posted on November 19, 2000 03:31:17 PM
Acquired a book of poetry by (and inscribed by) this Spanish writer. DJ includes gushes by Picasso, Casals, Frost, Shaw, etc. ad nauseam. Did a net search on him. All I can find out is that F.Scott Fitzgerald mentioned him in one book, and that he's connected in some way with some forgery scheme. But I don't know if he was the forger or the ...um, forgee. I'd like to include some bio info in the auction description. Any literati out there?
posted on November 19, 2000 03:48:58 PM
Hate to post a response of no help, but I made a call to my Aunt who is an English Professor at the U of I and has taught countless Fitzgerald mods and she said the reference didn't even ring a bell. (She's also a five time published author who has written about everything from American Poetry to The Business Man in Literature to Hemingway and the Arts... I really thought she'd be a slam dunk for this question!)
posted on November 19, 2000 04:11:06 PM
Hello HCQ. I found a reference to him but the text was missing from the article. I was able to see the text by viewing the source of the page. It's possible that I needed to turn on scripting and Java to see it but I didn't want to bother.
http://libws66.lib.niu.edu/friends/2forge.htm
QUOTE
"There are many other examples of fakes and forgeries, especially that found in plagiarized text. Extended investigation is often required to prove a document fake. Abbott ended his presentation with a personal example from his own investigation of the poet Scharmel Iris. Scharmel Iris, a popular poet of his day, not only borrowed from the poetry of others, but also built a reputation by using fake endorsements from other notable poets, used, in turn, to promote his works. As many believed the endorsements, he was recognized by many of his day as an established poet."
END QUOTE
BTW, a search for Scharmel Iris produced quite a few results on Google.
posted on November 19, 2000 04:24:54 PM
Wen - how kind of you to even make the effort! It's from This Side of Paradise, Book 2, Chapter 2, "Tom the Censor":
Iris also had work published in The Little Review, an WWI-era avant garde magazine. I found his name included in a list of "abbreviations of song publishers and collections". He was born 1889. And that's all I can find out! I've got an email in to C.S. Abbott, who wrote "The Case of Scharmel Iris", which was published in the journal for the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 77: 15-34....but it's still driving me nuts.
Thanks, bhearsch - that's the page I found that I couldn't read Will take a gander at Google now.
[ edited by HartCottageQuilts on Nov 19, 2000 04:26 PM ]
posted on November 19, 2000 04:40:20 PM
Well, did the Google thing and I'd seen all those sites already.
But the info about Iris being a - shall we say, "shameless self-promoter" make the DJ of this book particularly hilarious. Just a few (!) from the DJ:
Archibald MacLeish: "Poetry not so good as this gets published every year. I think it's a bloody shame Spanish Earth is not in print....At the very least it should for God sake be printed."
Eleanor Roosevelt: "[He] is on the side of the angels."
W.W. [sic] Yeats: "Of poets writing today there is no greater."
Ezra Pound: "We have but few great poets and Mr. Iris is one of them."
William Carlos Williams: "His poems are top rank. Pastora Imperio is perfect."
George Bernard Shaw: "His poems are not echoes of dead poets; they glow with the fire he has given them."
Robert Frost: I am merely a bucolic poet. Iris is greater than the rest."
Carl Sandburg: "Scharmel Iris is a genius in the lyric field."
Sir Walter Raleigh (?!?): "[F]rom the security of an inviolable judgment seat, he passes sentence on the world."
Pablo Picasso: "Only a great poet could have conceived and written [this book]."
Pablo Casals: "Magnifique!"
But my favorite, from Oliver St. John Gogarty: "Why have I not heard of [him] before this? Because of the critics who are like eunuchs posing as authorities on procreation. They don't know a thing about it; neither do critics know anything about poetry....That is why, until Yeats because aware of Scharmel Iris, he was more or less unhailed....That is why Yeats, the greatest poet of his period, gives this poet the greatest praise."
Holy jeezus. Has this guy been beatified yet?
I can't believe Williams liked this stuff. Maybe I'm just a philistine.
I may be one who is not constant to these boards.. but I do know certain staples here and one is not "Maybe I'm just a philistine" when it comes to HCQ. Your post is almost oxymoronic... You know it all, in my eyes. (And I'm NOT calling you a know-it-all)
posted on November 19, 2000 04:57:36 PM
HCQ -
A search on the book sites found 36 listings (may be duplicates).
"LYRICS OF A LAD. Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Symour, 1914. (publisher), First edition. Boards, cloth spine. One of 1000 copies. Laid in is a four-page prospectus with critical 'opinions' from Swinburne, Ruskin, Le Gallienne, et al. Iris regularly fabricated glowing comments on his own works, which he attributed to noted contemporary authors. He continued this practice for over 50 years."
"Given the poet's tendency to fabricate prefaces and other pendants by greater poets than himself for his collections of doggerel, one has reason to doubt everything about his books, including in this case expansive blurbs by Eliot, Williams, Sandburg, Shaw, et al. "
(why do I have a sense of dejavu all over again? Glowing prose, Irises, ..nah, I'm hallucinating).
Edited to add ...
Every listing seems to have been signed by the poet
[ edited by abacaxi on Nov 19, 2000 04:59 PM ]
posted on November 19, 2000 10:09:39 PM
LOLOL Loved those dust jacket testimonials. Next time I leave feedback it'll be "Of eBayers selling today, there is no greater!"
posted on November 20, 2000 04:33:53 AM
Glad some of you find this as amusing as I do (and yes, abacaxi, I was expecting a tipped-in plate of Yellow Roses to appear when I opened this tome).
"Doggerel" is an apt adjective for this junk. When I first picked it up I thought oh, bad translation (from Spanish). Now I doubt that I can also understand Fitzgerald's wry reference to this guy.
Well, I bought the thing for a quarter. It's certainly provided that much entertainment!
posted on November 20, 2000 05:54:02 AM
HCQ -
Is it IN Spanish or translated into English? I'm curious enough now to try to find a copy of his stuff to see just how bad it is.
It might be salable if you make it clear how bad it is and to what lengths he went to make himself look important (the Milli Vanilli of Poetry).
posted on November 20, 2000 06:21:34 AM
Nope, it's in English, and Salvador de Madariaga, who wrote the preface, describes Iris's work as "Spanish poems written in English," so I guess Iris typically wrote in English.
A selection of the better ones:
My guitar has six strings -
Six tremulous strings
Calling down a star.
On the day I die
Bury me in basil
And with me bury
My six-stringed guitar.
On the day I die
Wherever I stand
Bury me with my guitar
And cover me with sand.
Or how about:
I saw you plunge the blade in his heart
At twelve o'clock noon.
And when will I walk with him as then
At twelve o'clock noon?
His heart's blood scalded the troubled sand
At twelve o'clock noon.
Even the rose-tree trembled and bled
At twelve o'clock noon!
His blood stood up like a cock and crowed
At twelve o'clock noon!
And I cry out like a lair of lions
At twelve o'clock noon.
A "lair" of lyons? Other - um, quixotic uses of the language include "tassellated" towers, things "framed in the cistern of my hand," and descriptions of Sephardic patriarchs who "made do with their shekels and shallots" [?]. There's also a (unintentionally, I hope) hillariously passionate poem entitled "Boy with Cock".
Flipping through, I've just found a three-page epilogue by South African poet Roy Campbell that is, to put it quite mildly, a fulminating anti-communist manifesto, accusing even the Encyclopedia Britannica of error and bias. I can only assume that this book took at least 7 years to reach its publication in 1964, as Campbell died in 1957...
posted on November 20, 2000 11:40:24 AM
HCQ:
I am transported to the heights of banality with his words. Seldom in my life have I seen poetry approach such depth of triviality and use such flaccid similes for total lack of effect.
Someone should have buried his typewriter in the sand, not that bleeding guitar!
posted on November 20, 2000 01:24:24 PM
Yeah, like any of YOU could raise Sir Walter from his grave (and reattach his head, as I recall - or was that Essex?) to endorse YOUR talent
You know it all, in my eyes. (And I'm NOT calling you a know-it-all)
