0.13 Bohemian by design: gelett burgess and le petit journal des  (Page 4/7)

Those “goops” became one of Burgess’s most successful undertakings. His bibliography shows several titles in the 1900s for publications based on these rubbery figures. He pressed them into service as a way to instruct the no-doubt recalcitrant young in the norms of good behavior through the lessons contained in such works as the 1900 Goops and How Not to Be Them. But it would be a mistake to consign Burgess to the ranks of authors of juvenile literature. Though he did make a success of the works for children, his engagement with nonsense as well as other humor is an adult undertaking. As Joseph Backus, his most assiduous commentator, has noted, Burgess’s nonsense exhibits serious commitment to an artistic vision and purpose, “a logical but uncommon process of association guided in part by meter and rhyme.” Backus, Behind the Scenes, op. cit., p.31. Nonsense, in other words, is a metacritical act in its own write, playing with the contrast between formal coherence and conceptual disorientation as a way to renew a reader’s own relation to received form. Burgess played out his nonsensical sensibility in the elaborate adventures of the central character of his 1897 farcical novel, Vivette . Gelett Burgess, Vivette (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1897). A free-thinking, gifted, and daring (as well as alluring and liberated) young woman, Vivette is a sort of Nadja avant-la-lettre, but with more humor and fun in her than Breton’s pathetic muse. The writing in that book is tight, light, and right on the line of being enactment and parody of the genre of romantic adventure tale.

Throughout his career, in fact, Burgess played with sustained conceits. His narratives were often skirting this line between nonsense and more conventional humor. Aside from Le Petit Journal , the only substantial text in Burgess’s oeuvre that is a lengthy parody of a literary work (and comments on its production) is his 1904 Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne .

Burgess was successful as a writer. By the late 1890s, just into his early 30s, he was compared with Rudyard Kipling as an emerging star in the literary firmament. Hardly remembered with the same degree of distinction today, Burgess had experienced an early flash of success when his nonsense quatrain, “A Purple Cow,” received notable acclaim. Backus, Behind the Scenes, op. cit. Burgess pretended to rue the success of the short poem, and no doubt wished he could be other than “the man who wrote ‘The Purple Cow’,” but the ditty exemplified the spirit that guided his work throughout his career. In 1885 he had founded The Lark, in which that poem appeared. His two-year stint editing and writing for that monthly sixteen-page publication had no doubt perfected the skills he put to such focused purpose in Le Petit Journal. His turn to the writing profession had come about when he was dismissed from his post teaching technical drawing at the University of California, Berkeley (he had obtained a degree from MIT in his native Boston), for defacing a statue of the eminent Bay Area dentist Henry Cogswell. Backus, Behind the Scenes, op. cit., and wiki, (External Link) . The boyish spirit and delight in pranks is still evident in Le Petit Journal , which could be characterized as a bit of juvenilia if it were not so self-reflexive. Nothing in The Lark really prepares us for the full-throttle over-the-top density and referential richness of Le Petit Journal . To cite Backus again, The Lark has many of the same characteristics as the vaudeville variety programs that Burgess was attending and beginning to write about for money. The pieces in its pages were short, varied, consumable, appealing to a broad and not particularly over-sophisticated audience ready to be amused by spinning plates and wistful recitations as easily as a naughty but basically decorous dance by a young thing in flounced skirts. The Lark offerings are a published equivalent, offering sentimental short poems alongside sprightly vignettes. The Lark ran only for two years. Though it received some national notice (Will Bradley commented favorably on the journal in the pages of his own), and brought Burgess a degree of recognition, it proved not particularly viable in financial terms.