ­ers.

One has a hunch Star­bucks would not suf­fice…

Judg­ing by his humor­ous essay, “The Plea­sures and Pains of Cof­fee,” Balzac would seek out a place that stays open past mid­night, and the strongest, most arcane brew­ing meth­ods. The Buck­et of Black Snakes was his Green Fairy. He was that most cun­ning of addicts, some­times imbib­ing up to 50 cups of cof­fee a day, care­ful­ly hus­band­ing his binges, know­ing just when to pull back from the edge in order to pro­long his vice.

Cof­fee — he called it a “great pow­er in [his] life” — made pos­si­ble a gru­el­ing writ­ing sched­ule that had him going to bed at six, ris­ing at 1am to work until eight in the morn­ing, then grab­bing forty winks before putting in anoth­er sev­en hours.

It takes more than a cou­ple of cap­puc­ci­nos to main­tain that kind of pace. When­ev­er a rea­son­able human dose failed to stim­u­late, Balzac would begin eat­ing cof­fee pow­der on an emp­ty stom­ach, a “hor­ri­ble, rather bru­tal method” that he rec­om­mend­ed “only to men of exces­sive vig­or, men with thick black hair and skin cov­ered with liv­er spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowl­ing pins.”

Appar­ent­ly it got the job done. He cranked out eighty-five nov­els in twen­ty years and died at 51. The cause? Too much work and caf­feine, they like to say. Oth­er spec­u­lat­ed caus­es of death include hyper­ten­sion, ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis, and even syphilis.

Above, watch actor Paul Gia­mat­ti play Balzac all hopped up on cof­fee. And here you can behold The Cof­fee Pot That Fueled Hon­oré de Balzac’s Cof­fee Addic­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paul Gia­mat­ti Plays Hon­oré de Balzac, Hopped Up on 50 Cof­fees Per Day

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

How Caf­feine Fueled the Enlight­en­ment, Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion & the Mod­ern World: An Intro­duc­tion by Michael Pol­lan

“The Virtues of Cof­fee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethar­gy, Scurvy, Drop­sy, Gout & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day has­n’t touched the stuff for two whole weeks. Fol­low her @AyunHallliday

“Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language


There are some words out there that are bril­liant­ly evoca­tive and at the same time impos­si­ble to ful­ly trans­late. Yid­dish has the word shli­ma­zl, which basi­cal­ly means a per­pet­u­al­ly unlucky per­son. Ger­man has the word Backpfeifen­gesicht, which rough­ly means a face that is bad­ly in need of a fist. And then there’s the Japan­ese word tsun­doku, which per­fect­ly describes the state of my apart­ment. It means buy­ing books and let­ting them pile up unread.

The word dates back to the very begin­ning of mod­ern Japan, the Mei­ji era (1868–1912) and has its ori­gins in a pun. Tsun­doku, which lit­er­al­ly means read­ing pile, is writ­ten in Japan­ese as 積ん読. Tsunde oku means to let some­thing pile up and is writ­ten 積んでおく. Some wag around the turn of the cen­tu­ry swapped out that oku (おく) in tsunde oku for doku (読) – mean­ing to read. Then since tsunde doku is hard to say, the word got mushed togeth­er to form tsun­doku.

As with oth­er Japan­ese words like karaoke, tsuna­mi, and otaku, I think it’s high time that tsun­doku enter the Eng­lish lan­guage. Now if only we can fig­ure out a word to describe unread ebooks that lan­guish on your Kin­dle. E‑tsundoku? Tsunkin­dle? Contem­plate the mat­ter for a while.

The illus­tra­tion above was made when a Red­di­tor asked his daugh­ter to illus­trate the word “Tsun­doku,” and she did not dis­ap­point.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in July 2014.

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 Virtue of Own­ing Books You Haven’t Read: Why Umber­to Eco Kept an “Antili­brary”

An Archive of Vivid­ly Illus­trat­ed Japan­ese School­books, from the 1800s to World War II

The Japan­ese Fairy Tale Series: The Illus­trat­ed Books That Intro­duced West­ern Read­ers to Japan­ese Tales (1885–1922)

A Won­der­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed 1925 Japan­ese Edi­tion of Aesop’s Fables by Leg­endary Children’s Book Illus­tra­tor Takeo Takei

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his art blog Veep­to­pus.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 2013, the food writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan stum­bled across an arti­cle in the Boston Globe describ­ing a trove of dig­i­tized doc­u­ments from Ernest Hem­ing­way’s home in Cuba that had been recent­ly donat­ed to the John F. Kennedy Pres­i­den­tial Library and Muse­um, home of Hem­ing­way’s per­son­al archives. One line in the arti­cle caught her eye: “And the more mun­dane, like his instruc­tions to the house­hold staff, includ­ing how to pre­pare his ham­burg­ers: ground beef, onions, gar­lic, India rel­ish, and capers, cooked so the edges were crispy but the cen­ter red and juicy.”

Tan, a Hem­ing­way fan and the author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Mem­oir of Food and Fam­i­ly, set out to find the recipe and try it. She report­ed her expe­ri­ences on the Paris Review Dai­ly blog. “I had made burg­ers before, count­less times on count­less evenings,” Tan writes. “This one was dif­fer­ent; I was­n’t mak­ing just any burg­er — I was attempt­ing to recre­ate Hem­ing­way’s ham­burg­er. And it had to be just right.”

Here is Papa’s favorite recipe for pan-fried ham­burg­ers, as report­ed by Tan:

Ingre­di­ents–

1 lb. ground lean beef

2 cloves, minced gar­lic

2 lit­tle green onions, fine­ly chopped

1 heap­ing tea­spoon, India rel­ish

2 table­spoons, capers

1 heap­ing tea­spoon, Spice Islands sage

Spice Islands Beau Monde Sea­son­ing — 1/2 tea­spoon

Spice Islands Mei Yen Pow­der — 1/2 tea­spoon

1 egg, beat­en in a cup with a fork

About 1/3 cup dry red or white wine

1 table­spoon cook­ing oil

What to do–

Break up the meat with a fork and scat­ter the gar­lic, onion and dry sea­son­ings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fin­gers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the ice­box for ten or fif­teen min­utes while you set the table and make the sal­ad. Add the rel­ish, capers, every­thing else includ­ing wine and let the meat sit, qui­et­ly mar­i­nat­ing, for anoth­er ten min­utes if pos­si­ble. Now make your fat, juicy pat­ties with your hands. The pat­ties should be an inch thick, and soft in tex­ture but not run­ny. Have the oil in your fry­ing pan hot but not smok­ing when you drop in the pat­ties and then turn the heat down and fry the burg­ers about four min­utes. Take the pan off the burn­er and turn the heat high again. Flip the burg­ers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook anoth­er three min­utes. Both sides of the burg­ers should be crispy brown and the mid­dle pink and juicy.

Spice Islands stopped mak­ing Mei Yen Pow­der sev­er­al years ago, accord­ing to Tan. You can recre­ate it, she says, by mix­ing nine parts salt, nine parts sug­ar and two parts MSG. “If a recipe calls for 1 tea­spoon of Mei Yen Pow­der,” she writes, “use 2/3 tsp of the dry recipe (above) mixed with 1/8 tsp of soy sauce.”

Hem­ing­way’s wid­ow, Mary, pub­lished the same basic recipe in 1966 in the sixth vol­ume of the Wom­an’s Day Ency­clo­pe­dia of Cook­ery. The one-pound of beef was intend­ed for only two serv­ings. For more on Hem­ing­way’s ham­burg­er recipe and his culi­nary tastes, includ­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing list of gourmet foods he had shipped from New York to his home in Cuba, be sure to read Tan’s arti­cle at the Paris Review.

Update: You can also now enjoy Ernest Hemingway’s Sum­mer Camp­ing Recipes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Recipes of Icon­ic Authors: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, the Mar­quis de Sade & More

MoMA’s Artists’ Cook­book (1978) Reveals the Meals of Sal­vador Dalí, Willem de Koon­ing, Andy Warhol, Louise Bour­geois & More

David Lynch Teach­es You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Sur­re­al­ist Video

How to Actu­al­ly Cook Sal­vador Dali’s Sur­re­al­ist Recipes: Cray­fish, Prawns, and Spit­ted Eggs

The Original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Manuscript, Handwritten & Illustrated By Lewis Carroll (1864)

On a sum­mer day in 1862, a tall, stam­mer­ing Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty math­e­mati­cian named Charles Lutwidge Dodg­son took a boat trip up the Riv­er Thames, accom­pa­nied by a col­league and the three young daugh­ters of uni­ver­si­ty chan­cel­lor Hen­ry Lid­dell. To stave off tedi­um dur­ing the five-mile jour­ney, Dodg­son regaled the group with a sto­ry of a bored girl named Alice who finds adven­ture in the most unex­pect­ed places. By the day’s end, Liddell’s mid­dle daugh­ter, also named Alice, was so enthralled by this account that she implored the math­e­mati­cian to write the sto­ry down. Some three years lat­er, Dodg­son would pub­lish Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land under the nom de plume of Lewis Car­roll (the pen name is an Angli­cized ver­sion of “Car­o­lus Ludovi­cus,” the Latinized form of Charles Lud­widge). The peren­ni­al children’s read was imme­di­ate­ly pop­u­lar, count­ing Oscar Wilde and Queen Vic­to­ria among its ardent fans, and has nev­er been out of print since its ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion in 1865.

Alice’s Adven­tures Under Ground, the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the book that Car­roll pre­sent­ed to Alice Lid­dell in 1864, is present­ly housed in the British Library, which has gra­cious­ly made it freely avail­able online. You can view it here. The hand­writ­ten vol­ume includes 37 crisp ink illus­tra­tions, all per­son­al­ly drawn by Dodg­son. Dis­cern­ing Alice read­ers will notice that these illus­tra­tions dif­fer from the icon­ic images (and, to my eyes, very much supe­ri­or) cre­at­ed by famed Punch mag­a­zine polit­i­cal car­toon­ist John Ten­niel.

Title and illus­tra­tions aside, the orig­i­nal man­u­script is con­sid­er­ably slim­mer than the final ver­sion, con­tain­ing rough­ly 12,000 few­er words.

Those wish­ing to revis­it Alice’s adven­tures can do so at the British Library’s site.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Sal­vador Dali’s Illus­tra­tions for the 1969 Edi­tion of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land

Meryl Streep Shrooms Her Way Through Mod­ern Alice in Won­der­land

The Real Alice in Won­der­land Cir­ca 1862, and Our Favorite Cul­ture Links on the Web

Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

In the video above, poet, artist, Nation­al Book Award win­ner, and “god­moth­er of punk” Pat­ti Smith reads a selec­tion from Vir­ginia Woolf’s 1931 exper­i­men­tal nov­el The Waves, accom­pa­nied on piano and gui­tar by her daugh­ter Jesse and son Jack­son. The “read­ing” marked the open­ing of “Land 250,” a 2008 exhi­bi­tion of Smith’s pho­tog­ra­phy and art­work from 1965 to 2007, at the Fon­da­tion Carti­er pour l’art con­tem­po­rain in Paris.

I put the word “read­ing” in quotes above because Smith only reads a very short pas­sage from Woolf’s nov­el. The rest of the dra­mat­ic per­for­mance is Smith in her own voice, pos­si­bly impro­vis­ing, pos­si­bly recit­ing her homage to Woolf—occasioned by the fact that the start of the exhi­bi­tion fell on the 67th anniver­sary of Woolf’s death by sui­cide. Of Woolf’s death, Smith says, “I do not think of this as sad. I just think that it’s the day that Vir­ginia Woolf decid­ed to say good­bye. So we are not cel­e­brat­ing the day, we are sim­ply acknowl­edg­ing that this is the day. If I had a title to call tonight, I would call it ‘Wave.’ We are wav­ing to Vir­ginia.”

Smith’s choice of a title for the evening is sig­nif­i­cant. She titled her 1979 album Wave, her last record before she went into semi-retire­ment in the 80s. And her exhi­bi­tion includ­ed a set of beau­ti­ful pho­tographs tak­en at Woolf’s Sus­sex retreat, Monk’s House. Her per­for­mance seems like an unusu­al con­flu­ence of voic­es, but Woolf might have enjoyed it, since so much of her work explored the unit­ing of sep­a­rate minds, over the bar­ri­ers of space and time. While Smith express­es her indebt­ed­ness to Woolf, one won­ders what the upper-class Blooms­bury daugh­ter of a well-con­nect­ed and artis­tic fam­i­ly would have thought of the work­ing-class punk-poet from the Low­er East Side? It’s impos­si­ble to say, of course, but some­how it’s fit­ting that they meet through Woolf’s The Waves.

Woolf’s nov­el (she called it a “play­po­em”) blends the voic­es of six char­ac­ters, but Woolf didn’t think of them as char­ac­ters at all, but as aspects of a greater, ever-shift­ing whole. As she once wrote in a let­ter:

The six char­ac­ters were sup­posed to be one. I’m get­ting old myself now—I shall be fifty next year; and I come to feel more and more how dif­fi­cult it is to col­lect one­self into one Vir­ginia; even though the spe­cial Vir­ginia in whose body I live for the moment is vio­lent­ly sus­cep­ti­ble to all sorts of sep­a­rate feel­ings. There­fore I want­ed to give the sense of con­ti­nu­ity.

Spec­u­la­tion over Woolf’s men­tal health aside, her ref­er­ences to voic­es in her let­ters, diaries, and in her elo­quent let­ter to Leonard Woolf before she died, were also state­ments of her craft—which embraced the inner voic­es of oth­ers, not let­ting any one voice be dom­i­nant. I like to think Woolf would have been delight­ed with the fierce­ness of Smith—in some ways, Vir­ginia Woolf antic­i­pat­ed punk, and Pat­ti Smith. In her own voice below, you can hear her describe the words of the Eng­lish lan­guage as “irreclaimable vagabonds,” who “if you start a Soci­ety for Pure Eng­lish, they will show their resent­ment by start­ing anoth­er for impure Eng­lish…. They are high­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic.”

The record­ing below comes from an essay pub­lished in a col­lec­tion—The Death of the Moth and Oth­er Essays—the year after Woolf’s death. The talk was called “Crafts­man­ship,” part of a BBC radio broad­cast from 1937, and it is the only sur­viv­ing record­ing of Woolf’s voice.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Pat­ti Smith on Vir­ginia Woolf’s Cane, Charles Dick­ens’ Pen & Oth­er Cher­ished Lit­er­ary Tal­is­mans

Pat­ti Smith’s Polaroids of Arti­facts from Vir­ginia Woolf, Arthur Rim­baud, Rober­to Bolaño & More

Pat­ti Smith Reads Her Final Let­ter to Robert Map­plethor­pe, Call­ing Him “the Most Beau­ti­ful Work of All”

Pat­ti Smith’s 40 Favorite Books

 Josh Jones is a writer, edi­tor, and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.