Some Notes on Jespers' Kolniyatsch

BOOKS Some Notes on Jespers' Kolniyatsch Henry Jespers was convinced that the name a writer uses when he publishes is highly significant. His friend Taylor, a journalist, started off as a sports...

...Probably due to the "nihilism" (as the uninformed viewed it) of Kolniyatsch's "message," the vibrancy of the great Slav's suppressed spleen, the obliquities of his life style, he was being taken up by young readers—the Kids...
...They were pushing everything else aside to get at Jespers' "titanic" work...
...No," Jespers demurred, "that last one was Harry...
...For a long time Jespers had been laboring on a life of Luntic Kolniyatsch, the great Slav poet, whose seminal ideas influenced Franz Kafka and others so incalculably...
...It depends," Sir Max explained, "on what we mean by the word...
...Well, this was getting to be too much...
...Wade Jespers," as he usually signed letters to publishers...
...Later, he switched to general reporting, as Frederick W. Taylor...
...To add to his uneasiness, Jespers had lately seen three of his better students in front of a rack of paperbacks, absorbed in an anthology of Kolniyatsch's verse...
...Actually, it was also the great Slav's "later manner," as James Hun-eker astutely pointed out...
...He had picked up this phrase from Beerbohm but he had come to look upon it as his own...
...He sent off the book with a letter signed "H...
...Nowadays, most writers are content to be merely Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer...
...On the bench were reliable pinch hitters like Henry Timrod, Henry George, Henry Steele Commager, and Henry Demarest Lloyd...
...Young Finch signed his third letter "Dick...
...The name became F. Wool worth Taylor when he worked for a wire service, and now, Jespers noticed, a book on U.S...
...But that could wait...
...Jespers knew that Gaston and Si-mone Pegaway were working with their usual dull assiduity on a translation of the Master's writings...
...There had once been a four-initial novelist, Mrs...
...And he certainly had no intention of publishing prematurely, before his product had fully ripened...
...At last, on a cold winter day the manuscript was ready...
...The younger editors and readers were especially eager, Mr...
...Hart, Rhinestone, and Buttons were "delighted and proud," they wrote, to get the manuscript...
...Some of his students who wouldn't even look at a book written by an "Anthony" had read and liked Tony Tanner's excellent little book on American literature...
...Jespers really wanted to be known as "Jespers," and his opus magnum as "Jespers on Kolniyatsch...
...Most of what was generally known about Luntic Kolniyatsch came from Max Beerbohm's brilliant little essay and from tantalizing bits of information Jespers published in learned journals abroad...
...Jespers brought up Henry Fonda, Henry J. Taylor, and Henry Gibson...
...Kolniyatsch was indeed the despair of translators...
...He spent a week getting the material in shape, though it was the week Roger Blitz wanted him to go fishing through the ice on Whitefish Bay...
...Jespers hadn't definitely made up his mind about how he wanted his name on the title page...
...Yes, from now on he would be "Henry Jespers," though, of course, a writer has not made it big until he is known as Shakespeare, or Coleridge, or McLuhan...
...The book's contents had been vilely translated by the Pegaways, and stupidly edited by a young upstart (Yale Ph.D...
...Furthermore, "Hank" would irritate the pretentious J. Heathcote Savacool and the stuffy Pegaways...
...Not bad...
...Odd, Jespers mused, that no President was named Henry, though Clay, of course, nearly made it in 1844...
...Wade Jespers...
...Richard Finch, who described himself as a "nut" on Kolniyatsch and a nephew of Buttons, was assigned to head up the editing...
...Moreover, it was now rumored that Professor J. Heathcote Savacool, of Wyoming State College, was about to publish a biography of Kolniyatsch's grandmother, Lady Ottoman Wrench...
...Was Kolniyatsch mad...
...W. Jespers," or, on a few occasions, "H...
...This affords immense satisfaction to his banker, T. Watson Jones, well known in financial circles as "Watty" Jones...
...His dark premonitions, his bizarre spiritual explorations, fitted into no accepted category of belles-lettres, philosophy, or theology...
...His letters to Jespers were so perceptive, so knowledgeable, so friendly, they warmed the biographer's heart...
...There were one-initial writers like B. Traven and A. Alvarez, two-initial men like E. B. White and S. J. Perelman, three-initial men like A. J. P. Taylor...
...Beer-bohm asked...
...At eighteen, he murdered his maternal grandmother in a sullen fit of misanthropy and was sent off to the asylum at Baden-Baden where he wrote the poems that belong to what critic Per-cival Pollard called "his earlier manner...
...He privately expressed great contempt of the Pegaways, accusing them in their inept efforts at capturing in English the astringent beauty of Kolniyatsch's verse, of "trying to pack moonbeams in damp straw...
...at Fledgewood College who was born—yes, born— after he, H. Wade Jespers, had begun his work on the Master...
...These men were the first team, the starting line-up...
...If the Pegaways had bothered to read and digest Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, they would not stumble into muddy linguistic puddles...
...It had occurred to him, however, that an impressive number of American writers used the name Henry—Longfellow, Thoreau, James, Adams, Miller...
...When Jespers wrote a long, painstaking letter in reply, unraveling some minor snarls, he signed it "Hank...
...Buttons said, to get busy on the book...
...foreign policy was coming out, by Frederick Wool-worth Taylor...
...Billy McCann...
...Specialists in European literature knew that Jespers was doing a massive biographical-critical study...
...From then on Jespers somehow thought of himself as "Hank...
...His friend Taylor, a journalist, started off as a sports writer—just plain Freddy Taylor...
...That Kolniyatsch was an intellectual frontiersman there is no doubt...
...When Dick Finch at last wrote for advice on the author's name for the title page, Jespers wired back simply, "Make it Hank...
...His skill in avoiding the inevitable word," one critic said, "is miraculous...
...And Jespers found that Thoreau, christened David Henry, had transposed these names, and signed himself "Henry D. Thoreau...
...Sooner or later, Freddy would probably drop the first name, as did Bernard Shaw and Branch Cabell, and become Woolworth Taylor...
...His ground-breaking article, "Kolniyatsch, Kierkegaard, and Kafka," had sharply increased the impatience of scholars for the appearance of the full-scale work...
...He had hoped to go over the stuff again to catch and correct minute errors, to add a bit of scholarship here and there and some stylistic embellishments...
...Kolniyatsch was big enough to warrant such dedication...
...It, of course, had to be "well and fair...
...Jespers decided he must publish...
...It should be recorded, however, that the author endorses his royalty checks "H...
...So that's why it is that the great four-volume study of Luntic Kolniyatsch, sometimes referred to as "Jespers on Kolniyatsch," appears, as you have surely noticed, under the authorship of Hank Jespers...
...When he became a sports editor, it was Fred Taylor...
...But Jespers could think of Henry Ward Beecher, and Henry Greenberg, who once played first base for the Tigers...
...What Jespers projected was also to be a monumental, a magisterial performance of scholarship—exhaustive, illuminative, humane...
...Jespers had all the documents...
...This would appeal to the young crowd, Jespers thought...
...From the very beginning he planned to make the study his life work...
...Of three-name writers, the Harold Bell Wrights, there is no end...
...Funny about authors' names...
...A colleague of Jespers' at Plutoria University, envious of Jespers' rising reputation, satirically suggested, in a letter to the New York Review of Books, that Jespers might indeed work twenty-eight years on the study, the number of years Kolniyatsch himself lived (1886-1914...
...Wade Jespers...
...Perhaps he, Jespers, should use the name Henry...
...And, of course, a no-initial lady, Colette...
...Henry Jespers signed his own publications "H...
...Henry Jespers had begun his book when he was a young instructor of Continental Studies at Arcadia Heights University...
...Jespers feared that Kol-niyatsch might soon become another Hermann Hesse...
...It seemed to be the thing to do...
...Kolniyatsch, at the age of fourteen, was already passionately addicted to alcohol and heroin...
...Jespers' next-door neighbor, a fellow named Roger Blitz, remarked facetiously that everyone in America who amounted to anything was named Henry—Henry Ford, Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Emerson Fosdick...
...Recently, however, Jespers had observed developments that deeply disturbed him...
...But her husband, warming to the subject, came right back with Henry Sydnor Harrison and Henry Seidel Canby...
...There were seven big boxes of manuscript in all, probably four solid volumes...
...He knew his man as thoroughly as he knew the bowl of his own curved-stem pipe...
...He had settled on the title long ago—The Horned Viper: A Life of Kolniyatsch...
...But, as Jespers insisted, there was no excuse for the Pegaways when they rendered the poet's most poignant passage as, "Nothing is here for tears, nothing but well and good...
...Leon Edel was taking five volumes and twenty years for his life of Henry James...
...Jespers could recall a number of O. Edmund Clubbs and H. Allan Smiths...
...E. D. E. N. Southworth...
...Probably it would be "Henry Jespers...
...Savacool was, in Jespers' judgment, an odious and illiterate popinjay...

Vol. 35 • March 1971 • No. 3


 
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