Dictionary of Literary Influences

Unamuno, Miguel de

mism, and self-confidence, which should inspire the aim for spiritual rather than technological supremacy in Spanish people. With a similar approach, Unamuno visited Portugal between 1907 and 1914 and was interested in “saudade” (sadness) and Portugal’s self-examination and religion through the poetry of Texeira de Pascoaes and Antero de Quental.

Unamuno’s other basic preoccupation is that of the immortality of the soul and the finality of life. He trusts “el hombre de carne y hueso,” the man of flesh and bone who struggles against death. After his religious crisis, Unamuno taught himself Danish in order to study Søren Kierkegaard in 1901. From William James and Henri Bergson, Unamuno expanded his doctrine on faith, reason, and intuition.

Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos (1913) shows an anguished quest for immortality. Man does not explain rationally the existence of God; man feels the need for God. He chose to make the “mortal leap” from denial to affirmation of God; he desires a God so he can extend his existence beyond death. Denying the validity of any inflexible philosophical system, he declares: “faith that does not doubt, is a dead faith.” This agonizing struggle between reason and Christian faith forms the basis for La agonía del Critianismo (1925), also entitled “Pascalian Faith.”

Unamuno mixes literature with ideas, as others mix philosophy with literature. Thus, he creates a very personal genre, “nivola,” a type of fiction abstracted from time and space to show variants of the tragic feeling of life. The character Augusto Pérez in Niebla (1914) protests against Unamuno’s intention to terminate his fictional life, on the grounds that he has an autonomous life, separate from Unamuno’s pen. The autonomy of the literary character derives from Don Quixote as well as his being a precursor of Luigi Pirandello’s theater. Unamuno’s work is a preexistential hagiography, the fictional balance to Saint Augustine’s and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. Brotherly war and fraticide closely linked with the biblical story of Cain and Abel is the central theme of Abel Sánchez (1917).

Unamuno’s voice speaks for the present in as unmistakable a style as that of Friedrich Nietzsche and Walt Whitman. He declares “My thought derives not from reason but (from) life, although I need to rationalize it to express it to you. Most of it cannot be reduced to a theory or logical system; but like Walt Whitman, the great yanqui poet, no theory or school should be created without me.” As a national record, the novella reflects the political and ideological struggles of Spain that culminated in the Spanish Civil War. Unamuno’s intellectual independence, originality, emotional intensity, and personal style make him a unique and unclassifiable artist.

Archives

Archivo de Don Miguel de Unamuno, Universidad de Salamanca.

Casa-Museo de Unamuno, Universidad de Salamanca.

Archivo Histórico Nacional, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

Printed Sources

Ferrater Mora, José. Unamuno, a Philosophy of Tragedy, Phillip Silver (trans.), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).

Ilie, Paul. Unamuno. An Existential View of Self and Soul (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).

Marías, Julián. Miguel de Unamuno, Frances M. López-Morillas (trans.), (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).

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Nozick, Martín. Miguel de Unamuno (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971).

Pérez-Lucas, M. D. Unamuno en el recuerdo (retazos de su vida) (Salamanca: Hespérides, 1998).

Sánchez, Barbudo A. Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: Taurus, 1974).

Unamuno, Miguel de. The Private World: Selections from the Diario Intimo and Selected Letters, 1890–1936, Anthony Kerrigan, Allen Lacy, Martin Nozick (trans.), Martin Nozick and Allen Lacy (ed.), (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Wyers, Frances. Miguel de Unamuno: The Contrary Self (London:Tamesis Books, 1976).

Andrés Villagrá

UNGARETTI, GIUSEPPE (1888–1970)

Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, Egypt. Having spent his childhood in North Africa, where he was greatly influenced by nomadic culture, he later completed his studies at the Sorbonne, where he focused on the writing and thought of Charles Baudelaire, Racine, and Nietzsche. During his stay in France, Ungaretti made strong ties to the literary and artistic avant-garde in Paris and continued his studies there until recalled back to Italy to serve in the war. After serving as an infantryman in Italy during World War I, Ungaretti taught at the University of São Paolo in Brazil until 1942, after which he accepted a chair at the University of Rome. An Italian poet, critic, and translator, Ungaretti is primarily known for having developed a “purist” style of poetic expression: intense and condensed, Ungaretti’s writings display an unconventional syntax and elaborate rhetorical structure. His poem “Il porto sepolto” (1916; “The Buried Port”) reoriented modern Italian poetry and permitted critics to dub him the founder of the Hermetic movement in literature.

In 1904 Ungaretti met and befriended the poet Mohammed Sceab at the meetings of the literary group L’Ecole Suisse Jacot, during which time he was introduced to European literature. Dabbling in the writings of subversive writers including William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue, Giacomo Leopardi, and Stéphane Mallarmé, Ungaretti was able to confer with some well-known avant-garde thinkers during meetings of the socialist-anarchist literary group “Baracca Rossa,” which was established by the Tuscan writer Enrico Pea and Sceab in 1908. The Italian members of the circle proscribed a nostalgia for pre-Industrial Italy as well as a desire to adopt France as its new “motherland.” It was primarily during his acquaintance (ca. 1913) with French symbolist poets and avant-garde artists including Guillaume Apollinaire and Giuseppe Prezzolini that Ungaretti’s style reached maturation.

Archives

Wylie, Andrew, 1947– , collector. MC 217 (SUNY at Stony Brook) West Campus: Correspondence, drafts of poems and translations, newsletters, programs, photographs, clippings, telegrams, audiotapes, and phonograph records related to Ungaretti’s reading tour of the United States in 1969.

Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze: correspondence and rare manuscripts.

Printed Sources

Giachery, Emerico. Vita d’un uomo: itinerario di Giuseppe Ungaretti (Modena: Mucchi, 1990). Piccioni, Leone. Vita di Ungaretti (Milan: Biblioteca universale Rizzoli, 1979).

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Ungaretti, Giuseppe. Ungaretti: la biblioteca di un nomade (Rome: De Luca, 1997). Catalog of an exhibition of books most appreciated by Ungaretti, unedited manuscripts, and works by artists and writers with whom he was in touch.

Dana Milstein

UPDIKE, JOHN HOYER (1932– )

John Updike was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania—an only child—and raised in nearby Shillington and Plowville. Growing up, Updike enjoyed humorists who appeared in New Yorker magazine: Ogden Nash, James Thurber, and E. B. White, among others. Much of Updike’s early fiction is set in Pennsylvania, including Rabbit, Run (1960), Pigeon Feathers (1962), and National Book Award–winning The Centaur (1963). Updike’s Lutheran upbringing also informs his fiction; he undertook to “hymn” the “whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America” (Updike 1989, 103), most famously through the Pulitzer Prize–winning Rabbit tetralogy.

Updike graduated from Shillington High School in 1950 as covaledictorian, earning a scholarship to Harvard, where he wrote and drew cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon. He studied English literature; his senior thesis concerned seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick’s debt to Horace. Updike also read William Shakespeare, with whom he engages in Gertrude and Claudius (2000), a prequel to Hamlet.

After graduating summa cum laude in 1954, Updike and his first wife spent a year in Oxford, England, where he studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing. As they started a family, Updike read C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, Miguel de Unamuno, and Thomas Aquinas to soothe “existential terrors” and maintain his Christian faith (Updike 1989, 55, 230). Those struggles account for much of his fiction; In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), for example, explores religious faith and doubt in America over the twentieth century.

Updike joined the New Yorker staff in 1955 and lived in New York City. Though he left for Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1957, hundreds of Updike’s poems, short stories, and reviews appeared in the New Yorker over the next several decades.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Updike was in his late twenties, he read Swiss theologian Karl Barth and nineteenth-century Danish Lutheran Søren Kierkegaard; Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling gave Updike “a philosophy to live and labor by” (Updike 1999, More Matter, 843). Updike thought of his novels as illustrations from the texts of the two theologians: Kierkegaard’s existentialist anxiety pervades Updike’s character Rabbit Angstrom, while Barth’s doctrine of God as “Wholly Other” encouraged Updike to hold a mirror to domestic life without moralizing (Updike 1999, “Remarks,” 5).

Updike also acknowledges debts to French writer Marcel Proust, whom he read the summer after finishing college, and English novelist Henry Green for their “styles of tender exploration that tried to wrap themselves around the things, the tints and voices and perfumes, of the apprehended real” (Updike 1989, SelfConsciousness 103–4). Other notable influences are James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Mann, and J. D. Salinger (De Bellis 2000, 253–56).

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Archives

Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.: Notes, manuscripts, drawings, proofs.

Printed Sources

De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000). A comprehensive secondary source which has entries devoted to Updike’s influences and reading—and a helpful bibliography.

Plath, James (ed.). Conversations with John Updike ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994). Updike discusses his influences in many of these collected interviews.

Updike, John. More Matter (New York: Knopf, 1999). Updike’s seventh collection of nonfiction, like those before it, contains reflections on a lifetime of wide reading.

———.“Remarks Upon Receiving the Campion Medal.” In James Yerkes (ed.), John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). Explores Updike’s religious thought. The editor also maintains a comprehensive Updike Web site, “The Centaurian,” at http://userpages.prexar.com/joyerkes/.

———.Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1989).

Stephen J. Rippon

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V

VALÉRY, PAUL AMBROISE (1871–1945)

Paul Valéry, French poet and man of letters, is one of the greatest of modern philosophical writers in both verse and prose. Valéry was born in Sète to a bourgeois family of Italian and Corsican descent and was educated at the Université de Montpellier. After a year of voluntary military service, he enrolled in law school. It was there that he met André Gide, one of the most outstanding writers of the day. In 1892, he settled in Paris, where he entered the literary circle of symbolist poets and made friends with some very prominent writers including Henri de Régnier and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Valéry was the protégé of Stephane Mallarmé, who encouraged his early works, and whose other young disciples, such as Pierre Louis, had Valéry’s work published. Valéry’s reading of Mallarmé’s works was the prime source from which his own poetic expression emerged. In the musicality of Valéry’s verse, the influence of Mallarmé is clearly identifiable.

At the time of his acquaintance with Mallarmé, Valéry was also being greatly influenced by his reading of Edgar Allan Poe. He became interested in Poe’s constructivist principle of poetry as he explained it in his 1846 essay The Philosophy of Composition, a description of the genesis of his work The Raven. He was further interested in the fame that Poe had gained in France through the translations of his work by Charles Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Valéry’s reading of Baudelaire’s description of Poe motivated him to attempt to perfect his own understanding of the mind. Valéry’s early poems, which were written between 1889 and 1898, were influenced by the symbolists that he had met in Paris. In his poetry, Valéry attempted to make abstract ideas concrete through symbolic imagery.

Following these publications, Valéry began a long period of literary silence, opting instead to work at a publishing house in London and in a news agency (1900–1922). Valéry’s Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (1895) was an opportunity to test many of his arguments on the nature of thought. His constructivist version of Leonardo da Vinci owes much to his reading of René Descartes,

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who was the first to argue for the predominance of logical relationships in scientific inquiry. In Valéry’s second published essay, Une soirée avec Monsieur Teste (1896), these Cartesian undercurrents surface. Indeed, through its depiction of the fictional Monsieur Tête, the essay traces the intellectual outline of the seventeenth-century philosopher.

His works from the World War I period include La Jeune Parque (1917). In 1920, he published Cimetière marin, one of his best-known poems. Other works include

Album des vers anciens (1921), Eupalinos (1921), Charmes (1922), L’Âme et la danse

(1925), and Regards sur le monde actuel (1931). Valéry’s later prose works consist of philosophical studies and meditations. Valéry’s poetry is best described as the painting of his thoughts. It is a philosophical poetry that centers on the problems of our existence and of our destiny. His prose follows a similar intellectual and philosophical angle. He was appointed a lecturer in politics at the Collège de France in 1937. Valéry was elected to the Académie française in 1925. Upon his death on July 20, 1945, he was given a national funeral.

Archives

Jacques Doucet Literary Library, Paris, France, Collection Valéry.

Bibliothèque St. Geneviève, Paris, France, Collection Doucet, Paul Valéry. Including manuscripts and original editions.

Printed Sources

Anderson, Kirsteen. Paul Valéry and the Voice of Desire (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000).

Kluback, William. Paul Valéry: A Philosopher for Philosophers, the Sage (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).

Richard J. Gray II

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, RALPH (1872–1958)

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, but lived most of his life in London and in the town of Dorking in Surrey. Considered one of the greatest English composers of the twentieth century or indeed of any era, he wrote in a wide variety of forms, and his music was often influenced by his broad range of reading. His first symphony, for instance, is a vast choral work that powerfully sets stirring music to the verse of Walt Whitman, one of Vaughan Williams’s favorite poets. The ninth (and final) symphony, meanwhile, seems to have been largely inspired by the composer’s reading of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. First recorded on the very day the aged composer died, the final symphony exemplifies the strong links between literature and music that typify his whole career.

Many of Vaughan Williams’s most significant works show the impact of his reading. His fifth symphony, for instance, draws (especially in its sublime third movement) on inspiration from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Vaughan Williams explained the eerily enigmatic final movement of his sixth symphony by alluding to a passage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Meanwhile, each movement of the seventh symphony—The Sinfonia Antarctica—is headed by an epigraph from a separate literary source (Percy Shelley, Psalm 104, Samuel Coleridge, John Donne, and the

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journal of Captain R. F. Scott). Likewise, Job, A Masque for Dancing, was influenced not only by the Bible (a key source for many of the composer’s works, even though Vaughan Williams himself was an agnostic) but also by the engravings and poems of William Blake. Flos Campi, a ravishing work for orchestra and solo viola, draws inspiration from the biblical Song of Songs, while the ever-popular work The Lark Ascending, for violin and orchestra, was inspired by a poem by George Meredith. Riders to the Sea, perhaps the composer’s best opera, is a setting of the play by J. M. Synge, while another opera—The Pilgrim’s Progress—exemplifies Vaughan Williams’s enduring fascination with Bunyan. The Poisoned Kiss, yet another opera, was inspired by a short story by Richard Garnett, while the opera Sir John in Love is one of numerous works reflecting Vaughan Williams’s lifelong love of Shakespeare.

It is obviously in his numerous songs and larger choral works that Vaughan Williams’s literary interests are most apparent. Among the latter, Dona Nobis Pacem used words from Whitman, the Bible, and other texts to appeal for peace in prewar Europe; the oratorio Sancta Civitas draws on the Book of Revelation; while the exqusitely beautiful Serenade to Music takes its words from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Toward the Unknown Region borrows again from Whitman, while The Oxford Eleg y is a setting of Matthew Arnold’s memorable poems “The Scholar Gypsy” and “Thyrsis.” One of the most compelling of Vaughan Williams’s largescale choral works is Hodie, a Christmas cantata that sets texts from such varied sources as the Bible, Miles Coverdale, William Drummond, Thomas Hardy, George Herbert, John Milton, and even Ursula Vaughan Williams, the composer’s second wife and herself a poet whose words he frequently used. His Five Mystical Songs do rich justice to the poems of George Herbert, while his Five Tudor Portraits set poems by John Skelton.

Vaughan Williams wrote music for numerous hymns and other liturgical works, and he was equally active as a composer of art songs and song-cycles, often drawing (as so often elsewhere) on the music and lyrics of the English folk song tradition, which he vigorously championed. Among the more obviously “literary” sources for his songs were poems by such notable writers as Blake, Robert Bridges, Robert Burns, Coleridge, Richard Crashaw, Hardy, Herbert, A. E. Housman, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Shelley, Fredegond Shove, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred Tennyson, and Paul Verlaine. Vaughan Williams drew on these and many other literary sources throughout his long career, but he seems to have been especially attracted to the words of Whitman, Shakespeare, anonymous “folk” poets, and (in his later years) his second wife. His musical legacy shows everywhere the deep, abiding impact of his reading.

Archives

Important sources include the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London; the Royal Academy of Music Library, London; the Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; the Bodleian Library at Oxford University; and especially The British Library, London.

Printed Sources

Day, James. Vaughan Williams, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Dickinson, A. E. F. Vaughan Williams (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).

Foss, Hubert J. Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (London: Harrap, 1950).

Frogley, Alain (ed.). Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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———. Vaughan Williams’s Ninth Symphony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Howes, Frank. The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press,

1954).

Kennedy, Michael. The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).

Mellers, Wilfrid. Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1989).

Vaughan Williams, Ursula. R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Robert C. Evans

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WALDHEIM, KURT (1918– )

Kurt Waldheim was born at St. Andrä-Wördern, Lower Austria. In 1936 when military service became compulsory in Austria, he joined the Austrian cavalry and was put on the reserve list. He began to study law at the University of Vienna and attended the Vienna Consular Academy in 1937 but his studies were interrupted when he was called up at the beginning of World War II. After the war, Waldheim worked as a diplomat until 1968 when he became foreign minister of Austria (1968–70). In 1971, he was nominated as the presidential candidate for the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) but he lost the election to the Social Democrat Franz Jonas (1899–1974). From 1971 to 1981, Waldheim served two terms as the United Nations secretary general. During this time he earned a reputation as a tough negotiator; critics, however, depicted him as an opportunist. As a visiting professor at Georgetown University, he taught international relations from 1981 to 1982. He became Austrian president in 1986. The scandal surrounding Waldheim’s candidacy for Austrian president was triggered by his alleged involvement in war crimes. In his autobiography The Challenge of Peace (1980), he concealed his SA membership and his interest in becoming a member of the National Socialist Party, NSDAP. Furthermore, Waldheim was accused of having been involved in deportations of Jews from Greece. Although he insisted that he had no knowledge of the persecutions of Jews in Nazi Germany, he later contradicted himself. An international investigating commission of historians suggested that Waldheim covered up the truth about his actions during the war.

In 1944 Waldheim completed his dissertation on the federalist notions of Konstantin Frantz, a German diplomat who was known for his anti-Semitic attitude. Waldheim discussed Frantz’s idea of a “Greater Germany Solution,” and praised Frantz for predicting the emergence of a powerful “pan-Germany.” In his autobiography, however, Waldheim depicted himself as a dissident and stated that, although a soldier of the Wehrmacht, he had read all of the anti-Nazi literature which had cir-

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