You have surfed into a deep stream of mystery and creativity that will take both of us years to understand.
So welcome- if you can take this first step into artistic and historical oblivion, I will take the lead the rest of the way. My mission is to bring obscure and yet important and fascinating objects to the surface, and perhaps add some nuances to history.
This whole blog is a wayward planet whose sun is a creative genius and mysterious player during the Victorian age... a man who for good reasons chose to live and die in relative secrecy, but who amassed a large legacy of American literature; Biographies of the premier creative giants of his age, Twain, Gish and Nast, scores of children's books, novels, and stories that could have inspired the Twilight Zone. And if I am correct in my theories... a mountain of photography of all the news makers of the day, some collected and some he photographed himself.
I stumbled onto the photographs, seen here for the first time, and they have led me to one of the greatest untold networks of creative minds ever formed. Artists, detectives, writers, models, prostitutes, outlaws, spies... all providing the critical mass of an unseen Rolodex of the right-brained talents and iconoclasts of the Industrial Revolution.
His name was Albert Bigelow Paine, and after you get through with this blog you will never forget him. Because here we have thrown back the veil and uncovered his monument, which has been sleeping where he buried it, right under our deadened American noses.
Albert Bigelow Paine had many reasons for ducking behind his colossal literary monument, his unequaled diversity, his uncanny success, and instead trusting to time and saturation to place his flag at the peak of American cultural achievement. But his unexpected death and poor planning, and perhaps poorer politicking, left his flag stuck in a bottomless chasm instead.
Paine was at the very least a great talent, a passionate writer, but also a ruthless literary appropriator... even a thief, and a bigamist and a con-man... and probably a forger and well, we still don't know what all. He was the perfect example of the fine line between crime and art, of the creativity within man that can be used for either good or evil, and especially a prime example of right-brained abilities and how they have always run amuck without much understanding or appreciation, and way too much trust in this left-brained world.
His vapor trail left so much jealousy and resentment and suspicion that he had worn out any goodwill that might have preserved his legacy. A.B. Paine was the worst and the best of artistic genius, and after his star had fizzled, it had used up all the oxygen in its time slot. So you and I have never heard of this person.
And this is so strange, given that he was personally responsible for establishing the halls of fame for some of our greatest cultural icons... He may have been one of the first to understand fame and the art of managing it, of public relations, of creating and protecting a public image. But Paine had no one to do for him what he had done for others.
Thus he planted essential flags of immortality on the Olympus of Americana, and then perished, his own considerable contributions to be forgotten, no museums, no magazine articles, not even a biography...
Nothing but the same superficial bio, a paragraph, barely modified, repeated in footnotes in scores of publications and websites, too uninterested to investigate further.
We should have been asking hundreds of good questions, when someone could have answered them. What happened to Paine's early career of photography? The photographs? How did he manage to skirt prosecution of all of his crimes? How did he, an unknown writer from the Midwest, manage to ingratiate himself with the most famous people in the United States, in order to write their biographies? Operating in New York under an assumed name, hiding from his wife, and hiding his second family from his first wife... yet writing cutting edge manuscripts which gained the confidence of America's most popular bard, Samuel Clemens, and through him attracting the most enviable commissions in the country. How? How did he maintain and profit from that relationship long after Clemens was dead, continuing his magic with Clemens's only surviving daughter, who was convinced that he was the only person who ever "understood her father."
How did he continue to release previously unknown, unpublished works of Clemens, squeezing the last drop of blood from the dustbin of the Twain archive? Even finishing uncompleted works, combining, rearranging others... all while editing or writing sequel biographies of Twain, and award-winning books of his own? It was a magnificent whirlwind of commercial literary success not often experienced by any author of any age. And acknowledging all this, how could we then not know of him?
THAT is what this blog seeks to answer... and it will take some doing. The answers will come, not by reading something on the Internet, but from research and a good deal of creative deduction. It will take a writer and and photographer and a right-brained person like Paine to unlock the mysteries... and that...
would be me.
You could be an English Lit. Major and still never have heard of this author, who wrote the first biographies of America's creative brain trust, and much more...
So welcome- if you can take this first step into artistic and historical oblivion, I will take the lead the rest of the way. My mission is to bring obscure and yet important and fascinating objects to the surface, and perhaps add some nuances to history.
This whole blog is a wayward planet whose sun is a creative genius and mysterious player during the Victorian age... a man who for good reasons chose to live and die in relative secrecy, but who amassed a large legacy of American literature; Biographies of the premier creative giants of his age, Twain, Gish and Nast, scores of children's books, novels, and stories that could have inspired the Twilight Zone. And if I am correct in my theories... a mountain of photography of all the news makers of the day, some collected and some he photographed himself.
I stumbled onto the photographs, seen here for the first time, and they have led me to one of the greatest untold networks of creative minds ever formed. Artists, detectives, writers, models, prostitutes, outlaws, spies... all providing the critical mass of an unseen Rolodex of the right-brained talents and iconoclasts of the Industrial Revolution.
His name was Albert Bigelow Paine, and after you get through with this blog you will never forget him. Because here we have thrown back the veil and uncovered his monument, which has been sleeping where he buried it, right under our deadened American noses.
Albert Bigelow Paine had many reasons for ducking behind his colossal literary monument, his unequaled diversity, his uncanny success, and instead trusting to time and saturation to place his flag at the peak of American cultural achievement. But his unexpected death and poor planning, and perhaps poorer politicking, left his flag stuck in a bottomless chasm instead.
Paine was at the very least a great talent, a passionate writer, but also a ruthless literary appropriator... even a thief, and a bigamist and a con-man... and probably a forger and well, we still don't know what all. He was the perfect example of the fine line between crime and art, of the creativity within man that can be used for either good or evil, and especially a prime example of right-brained abilities and how they have always run amuck without much understanding or appreciation, and way too much trust in this left-brained world.
His vapor trail left so much jealousy and resentment and suspicion that he had worn out any goodwill that might have preserved his legacy. A.B. Paine was the worst and the best of artistic genius, and after his star had fizzled, it had used up all the oxygen in its time slot. So you and I have never heard of this person.
And this is so strange, given that he was personally responsible for establishing the halls of fame for some of our greatest cultural icons... He may have been one of the first to understand fame and the art of managing it, of public relations, of creating and protecting a public image. But Paine had no one to do for him what he had done for others.
Thus he planted essential flags of immortality on the Olympus of Americana, and then perished, his own considerable contributions to be forgotten, no museums, no magazine articles, not even a biography...
Nothing but the same superficial bio, a paragraph, barely modified, repeated in footnotes in scores of publications and websites, too uninterested to investigate further.
We should have been asking hundreds of good questions, when someone could have answered them. What happened to Paine's early career of photography? The photographs? How did he manage to skirt prosecution of all of his crimes? How did he, an unknown writer from the Midwest, manage to ingratiate himself with the most famous people in the United States, in order to write their biographies? Operating in New York under an assumed name, hiding from his wife, and hiding his second family from his first wife... yet writing cutting edge manuscripts which gained the confidence of America's most popular bard, Samuel Clemens, and through him attracting the most enviable commissions in the country. How? How did he maintain and profit from that relationship long after Clemens was dead, continuing his magic with Clemens's only surviving daughter, who was convinced that he was the only person who ever "understood her father."
How did he continue to release previously unknown, unpublished works of Clemens, squeezing the last drop of blood from the dustbin of the Twain archive? Even finishing uncompleted works, combining, rearranging others... all while editing or writing sequel biographies of Twain, and award-winning books of his own? It was a magnificent whirlwind of commercial literary success not often experienced by any author of any age. And acknowledging all this, how could we then not know of him?
THAT is what this blog seeks to answer... and it will take some doing. The answers will come, not by reading something on the Internet, but from research and a good deal of creative deduction. It will take a writer and and photographer and a right-brained person like Paine to unlock the mysteries... and that...
would be me.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for sticking your finger into the fire...please drop your thoughts into it!