Two years ago on Round and Square (19 October 2011)–Seinfeld Ethnography (30)–Dinner Party
Click here for other posts by Guest Contributor Lily Philpott:
 |
| [a] All the World's a Stage - RF |
Today's guest contributor on Round & Square is Lily Philpott. She hails from Weston, Connecticut and recently graduated from Beloit College with a B.A. in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. She joins Rachel, Julia, Amara and Sarah in the Geil archive in Doylestown, Pennsylvania to help digitize the archive and enjoy the stories she finds there.
*** ***
Please note that all items marked "DHS" are property of the Doylestown Historical Society, and used with DHS permission. If you wish to use an image you need permission of the Society. Please contact Robert LaFleur (lafleur@beloit.edu), and he will put you in touch with the appropriate people.
Yesterday Julia Lacher wrote about the time Geil spent in the Clifton Springs Sanitarium in upstate New York, and the
document I’m focusing on for today is written on stationery from the same
sanitarium. Like Julia, I initially associated sanitariums with horror films,
but was interested to learn that Geil would have stayed at one in the interests
of improving his health, and securing time to write.
As a writer I am interested in Geil’s
creative process. The notes that we are currently focused on digitizing are
primarily concerned with China, and although Geil never explicitly mentions his
writing habits, the nature of the documents allows us to infer the ways he may
have written.
 |
| [c] Travelling in China - RF |
Yesterday, for example, we found a folder
full of typed pages written by Geil while on his Great Wall adventure to a "friend." The friend is never named, and the letters are not addressed, which
led me to believe that they were Geil’s attempt at an epistolary account of his
journey—that age-old tradition of telling an entire story in letters.
We have also been scanning diaries Geil
wrote while traveling through China. I can almost picture William Edgar Geil
sitting at a typewriter, and feeding sheets of paper through the machine while
he typed up the day’s observations. The diary entries are often misspelled or
unhelpful, but they seem to constitute an important part of Geil’s creative
process.
The archive also contains notes—some from
famous translators who were kind enough to lend a hand, and some fragmentary
scraps of paper filled with cramped and nearly illegible cursive. All of these
separate documents—the "letters," the travel diaries, the translations, and
the handwritten notes—eventually became the books that Geil published.
 |
| [d] Paper Trail - RF |
While writing, authors leave physical
traces of their creative processes. There are letters sent to friends or
relatives; books that have been annotated in the name of research; sloppy first
drafts; correspondence with an editor, and more. If we’re lucky this paper
trail is preserved for later generations to study and enjoy.
And so, finally, we turn to the document
that inspired this blog post. When I unearthed it yesterday, I was delighted to
find that it contained a number of quotations from William Shakespeare and Ben
Jonson. This is something that Geil does frequently. There are a number of
notes where Geil copied out quotations from authors, poets, or sinologists he seems
to admire. I would assume that this is yet another part of his creative
process: you can’t be an effective writer if you don’t read and engage with
your betters.
 |
| [e] Be-Geiled by Shakespeare - DHS |
What really intrigued me about this note,
however, was the way that the quotations seemed utterly nonsensical when put
together. In true Geil fashion, he quotes from a number of plays, as well as
from Shakespeare’s friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson, on topics that
range from immortality to obscurity to villainy.
Quoting Trinculo as he inspects Caliban in The Tempest, Geil writes: “A very
ancient + fish-like smell," and then, for some inexplicable reason, circles it.
Quoting The Merry Wives of Windsor,
he writes: “The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended
nostrils." Quoting from the same play, he writes: “I cannot tell what the
dickens his name is." Not to forget Ben Jonson, he copies down the simple
phrase: “I smell a rat." More importantly, he (incorrectly) transcribes a line
from a poem that Jonson wrote about Shakespeare, writing: “He was not of our
age, but for all time."
 |
| [f] Shakespeare's Globe - RF |
Now, I have read a number of strange works
while studying English literature. If I read slowly and carefully, I can understand
Chaucer in his original form; I’ve navigated Proust’s love of run-on sentences;
and I genuinely enjoy James Joyce. I also enjoy reading Shakespeare, and while
it’s enjoyable to see Geil of all people quoting the Bard himself, I don’t
really understand why.
I like the idea that Geil turned to the
Bard for inspiration while working in the Sanitarium but it is a strange trove
of inspiration that he came up with, indeed.
 |
| [g] Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' - RF |
While we may never know why Geil found
Trinculo’s description of Caliban’s stench important enough to write down and
circle, what really struck me from the note was the line copied from the poem
Ben Jonson wrote for William Shakespeare after his death.
The line reads: “He was not of our age, but
for all time,” and it comes from a poem dedicated to the genius and legacy of
William Shakespeare. Jonson and Shakespeare were contemporaries, but the line
rang true in Geil’s time, as it does today. I imagine that while writing this
line Geil may have wished that he, like Shakespeare, become a man “for all
time.” This is not, of course, what happened, but there are a few us in
Doylestown, who are digitizing even the most confusing of Geil’s notes in the
interest of making him available to the twenty-first century, and I suppose
that’s a start.
 |
| [h] 'A man for all time' - RF |
No comments:
Post a Comment