Hello, and welcome to the bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is John Gruesser, editor of "Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction," and "Animals in Classic American Poetry: How Natural History Inspired Great Verse."

John, thank you so much for being here today.

- -Terrific to be here.

- -These books, I feel like they're kind of a mouthful, but they are what they say they are.

But could you maybe introduce them to us, as well?

- -Sure.

I got a very unique position at Sam Houston State University.

They hired me as a senior research scholar, and I was there from 2018 to 2023, and it was just research.

So there were there were no teaching responsibilities.

It enabled me to undertake a number of different projects, but one that kind of hadn't been planned ahead of time were what was the one that led to these two books?

So the, the head of the search committee that hired Neil, William Lutterschmidt, we really hit it off, and he told me that he and Brian Chapman had the Integrative Natural History series.

So Bill and I are talking and we're thinking about, well, literature and natural history is can we can we do something there?

And originally, I'm an Edgar Allan Poe person.

So originally we were thinking, well, maybe something I need Edgar Allan Poe.

But as we thought more about it, it seemed like we should do fiction and do really kind of classic American fiction.

So in the first book, we start with Washington Irving.

We do, we've got a couple of we've got a couple of essays on Edgar Allan Poe.

We've got Mark Twain story about the jumping frog.

We have, Of Mice and Men.

We've got William Faulkner's The Bear, and that's actually where the cover, illustration comes from.

And, we, we finish off with To Kill a mockingbird and with, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.

So, and the way that Bill kind of conceived it, was to recreate our conversation.

So his foreword to the first book is our talking through this whole thing.

And he's he's a biology professor.

He's actually a herpetologist.

But he said I always wanted to read Moby Dick, and I've never finished it.

So I kind of talked to him about how to think about Moby Dick, that it's subtitled, The Whale, and that it's actually structured like a whale, that it's the the head of it, or the first part of it is filled with all sorts of rich fat, which kind of is tough to get through.

So he recounts that in the, in the foreword to the first book.

And the first book just turned out beautifully.

It really I can't tell you.

I mean, some of the reviews have mentioned just just, you know, what a work of art.

The book itself is because it's filled with 120 illustrations, 90 of which are color.

So, in addition to having these essays by leading scholars on these really well known works of American fiction, it's got terrific illustrations that coincide with it.

So because that book seemed to work so well, I said, hey, Bill, should we do one on poetry?

And Bill, again, he was hesitant because he thought he knew fiction better, better than he knew poetry.

So we had a second conversation, and he recounts that second conversation in the foreword to the to the second book.

And it's, it's we we like how the two books work together because, yes, they're on the same subject, but they have different focuses because, because one's on one's own fiction and one's on poetry.

But again, a lot of illustrations.

Again, it's really a lovely book.

- -I do want to talk about that series.

The Integrative Natural History series, which as you mentioned, was founded by, Bill and Brian Chapman.

Yes.

And their book is actually right behind us here.

And they were they were guests on the show once, a long time ago.

If you are a long time watcher to remember that, and we've had a few more books of theirs on this, on this, show, they and they have been interdisciplinary, but not so interdisciplinary.

Is this so I love the other books have been across maybe other natural history and natural sciences, but I love that they're really living up to their integrative title and and branching across to, to the social sciences, to English, to the literature.

Yes, and it was a really good, serendipitous kind of, event that Bill and Brian have.

This has series which is by its nature interdisciplinary.

And I was hired even though I'm a, I'm an English professor, literature professor.

I was really hired to be, across the, across the humanities and ultimately across all of the disciplines.

So this was this was really perfect.

And it kind of epitomized I think, what Sam Houston State was looking for from me in my position.

And it kind of really, as you were saying, got to the heart of what that integrative Natural History series is all about.

- -It's a thing here at A&M that they've recently merged together, the College of Arts and Sciences.

That's hardly been a thing at many other universities.

And when I was in a UNT that that was our college's arts and sciences, and I remember a lot of professors talking about how important it was that those two are together, because we need to learn from each other.

The arts needs the sciences, and the sciences means the art.

And I think these are a perfect example of that.

- -Yeah.

I was, I taught at Kean University in New Jersey before, before I took the position here.

And I'm actually back there now as an emeritus professor and an adjunct.

But during my time at Kean, for a dozen years, I ran a, graduate liberal studies program, which was by its very nature interdisciplinary and and include included courses from the sciences and a number of different different disciplines in the humanities and and and, psychology, the social sciences.

So I had some background in I had of familiarity with interdisciplinary programs and interdisciplinary projects.

And so that was a that was a nice, a nice mix to that, that this series kind of related to.

- -And this is a... to look at the literature itself.

This isn't a new idea.

A lot of the, the authors of these works were very interested in the natural world around them.

I think it was Poe was, coauthored a book on the natural sciences.

So this is this has kind of been a thing as long as writers have been around.

They've been looking at their world around them to to draw inspiration.

- -Yes.

It's called the "College' First Book."

It's a book about seashells.

And it was his only bestseller.

It's the only work that in his lifetime went to a second edition.

He did write the introduction, and he was involved in kind of putting the book together, which he cobbled from another, another book.

But, he had a real interest in the sciences and had a real interest in, in animals.

I mean, so many of his titles, if you think about it, you know, you've got The Raven, of course, but you've got the black Cat, you've got the gold bug.

I mean, those are three of his most famous works, and they're all focused around, animals in some way.

And so we've got, in the first book, we have an essay on, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which, spoiler alert, alert here, features an orangutan.

And we also have an essay on the gold bug and kind of insects generally in in Poe's fiction.

And in the second book, we have an essay on The Raven and some other poems, which really focuses on, composite creatures or beings and the whole process of metamorphosis.

So Poe is well represented in these two books, but so many of the authors, I mean, Melville, with Moby-Dick.

But then he wrote a lot of poetry.

So Moby-Dick is covered in the first book, but Melville's poetry, particularly his later poetry, is covered in the second book.

And a lot of that has to do with animals.

- -I think it's fair that Poe gets such a large presence in the book, not just because you are a study of his work, but I think in the in the popular imagination, we picture him with a raven with a black cat.

He is as illustrated with animals so frequently that the tie there is inexcusable.

I think you can't- You can't do one without the other sometimes.

- -Yeah.

And I I'm actually doing something now, writing an essay, on dogs and Poe and they don't, there's several of them.

Most of them are Newfoundland's, but they don't play that kind of pivotal role that some of the other animals do.

In fact, they have kind of a subservient role, with one exception.

And that's Poe's only novel, which is the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

And Poe kind of loses control of the the Newfoundland in that story, and he kind of loses control of one of the characters in that story as well.

And they are linked in kind of in kind of interesting ways.

- -That's fascinating.

To zoom out just a bit, though, when you're putting this book together as the editor, how do you do?

You go to scholars and say, I want you to write on this, or you just go to a known scholar on on a particular author and say, what do you have on animals?

How do you put this work together?

- -Well, one of the nice things about getting old is that, you know, a lot of people.

So a lot of these people I knew and I know I knew that they were experts, on particular authors.

And I was I was able to say, hey, I'm doing this.

Join us.

And so many of them said yes and really made the book strong in the instances where I really didn't know a scholar, on a particular an expert on a particular author, I just needed to ask other people who knew and then and then made the recommendations so that in many ways was was the easy part.

In fact, both of these books were really a breeze.

They were they were so much fun to conceive.

They were, it was a lot of fun to receive the essays and then to to work with them on, on making them even stronger than they were before.

And then to integrate the, the illustrations to have that match up with the, with the essays.

And then I couldn't be happier with the finished product.

- -I do want to highlight... We've talked about it a few times with illustrations though, especially if you're talking about a particular species.

Having a reference there is nice.

Sometimes there's some contemporary art from the time that you can.

You don't expect to see a lot of illustrations in literature book like this, but for a topic such as this one, it really just adds something marvelous to the reading experience.

- -Yeah, we have several works of original art in connection with All the Pretty Horses, and that is really, I think, something special.

Another thing that is that that is, is great about the about these books, particularly the more recent book, the one on verse is that some of the authors of the essays took their own photographs.

So Philip Phillips, who does the essay on Robert Frost, he and his wife travel up to New Hampshire.

He's got a picture of Dairy Farm, which is still in existence.

And he also has a photo of Hy Le Brook, which is one of Frost's poems.

So he's got it when it's running in the spring.

That's when Philip was there.

But the poem is really about the brook dying out.

And so the speaker in the poem has to remember what the brook and the Haley's are.

Frogs.

What the papers they're called.

What what they what they look like, what they sounded like.

And then the author of the final essay, Thomas Gannon, he is a birder.

He, identifies as a Native American, which is perfect because he's writing about Joy Harjo, who is a former poet laureate of the United States.

But he's a very accomplished photographer, particularly of books.

And so he writes, the chapter is not not completely about books, but many a lot of the works that he talks about around books, and he's got his own photographs gracing the pages - -Another interdisciplinary kind of bench to this, to this wonderful thing.

So let's, let's talk generally about the two books also, it's impossible to say there's one overarching theme.

But did you did you find any, any kind of general themes about how animals get written about by by these authors?

- -I do think that, as we move into the 20th and 21st century, really question the assumption that, human beings are somehow different from animals and somehow have the right to do what they please with animals.

I know my mother, you know, God bless her soul.

She was kind of raised that animals are to serve us.

And, I think we have a much better sense now of the intelligence of animals.

How animals, express and feel emotions, and that we actually have a lot to learn from animals.

If we maybe stop using them in certain ways and, and and observe them and let them teach us a number of different things.

In fact, one of the the essays in the second book is called learning from the animals.

It's about, Yusef Komunyakaa poetry and, Komunyakaa spent time in Vietnam.

And he writes about the destruction that that took place there, which affected the animals there.

And he writes about some of the animals he encountered there.

He grew up in the South, and he writes about, the effects of industrial pollution on, on the water, on the waterways there.

But he also, has, he's got poems about the maggot and he's got poems about slime mold.

So taking these presumably very insignificant things or things that we might not think about, but as that poem about the maggot says, you can't avoid it.

Yeah.

And it's all part of that natural process of decomposition and decay, which leads to, rebirth.

The other really nice thing about these books, both within each file room and now that they're two volumes, between the two volumes is how the essays speak to one another in some cases, works that are that are the focus, or authors that are the focus of the specific essay will be referred to in the later essays.

But in, in other instances, it's, it's a matter of so you've got, you've got Komunyakaa writing about the maggot.

Well, it makes you think about Emily Dickinson.

I heard a fly buzz when, when they died.

But it also makes you think of Edgar Allan Poe and the Conqueror Worm that again, that the the final lines.

I'm not going to get the lines right, but it's something the effect that that the, it's the it's about a performance in front of angels and it's the, the play is the tragedy, man.

And the hero is the conqueror worm.

So again, the worms, the maggots, ultimately they're going to win out.

- -Another theme I noticed as I was reading them is the idea of of to go to that along with that human exceptionalism idea.

And I can never say that word anthropomorphism.

Yes.

Especially like with Jack London's you know, at the time there were critics saying you're putting too much on the dog, but we don't.

How do we know that?

We know what animals thinking, what they feel.

And then, a word I learned from the book zoo Morphism doing the opposite, ascribing, animal behaviors to humans.

And I love the idea of those two concepts in and a conversation with each other through both the books.

- -Yeah.

And, Mary Balkan, who does the first essay in the second book, which is on Anne Bradstreet, who was the first published American poet.

She was a she was a Puritan.

And, Mary kind of introduces those two concepts.

So it's perfect.

You know, somebody who may not be familiar with those two concepts, you know, has those defined right off the bat.

Mary, says a lot about them.

And then later authors are using that that terminology.

And I think in general, the the authors do a very good job of introducing terms, some of which seem esoteric, but they explain them very well and they put them to use.

So you're really learning a lot in reading these books.

- -Absolutely, absolutely.

Another, I guess kind of theme is sometimes the authors featured in and the poets, they wrote a lot in their lifetimes.

So maybe their, their feelings about animals and how they wrote about them in their younger days will be contrasted with how they they write about them as they've gotten older, and especially in the 20th century, where they're they're seeing the effects of whaling or, how Mark Twain was as viewing how animals were being treated.

All these things changed in their lifetime, too.

So there's kind of a contrast.

- -Yes.

And I was something that I wasn't aware of that that Mark Twain was really an early animal activist and that, you know, he wrote a book about, you know, against the vivisection of dogs and, and, you know, other forms of animal cruelty.

And, you know, if you kind of know Twain's later career, he really did become an activist, you know, kind of moving from a popular writer and a humorist, too, somebody who was addressing very serious issues.

But that, I think is a is a very fun chapter on the one on the jumping Frog.

John Bird, who's an expert on on Twain, you know, just he's got a really humorous way of writing and, enabling us to appreciate Twain's humor.

And yet his argument is that even in a story like The Jumping Frog, which seems so funny and doesn't seem to be so serious, it's about animal cruelty.

And, you know, if you know that later part of Twain's career, you can look back and see it in, in the, in the, the notorious jumping fraud.

- -That was one of my favorites, too.

I mean, I love Mark Twain, so it stands to reason.

I feel like we do have to talk more about Moby Dick, because I think if you asked any random person what's a book that has an animal central to it, they probably would say Moby Dick.

You know, if they haven't read the book, like like our friend, it's just something that kind of looms large in our literary and literary minds.

Why?

Why do you think that that is?

Why does that book have such a cultural, relevance?

- -I think because it is so audacious.

I'm actually teaching it again this semester and really looking forward to it.

But it's a it's a challenge.

And, you know, I tell students we can get through this, and I really set up the semester.

So they've got, four weeks to, to work on it so that they can get through it.

But the other thing that I tell them is that they don't have to do it all themselves.

We have so much technology now which which can, can help us.

You know, there's a great audio book, but an audio book version of Moby Dick on Fox.

And the nice thing about that one is, in contrast to some other LibriVox recording, is it's one reader the whole time.

So the and I'm forgetting the name of the of the narrator, but he becomes kind of like an old friend as you listen to that.

In addition, there is a, out of Plymouth, England.

There is a big read which was devoted to Moby Dick.

And so some very famous people are reading the individual chapters.

So you have actors like Tilda Swinton and Benedict Cumberbatch.

You know, we have, film director, John Waters, who does a very the his chapter is very appropriate.

It's called the cassock, which is about a certain part of, a whale's anatomy.

But so there's some original music for these chapters, and there was original artwork commissioned for it as well.

So I tell my students, you know, here are what I think are the essential chapters.

I'm expecting you to read these very carefully, and you're going to need to know them.

These other chapters.

I'm not saying don't read them, but I'm saying you can skim them.

And I'm also suggesting to let somebody else do the driving for you, maybe listen to the audiobook version and maybe listen to to the Big Read.

But the book is to get back to what I was saying before so audacious the and Melville thought that he was writing a great book.

He really he was also, as he was writing this great book, he was reading a lot of Shakespeare at the time.

And he was he saw himself kind of competing with Shakespeare and trying to be an American Shakespeare and creating this, this, this epic, expansive book.

You know, one thing you can compare it to?

I mean, it's not an epic per se, but it is it has that heft to it.

So if you think of the the Homeric epics, you think of the Odyssey is the Odyssey is divided up into 24 books.

Odysseus, the main character, doesn't appear until book five, so it built.

We hear about Odysseus and what's happened to Ithaca in Odysseus his absence, not just doing the same thing with Ahab.

We're hearing all of these things about Ahab and what's happening to him.

And Ishmael is very curious.

He hasn't seen Ahab.

And then finally, in chapter 28, Ahab, you know, you know, Ahab appears for the first time, and then soon after that, that just did absolutely spellbinding chapter called the Quarter deck, where, Ahab calls all the men down from the mast heads, calls them all aft and nails the doubloon.

On on a mast hat and says, you know, see this, see this, see this.

You know, whoever of you raises the white whale, this doubloon will be yours.

And then he proceeds to basically, make a pact with all his men that they are going to commit themselves to his his getting vengeance on the whale that took away his leg.

And it's a it's a, a fascinating study in tyranny, in manipulation.

And and even Ishmael, who has found this wonderful friend in, in Queequeg, is seduced by it.

And there's he's pulled throughout the novel between this, this friendship and friendship for, for for human beings in general and feeling at peace in the natural world.

And this quest to hunt down this animal on whom Ahab and a number of other people have projected all of this meanings and, and and that's something that is, is really telling about about, about Melville, particularly in Moby-Dick.

But in Hawthorne and Melville, you know, dedicated the book to Hawthorne.

But if you think about The Scarlet Letter, if you think about, Hawthorne story, The Birthmark, these are also stories in which people are projecting meaning onto just things.

I mean, not that a whale is a thing, but a whale is an animal and does not intrinsically have that kind of meaning.

Just as Hester Prynne is just wearing a piece of cloth with a letter E on it, or Georgiana just has this little birthmark on her cheek.

But people are investing them with all, all sorts of meaning.

So, I can't say enough about Moby Dick and, Brian, who does the chapter?

He does both the chapter on Moby-Dick.

He does the chapter on Melville's later, later poetry.

He's one of the greatest Melville scholars that we have.

So, he talks about Moby Dick, but he also talks about other animals that are mentioned within the novel.

And in that chapter 36 of Moby Dick, the quarterdeck.

When Ahab is talking about his leg being torn off by Moby Dick, he makes this sound, which is like a stricken moose.

And Brian writes about that particular moment really, really effectively and really powerfully.

- -That's a wonderful section of it.

If that is inspired, he read, Moby Dick.

Or if you didn't just inspire everyone, I don't know what will because both amazing and, enticing to make you want to to read more.

Unfortunately, we are running short on time here.

So in our final minute, what do you hope people take away from these books?

- -I hope that they see how important animals have been to literature and how, authors and some of our greatest authors have really come to realizations about the natural world and realizations about themselves, about human beings, through thinking about and writing about, non-human animals.

Wonderfully said.

Thank you so much for being here today.

These are fabulous books.

I would hope everyone would read them and then get inspired to read all the books and poetry contained in them.

I just- I really appreciate you coming here and talking to us today.

- -Thanks so much, Christine.

- -The books again are "Animals in the American Classics" and "Animals and Classic American Poetry."

That's all the time we have for today, and I will see you again soon.