Sometimes I Wonder...

Every once in a while I read something that I just need to share.

The Diary of Anne Frank has been produced on Broadway several times beginning on this day in 1955. While always a hit the reviews have been mixed. The 1997 New York production, which had a script reworked by Wendy Kesselman, met with harsh criticism from Cynthia Ozick and Vincent Canby as described in Today in Literature:

Ozick says of the 1997 production:

the Diary had been "bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied."

Canby complains in a similar vein when he describes the "earnestly artificial" Anne as "having been directed to behave in a fashion that might have embarrassed even Sandra Dee's Gidget."

But the part of the story I wanted to share was the incident which Canby relates in the same review:

Anne and Margot Frank in 1933

This production will be of interest mainly to those who have never before encountered "The Diary," like the woman in her 20s who sat in front of me the night I saw the play. As her escort was whispering in her ear just before the performance began, she suddenly drew back and stared at him in surprise. "You mean," she said, "she dies at the end?"

Sometimes I wonder...

For more about Anne Frank visit the Anne Frank Museum website.

A Scarlet Letter - Today in History

On this day in 1850, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne was published.

While the work was fiction, and the existence of the well-worn letter "A" found in the Salem custom-house was certainly a literary device, Hawthorne's famous story did come from the experiences of his ancestors.

From Today in Literature:

Among his seventeenth-century ancestors were two sisters who had been forced to sit in the Salem meetinghouse wearing forehead bands identifying their incestuous conduct (while their brother hid out in Maine). The Scarlet Letter also came from Hawthorne's general guilt over the Puritan enthusiasms of some of his other ancestors -- one had been a judge at the witch trials -- and his feeling that his hometown was a place of gloom and convention.

King continues

Hawthorne's attempts to escape Salem included a short stay at Brook Farm, the Transcendentalists' utopian community outside of Boston. Although at first invigorated by the new thinking and fresh air, he soon found himself permanently volunteered to the manure pile, and reappraising town-life: "a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money."

So Hawthorne returned to Salem and his work at the customs-house while continuing to hope for the time when he would be able to make a living from his writing. Not until he was fired from his job in the summer of 1849 did he make another attempt at the tale which had been previously been know as "Endicott and the Red Cross" about "a young woman with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown."

Despite his predictions that it would "weary very many and disgust some," The Scarlet Letter was immediately popular, allowing Hawthorne to move away from Salem with this good riddance: "I detest this town so much that I hate to go into the streets or to have the people see me. Anywhere else, I shall at once be entirely another man."

Charlotte's Web is 50+ Today

On this day in 1952, one of our most-loved children's books was released. When E.B. White published Charlotte's Web, he had been living on his "Salt Farm" in North Brooklin, Maine for 15 years. His love of the country life is evidenced by these entries from his letters:

Practically the most satisfying thing on earth (specially after fifteen years of trying to put English sentences together against time) is to be able to square off a board of dry white pine, saw to the line (allowing for the thickness of the pencil point) and have the thing fit perfectly.

I am surrounded by hundreds of bottles of new crabapple
jelly, and pears in jars, and ripening cranberries, and turkeys on the hoof, and ducks in the cove, and deer in the alders, and my own mackerel shining in air-tight glory. I wouldn't know what to do with a dollar even if I could remember which pants it was in.

His affection for this life reminds me only too clearly of my years living on the old Shaker place now known as Alasa Farms, located on Sodus Bay, New York, when he says:

the thousand and one exciting little necessities which spring from a 12-room steam-heated house standing all alone in the big world.

The reality of farm life comes alive in the pages of Charlotte's Web as we share the trials and joys with Charlotte and Wilbur. White was never interested in painting a rosy or false picture of the animal world.

My feeling about animals is just the opposite of Disney's. He made them dance to his tune and came up with some great creations, like Donald Duck. I preferred to dance to their tune and came up with Charlotte and Wilbur.

He told a neighbor who wanted to know what he thought about the movie version of Charlotte's Web:

The story is interrupted every few minutes so that somebody can sing a jolly song. I don't care much for jolly songs. The Blue Hill Fair, which I tried to report faithfully in the book, has become a Disney world, with 76 trombones.

White recorded the audiobooks version of his story himself because:

I think a book is better read the way my father used to read books to me -- without drama. He just read the words, beginning with the seductive phrase "Chapter One...."

E.B. White: 1899-1985, he lived on his farm for nearly 50 years.

From Today in Literature

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