American Romances by Rebecca Brown

Author:Rebecca Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1 The A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I read these days is not my sister’s copy, though I thank her for the loan and for a million others. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, etc.; tons of music—the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, then Hendrix, Simon and Garfunkel, Jethro Tull.) My reading copy is, rather, included in The Portable James Joyce (Viking, 1966), edited and with an introduction and notes by Harry Levin, the same guy who did my Hawthorne Riverside anthology (that guy gets around!) which I purchased, used, for the pathetic sum of $6.60.

2 The altered texts made by playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell are described in John Lahr’s terrific biography Prick Up Your Ears (Knopf, 1978). Orton and Halliwell, before the one whacked the other to death with a hammer, lived in a tiny little flat in Islington, the same part of London where I lived in the ’80s. I went to what had been their place and stood outside and looked at it. I went to the library too. Though the artful altering of shitty library books earned Orton time in the slammer, those same defaced books, once evidence of criminal destruction of property, are now the crown jewels of the Islington library.

3 Tom Phillips’s great and beautiful altered text, the daddy of them all, is A Humument, which you should look up at www.tomphillips.co.uk and humument.com.

4 The Mortal Storm (Little, Brown, 1938) is probably the most well-known of the many, many books by Phyllis Bottome, the British daughter of an American clergyman. Bottome’s output included novels, short fiction and a biography of the man with whom she studied psychoanalysis in Vienna, Alfred Adler. In 1940, the unabashedly anti-Nazi Mortal Storm was made into a film starring James Stewart as a good German who doesn’t join the Nazis, and Margaret Sullivan as the non-German (read Jewish) girl with whom he falls in love. The movie pissed the Nazis off so much that they banned all MGM films from being shown in Germany. The Mortal Storm isn’t banned anywhere anymore but it might as well be, in the sense that we can’t find it readily because our tastes have changed and now it comes across as just a toothless bit of cinematic junk food.

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