The Playboy Anthology: script

 This is the delivered version of my 20-minute paper for Sex in Translation, an excellent conference organised by Will McMorran and Maddalena Italia at Queen Mary University of London this July. I'm giving you the handout as a separate post.

-----

 The Playboy Anthology – GN script

 

Intro

 

·      [thanks to organisers Will and Maddalena, and chair ______________ ]

·      My subject this afternoon is one close to my heart: the reception of the Greek Anthology, a Byzantine compilation of more than four thousand ancient epigrams. 

·      Over the last few hundred years, these little poems have been cherry-picked as, variously:

o   a mainstay of elite education, (alongside Lucian – Hannah’s paper),

o   an antidote to being French,

o   a model for War poets,

o   and a touchstone for literary Modernism (alongside Sappho – Marina’s paper).

·      The Anthology’s rich store of homoerotic content has also offered a found family to gay rights activists,

o   Notably in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

o   But also continuing sporadically into more recent times,

o   [PowerPoint]

o   As in this appearance of Strato of Sardis in Gay Journal of 1979,

o   In translations by Michael Kelly. (Jousts of Aphrodite)

§  (drawings are by Ian David Baker)

·      Ten years earlier, though, erotic content from the Anthology had met a much wider audience,

·      When translations of eight heterosexual epigrams appeared in the Christmas 1969 issue of Playboy Magazine,

·      With eight more following at Christmas 1970.

 

The translator

 

·      The translations were by Harry Brown,

·      [PowerPoint]

·      Not the elderly vigilante played by Michael Caine,

·      But the veteran poet, novelist, and Oscar-winning screenwriter,

o   responsible, for instance, for The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and the original, ‘Brat Pack’, Ocean’s Eleven (1960).

·      [PowerPoint]

·      Critics noted with approval that his work was steeped in classical allusion,

o   As here, in Sapphic mode;

o   Though his great inspiration was Homer’s Iliad,

o   Which he echoed in verse, and rewrote as a Western novel, turning Greek and Trojan heroes into gunslingers. (The Stars in their Courses, (1962) later filmed with John Wayne)

The venue

 

·      Classically allusive poetry was his first love –

o   I give a further example at the top of your handout, from 1940 –

·      But his published books of verse cluster early in his career.

o   Screenwriting paid more, and paid reliably, with novels on the side.

·      Playboy, though, paid enough to attract the top talent of its age,

o   Even if (in Brown’s case) they’d married well, and semi-retired to Mexico years before.

 

·      In the 1970 Christmas issue that’s circulating,

·      You’ll see household names including Michael Crighton, Paul Theroux, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the celebrity sexologists, Masters and Johnson, plus an interview with Robert Graves.

o   This was excellent company in which to circulate.

·      The previous year, Brown’s first consignment of versions from the Anthology had rubbed shoulders with – among others – Joseph Heller, Graham Greene, Timothy Leary, Woody Allen; science fiction greats Robert Sheckley and Ray Bradbury; and the Black Panthers leader, Eldridge Cleaver.

o   All that, plus Sugar Ray Robinson’s thoughts on the boxer then still known as Cassius Clay.

·      Playboy was at that time the highest paying magazine in the world,

o   And you can feel it in the inventive layouts and the quality of the paper stock.

o   As academics we can only dream of our work being treated so well,

o   [PowerPoint]

§  Though I concede that advertisers of premium spirits, colognes, hi-fi, and cutting-edge menswear do not flock to the presses that publish us.

·      Playboy’s editors especially pushed the boat out for these ‘gala’ Christmas issues,

·      And it’s important we see Brown’s versions in this context of special volumes that crowned the year,

·      Above and beyond their placement within a long-running feature that already marked the magazine as above its smutty imitators –

o   The ‘Ribald Classics’.

 

 

The Ribald Classics

 

·      Playboy marketed itself as ‘Entertainment for Men’, a total lifestyle package,

·      And invoking a global history of sexy hijinks helped underwrite that aspirational vision.

o   Tweaked extracts from Boccaccio, Rochester, Apuleius, or the tantric scriptures, welcomed the magazine’s readers to an elite brotherhood of sophisticated men-about-town, spanning continents and centuries.

·      Ribald Classics was, then, a prestige project, in which Playboy reached beyond the ephemerality of the monthly production cycle,

o   To embrace, and assert continuity with, centuries of literary tradition, and often with undisputed high culture.

·      It had been part of Playboy since the very beginning in 1952 and lingering into the 1980s,

·      And we can see its importance to the brand in the editorial policy of republishing the cream of the instalments in three volumes, initially in hardcover and then with wide dissemination in paperback. (first hardback 1957, paperback 1966-72)

·      The last of those three books includes all sixteen of Brown’s versions.

o   Some or all of them also made it into volume 7 of a more general paperback series titled The Best of Playboy, though my research has not yet extended so far.

·      In what follows, I cite the epigrams as presented in that volume, which is easier to find than the individual issues in which they first appeared.

o   Let us call it the editio minor.

 

The illustrator, and a plan

 

·      Before I continue, I must make one apology: [PowerPoint]

·      I will not be discussing the illustrations by Brad Holland.

o   They’re fabulous,

o   He went far beyond his brief (as quoted on your handout),

o   And he’s a crucial figure in the development of commercial illustration,

o   But I don’t have the time or expertise. I regret this, and we could always come back to it in discussion.

·      What I plan to do in my remaining time is twofold.

 

1.    I’ll relate Harry Brown’s Playboy Anthology to a trend in American reception of its epigrams, setting the scene as concisely as I can;

2.    And I’ll then invite you to consider a few of its versions as adaptations that aimed to give readers what Brown, and Playboy, thought they wanted.

 

·      If you wish to go further, know that Playboy Magazine has an online archive of vintage issues for subscribers,

·      And that its archivists, so-called, do not reply to queries from academics.

·      On with the show.

 

The recent American reception context

 

·      Now, we all know that the cultural meanings of classical and other canons depend on where and who you are at any given time:

·      Local reception traditions pick and choose the bits that work for them,

·      And that is nowhere more true than in the uses found for Greek epigram,

·      Which, as I said at the outset, has ended up signifying all sorts of things in different times and places.

 

·      In twentieth-century America the Anthology went stag,

·      Beginning in 1916 in Philadelphia with Mitchell Buck, who made the first complete translation of the Anthology’s heterosexually erotic fifth Book into English. [PowerPoint]

·      Buck relied on (Friedrich Jacobs’s) an old facing-text edition for Hachette (1863),

o   Which had put most of the poems into French, and a naughty few into Latin;

o   French and Latin alike now became English, with very little reference to the Greek.

·      Buck covered Lucian’s Dialogues of Courtesans that same year, I imagine on the same method,

o   and would later have a go at Bilitis (for which there was no Greek) and the Carmina Priapeia.

·      His Book 5 was a limited private edition, (750 copies),

·      But it established an American stake in Greek epigram as a carnal playground for red-blooded men of letters.

·      [PowerPoint]

·      Buck loved his archaisms; here is his Meleager 5.175, an epigram we will meet agai in looser guise when we circle back round to Harry Brown.

 

·      A decade later, the heterosexual allure of the Anthology found a more effective publicist in Wallace Rice.

·      Rice was a Chicago newspaperman and literary jack-of-all-trades, educated like Brown at Harvard,

o   And known for such timeless classics as Heroic Deeds in our War with Spain and 75 Years of Gas Service in Chicago.

o   ...Also various anthologies, because they were quick to do.

·      One of his standout works is Pagan Pictures, published in 1927 through the avant-garde firm, Boni & Liveright, in a purportedly limited edition. (1600 copies) [PowerPoint]

·      It bills itself as a volume of Greek epigrams... more or less.

o   The compendious subtitle admits that this is an omnium-gatherum, ‘Freely translated and fully expanded from the Anthology & the Greek lyrical poets, variously augmented by modern instances.’

o   In other words, Pagan Pictures was bits of whatever Rice fancied, under the pretext of translating the ancient Greeks,

o   ... Plus some stuff he outright made up, though ‘variously augmented’ is as close as he comes to admitting it.

·      His intro invokes ‘the ancient Grecian manner of thought’ – echoes of A.L.H. (Hannah’s paper) – but this is mere pretext.

·      He finds a kindred spirit in the ancient epigrammatist, Xenos Palaestes...

·      [PowerPoint]

·      ...Who does not exist. This is just Rice under a pseudonym.

·      The name is a giveaway to readers who share his classical training: it means foreign wrestler.

o   As Xenos Palaestes, Rice strips down and grapples with the ancient poets whom he wishes to emulate.

·      Often he gives an epigram by a real ancient epigrammatist, and then a tweaked version by Palaestes –

o   An exercise in call-and-response that is very much in the spirit of Meleager, the first of the great anthologists...

§  If Meleager had been obsessed with breasts, and indeed, exclusively and insistently heterosexual.

o   Sometimes the real ancient epigrammatist in these pairings is made up, too,

o   This example being a case in point.

·      Both of these epigrams are fake;

·      Both of their authors are figments of Rice’s imagination, sowing their wild oats in a Pan-infused Hellenic pornotopia that’s pure twentieth-century fantasy.

.

·      I don’t doubt Wallace Rice had read and been inspired by Buck’s version of Anthology Book 5,

·      But it was his Pagan Pictures that crystallised a distinct American vision of that work,

·      And that proposed that this one book, out of the sixteen, effectively was, or deserved to be, the Greek Anthology for modern American purposes.

·      35 years later it was the turn of Kenneth Rexroth, the self-declared polymath who was famously dubbed ‘Father of the Beats’.

·      Demonstrably inspired by Rice, Rexroth put together a 1962 Poems from the Greek Anthology for the University of Michigan Press

o   (subsequently an Ann Arbor paperback)

·      In which he more-or-less translated a bewildering array of originals, ranging from actual Greek epigrams to a snippet from Carmina Burana.

·      The work was rapturously received – even now he has his groupies –

·      And it must be what Harry Brown in turn was measuring himself against in 1969,

·      Seeing if he still had it in him to show that he still had it,

·      In a distinctly American and insistently virile reception tradition,

·      That claimed the Greek Anthology as a game preserve of sexually available womanhood,

·      Turning ancient Greek epigrams into modern one-night stands (or, in Rice’s case, tumbles in an Arcadian shrubbery).

 

·      [PowerPoint]

 

·      Rexroth continued Rice’s habits in several important ways:

 

1.    He brought in material from outside the Anthology, and from outside epigram entirely – even once, by accident, from prose;

2.    And he never told his readers exactly where he was getting it all, asserting merely that it was by such-and-such a poet,

3.    Which covered for his slapdash way with genre, and let him get away with inserting material of his own invention.

 

·      The approximate version of anonymous epigram 11.8 that I have shown you here is a case in point. Rexroth has simply made up the second half,

·      And this longer poem [PowerPoint] appears to have no original at all. Rexroth presents a hipster fantasy of priapic Hellas by way of the San Francisco scene.

·      In fairness I should say that Rexroth extends his coverage beyond the erotic, with some nifty versions of epitaphs and such,

·      But in all the important ways, he is Rice’s successor.

·      As I’ve mentioned, both translators mask the extent of their liberties by neglecting to cite exact sources,

·      And they justify both this neglect, and those unspecified liberties, by emphasising their human connection to the text. They are poets, not pedants,

o   And to care about detail is not true to the authentic Greek spirit.

·      What’s more, they make these claims in terms so similar that it’s clear Rexroth has read Rice and alludes to him. [PowerPoint]

o   I would certainly never imply that this Colossus of the avant-garde is ripping him off.

 

·      However, Rexroth also departed from Rice’s practice,

·      In a way that aligns with, and may well have been inspired by, the format of Playboy’s Ribald Classics,

o   And thus anticipates Brown’s escapades several years later.

·      He collaborated with an exciting contemporary artist, Geraldine Sakall,

o   Who also illustrated Douglass Parker’s Wasps for Michigan that year.

o   Modern reprintings sadly do not reproduce her images, which were very much part of the original vision,

o   And I echo that injustice by not discussing them now –

o   But that would be a whole other paper,

o   And I need to get back to the girlie mags.

§  I’ll just leave one here for you to enjoy. [PowerPoint]

 

The 1969 sequence

 

·      Let us now consider Harry Brown’s first batch of epigrams, from Christmas 1969.

·      I’ve given you the titles he assigned, and the originals his versions correspond to, on your handout... as best I can.

o   Like Rice and Rexroth, he just asserts ‘X is by Y’.

·      Some versions in both batches are very loose, but for 1969 we’ll look at two that relate less tortuously to their models,

·      For which I offer my own World’s Classics versions as placeholders.

o   We’ve the Greek at the end of the PowerPoint if we want to come back to it in discussion.

o   Till then, please believe they’re quite faithful.

·      I’ve picked out one poem by Philodemus, in which a comic dialogue between a courtesan or hetaera and her prospective customer becomes a not-much-less transactional chat-up in a Sixties nightclub;

·      And one by Gallus, whom I’d like to be the Cornelius Gallus who went down in history for founding Roman erotic elegy and getting on Augustus’s bad side –

o   We know he wrote erotic epigrams in Latin and was biculturally fluent, so why not?

·      In both versions, Brown puts the poet into the picture under a modernised handle –

o   ‘Phil O’Demus’; ‘Oh, Gallie’ –

·      Turning these ancient epigrammatists into American bachelors on the contemporary singles scene.

·      Philodemus, or Phil, charms his hookup with the promise of ‘stereo, soft lights, [and] Jack Daniel’s’ –

o   The very accessories that Playboy told its readers would make nice young women want to sleep with them, while asking no commitment in return,

o   And that the magazine’s high-end advertisers were keen to sell them.

·      The modern Philodemus purchases his pleasure with brand names, not coin.

·      [PowerPoint]

·      We can note in passing that Brown’s version of Rufinus 5.43 similarly goes out of its way to de-hetaericise its original, this time through framing:

·      Rufinus in the original is an ironic erotodidact, deprecating the poor gamesmanship of a less experienced player, but this adaptation has us eavesdrop instead on a ‘Snippet from an exchange of girlish confidences’ between nice young women on the dating circuit.

o   The Trigère of this version is the queen of prêt-à-porter, Pauline Trigère.

§  Her celebrity clients included Jacqui Kenney and Liz Taylor.

§  She invented the jumpsuit.

§  In Classics you learn something new every day.

·      Brown’s version of Gallus, on your handout, is weird and gross, probably –

o   The scenario takes some puzzling out,

o   Since the original is atypically explicit, and Playboy wants to keep clear water between its own product and hardcore pornography.

o   So, Brown resorts to euphemism, if we can call it that, and gets all tangled up.

·      The poem’s inclusion at least confirms that Brown was working from an up-to-date edition.

o   William Paton, who took on the Anthology for the Loeb Classical Library in the 1910s, put sexually and scatologically explicit Greek originals into Latin rather than English – a recurring motif of this conference;

o   a mid-century update by series editor Brian Warmington quietly patched this.

·      There’s a poem by Marcus Argentarius (5.104) in the next year’s batch that also benefited from Warmington’s attentions.

·      We may also note that Brown – who, after all, read widely in the classics – has looked into more than one Loeb from the Anthology’s five-volume set:

o   He gives a version of Automedon from the satirical Book 11, on male impotence,

o   Not a theme we might have expected Playboy’s ethos to embrace, but one in keeping with the picaresque tone of other Ribald Classics inclusions.

 

The 1970 sequence

 

·      Turning now to the sequence from the following year, and aiming for contrast, I’ve picked out two versions with more tenuous relations to their ancient prototypes.

 

·      Let’s look first at Brown’s 1970 Meleager epigram 5.175,

o    A poem we’ve already met in Mitchell Buck’s quaint version of 1916.

·      In the original scenario, the elegiac lover remonstrates with a hetaera who had verbally contracted to reserve her romantic favours solely for him, at least, in his understanding.

·      But all the signs betray her: she has been partying without him, at a symposium, and a raucous one at that, segueing into the drunken late-night procession called a kōmos.

·      Gunē pankoina, he calls her – a woman who makes herself available to all comers.

·      Brown’s version transmutes the scene. Bachelor Meleager now calls out an actress girlfriend who has been sleeping with just one other man,

·      Amid jumbled allusions to classical myth and to the theatrical avant-garde

o   (Peter Weiss’s German play Marat/Sade (1963) was filmed by Peter Brook in 1967).

·      I believe the name ‘Peggy’ is prompted by Meleager’s Sapphically charged word for lyre, pēktis, but that’s about where contact with the original ends.

 

·      Turning to Asclepiades 5.189, we find this Greek poet as well echoing a famous Sapphic snippet (fr.168B Voigt: Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα καὶ Πληΐαδες):

o   ‘The moon and the Pleiades have set, it is the middle of the night, time is going by, and I lie down alone.’

·      This allusion cues up a classic motif of erotic epigram: the paraklausithuron,

o   The elegiac lover’s late-night lament outside the securely barred door of the pretty young person on whom he has set his sights.

·      Again the context is betrayal by a courtesan with whom the lover had believed he had an exclusive arrangement – ‘her who lied to me’,

·      Leading into a bundle of quintessentially Hellenistic tropes that figure Erōs as an inner fire, a sickness, or an arrow-wound – and sometimes, as here, all three at once.

·      Fire and sickness are still part of the modern repertoire of love-songs, but Brown takes a different line.

·      He latches onto the storm of the first line – the single Greek word kheima, wintry weather – and develops an elaborate thunder-and-lightning scenario,

·      That turns Asclepiades’ loss into the modern bachelor’s unexpected win.

·      The original kind-of-disappears into the mix,

·      But further epigrammatic troping comes in, from Brown’s wider scoping of the Anthology:

o   The drunkenness of the elegiac lover on his kōmos, processing from the symposium to the door of his beloved;

o   And the foul weather that inevitably accompanies his ritual journey into disappointment;

o   Including the mortal threat of lighting – an epigram by Meleager, for instance, declares the lover’s fatalistic fearlessness, and notes that Zeus, god of the thunderbolt, knows what it is to lose his head over a pretty young thing (Meleager 12.17).

o   We even find classical precedent for the thunderbolt as penis, in a smutty mythological pastiche by Nicarchus amid the satirical epigrams of Book 11 (11.328),

o   Again suggesting Brown has read more widely than he strictly needed to.

·      And he has certainly looked at the Greek.

o   As with Peggy and pēktis, I think Marcia’s name is a creative mistranslation of the ‘long’ of ‘long night’ – makrē.

 

Conclusion

 

·      To conclude: there’s lots going on. A lot of it’s not great:

·      Harry Brown was in his fifties; he tries to sound ‘hep’, but he ends up the oldest swinger in town,

·      To the extent that we might be tempted to apply the Playboy Editors’ own strictures and dismiss his versions as ‘jazzed-up travesties’.

·      But he was working within, and servicing, a distinct local reception tradition,

o   To which his wide classical reading brought some value.

·      Putting together Brown with what had gone before, we may now say that Greek epigram’s macho afterlife in twentieth-century America was a significant new chapter in its reception,

o   Building on older trends, but freshening the genre up, by decoupling it from weak ideas like translating what was actually there.

·      [PowerPoint]

·      Typically this approach turned a blind eye to everything beyond Book 5,

·      Turning the Anthology into a classical paradigm for bachelor exceptionalism,

·      And its poets into ancient chat-up artists,

o   A fantasy which could run alongside others that centred around the same notional source but were putting it to quite different uses.

·      I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it all;

·      Thank you for your time.

·      [PowerPoint – Brad Holland illustrations again]