Louis Menand has a review in last week’s New Yorker (archived) of Zora Neale Hurston’s much-rejected and now finally published novel The Life of Herod the Great; Menand describes her attempts to interest publishers, saying it “was turned down by Hurston’s publisher, Scribner’s, in 1955”:
She continued working on the book. In 1958, it was turned down by another house, David McKay, the publisher of Fodor’s travel guides and Ace Comics. In 1959, she wrote to Harper & Brothers to ask “if you would have any interest in the book I am laboring upon at present—a life of Herod the Great. One reason I approach you is because you will realize that any publisher who offers a life of Herod as it really was, and naturally different from the groundless legends which have been built up around his name has to have courage.” Harper & Brothers was Richard Wright’s publisher—as the reference to “courage” was intended to remind the recipients. But they passed on “Herod.” This was Hurston’s last extant letter.
One is primed to expect a happy ending — guess what, it turns out to be a masterpiece! But alas, Menand agrees with the publishers:
This is the Herod of “Herod,” a superhero of the Levant. He excels at everything, from man-to-man combat to interior design, an impossible combination of rectitude and swagger. When Cleopatra tries to seduce him, he refuses her. He’s a married man! When he has his wife executed, as the real Herod did, his reasoning is unassailable. When Cleopatra’s lover, that dissolute sensualist Mark Antony, sizes him up for a possible same-sex hookup, he can see right away that Herod is not that type. As Hurston describes the moment, “Antony was silently appraising Herod’s masculine perfection, his large, luminous eyes and superb lashes, his muscular limbs well developed by military use. But he did not sense that Herod’s mind would be capable of persuasion.”
The whole book is written like this, in a kind of illustrated-classics prose.
The bandit wheeled and snarled at Herod, exposing his rotting front teeth. He cursed Herod roundly and coarsely, then suddenly gripping his heavy spear, hurled it. But it was a second too late. Herod’s own spear was on the way, it hit Hezekiah fairly in the chest and pinned him to the ground. “Oh, allow me to finish him, Herod,” one of Herod’s young officers begged. “He is finished,” Herod said confidently making his way towards where Hezekiah lay. “I have been practicing that throw since I was ten years old.”
The dialogue is theatrical:
“My weaving-women have all but finished a new robe for you, beloved son. It is the blue of the Great Sea, shot with threads of gold.”
“How generous and thoughtful of you, Mother. You keep my maternal love aglow at your thoughtfulness. Allow me to embrace you before I return to that tiresome citadel.”
Or:
“Nicolaus!” Herod cried and heartily embraced the tall, spare-built Nicolaus. “Nicolaus, my classmate and friend of my bosom!”
“Herod, owner of the fidelity of my right hand! What brings you to Damascus? Your glorious actions are filling the world with your fame.”
Some bits are unintentionally comic:
“Those Barbarians shall never know the feel of a single Jewish woman’s body while I am alive.”
I have complained about this sort of thing before (Jane Stevenson’s The Winter Queen in 2006, Mary Lee Settle‘s I, Roger Williams in 2011). What on earth drives good writers — and Hurston was definitely that — to abandon all sense of style when they come to deal with historical material? It’s a damned shame, is what it is.
— “My weaving-women have all but finished a new robe for you, beloved son.”
— “Allow me to embrace you before I return to that tiresome citadel.”
— “Nicolaus, my classmate and friend of my bosom!”
Those are excellent phrases for a Palestinian Aramaic/Greek/Hebrew phrasebook.
Made me laugh!
One of the novels she did get published during her lifetime was _Moses, Man of the Mountain_, originally published in 1939 by J.B. Lippincott, Inc., which also deals with a notable Biblical personage and reportedly has at least in part a non-standard spin on the traditional narrative about the character. I have not read it, and apparently critical opinion about it was and remains sharply divided. One secondary source says it’s written in “Negro vernacular,” which suggests to me a rather different prose style than this Ye-Olde-Bodice-Ripper approach, but I don’t know how accurate a description that is.
I have not clicked through to Menand’s piece, so I don’t know whether or not he mentions this prior work and any parallels it presents.
Further on, the review suggests that Hurston may have had a film version in mind, and continues:
Menand actually has quite a lot about Moses, Man of the Mountain. It’s an interesting review, worth reading.
The same Charlton Heston who played in Touch of Evil?
The reviewer has apparently no idea what a storyboard is.
thousands of Hebrew workers were struggling with building stones. Some of their backs were bloody from the lash; many of them were stoopy from age and all of them were sweaty and bent and tired from work. The Egyptian foreman gazed at the drooping sun in awe and breathed with reverence: “Ah, Horus, golden god! Lord of both horizons. The weaver of the beginning of things!”‘
NB:
1. Workers, not slaves. This is PC before PC existed.
2. Stoopy– this is a very good replacement for the more usual “stooped”, and makes a good complement with the “drooping” sun ( a celestial worker, also sweaty and bent and tired, but continuing regardless)
3. Lord of both horizons– boldly making the case that Egyptians were flat-earthers.
“What god you talking about, Jochebed? These gods was here in Egypt long before we ever thought of coming here. Don’t look to them for too much, honey. Then you won’t be disappointed.”
This must be what is meant by “Negro vernacular”. Note “honey” instead of “hon” or “honey chile”.
https://archive.org/details/mosesmanofmounta00hurs/page/15/mode/1up?q=God
I appreciate David E.’s encouragement to click through, and agree it’s a piece worth reading. I think the headline (presumably not composed by Menand himself) unfortunate and would have suggested trying a verb other than “Obsessed,” which makes her sound like a stalker.
The stuff toward the end about her hearty dislike of du Bois and the quasi-respectable NAACP establishment seems largely gratuitous to the main thrust of the review, unless a lot of detail that would have explained a metaphor/analogy somehow got cut out in the editing. But it was interesting because that general theme had been on my mind of late due to the recent posthumous pardon by our now former president of that colorful fellow (and until a few days ago convicted felon) Marcus Garvey. Just because Garvey’s story (including but not limited to the context of his criminal trial) cannot be accurately understood w/o understanding the long-running conflict between him and his followers, on the one hand, and the du Bois/NAACP crowd, on the other. The latter having succeeded at convincing the authorities that their weird factional conflict (which the authorities almost certainly did not actually care about very much as such) was really a crime against public order committed by their factional opponent is itself a very Biblical theme. (It happens to Paul a whole buncha times throughout Acts.)
Garvey himself. like many historical figures, said some very philo-Semitic things at some points in his life and some regrettably quite anti-Semitic things at others. By chance, his trial for mail fraud was presided over by a Jewish judge at a time when that was much statistically rarer on the federal bench than it subsequently became, and he regrettably fell prey to the temptation to express his dissatisfaction with the court’s rulings in anti-Semitic terms, which *may* have been a contributing factor to him getting a stiffer sentence than might have otherwise been warranted and *may* thereby even (this is pure speculation on my part) have then eventually contributed to him getting out of prison early after Pres. Coolidge was advised by his Attorney General that the public interest would be served by exercising clemency and commuting the man’s sentence to time served. (The prior Attorney General as of the time of Garvey’s trial had in the meantime been forced to resign under pressure because of some alleged connection with the Teapot Dome scandal, although I don’t know if the decision to pursue the prosecution had been made at that high a level or further down the chain.)
Perhaps a misreading of how the phrase “Horus of the horizon” is written in Egyptian? According to Gardiner’s grammar, “Owing to their resemblance in sound to duals, some adjectives in -y from feminine nouns are written with a twofold ideogram” (§79), giving the phrase “Horus of the horizon” as an example.
“Those Barbarians shall never know the feel of a single Jewish woman’s body while I am alive.”
But married Jewish women are something else….