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100% found this document useful (6 votes)
49 views

Young Adult Literature From Romance to Realism 3rd Edition Michael Cart instant download

The document is about the third edition of 'Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism' by Michael Cart, which has been updated to reflect recent trends in young adult literature. It discusses the significant increase in the number of YA titles published, the role of adult readers in the market, and the growing sophistication of YA books. Additionally, it highlights ongoing challenges in multicultural literature and the rise of LGBTQI representation in the genre.

Uploaded by

karnocrupezb
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Young Adult
L I T E R AT U R E
FROM ROMANCE TO REALISM
ALA Neal-Schuman purchases fund advocacy, awareness, and accreditation
programs for library professionals worldwide.
THI RD E DITION

Young Adult
L I T E R ATUR E
FROM ROMANCE TO REALISM

MICHAEL CART

C H I C AG O | 2 0 1 6
ADVISORY BOARD
Robin Kurz, Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Management,
Emporia State University
Stephanie D. Reynolds, Director, McConnell Center/Conference for the Study of Youth
Literature, and Lecturer, School of Information Science, University of Kentucky
Mary A. Wepking, Senior Lecturer and School Library Coordinator, School of Informa-
tion Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

© 2016 by the American Library Association

Extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of the information in this book;
however, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein.

ISBNs
978-0-8389-1462-5 (paper)
978-0-8389-1475-5 (PDF)
978-0-8389-1476-2 (ePub)
978-0-8389-1477-9 (Kindle)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Names: Cart, Michael, author.
Title: Young adult literature : from romance to realism / Michael Cart.
Description: Third edition. | Chicago : ALA Neal-Schuman, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014835 (print) | LCCN 2016014881 (ebook) | ISBN 9780838914625
(print : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780838914755 (pdf) | ISBN 9780838914762 (epub) | ISBN
9780838914779 (Kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Young adult fiction, American—History and criticism. | Young adult
literature—History and criticism. | Teenagers—Books and reading—United States. |
Teenagers in literature.
Classification: LCC PS374.Y57 C37 2016 (print) | LCC PS374.Y57 (ebook) | DDC 813.009/
92837—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016014835

Book design by Kimberly Thornton in the Proxima Nova and Adelle typefaces.
Cover images: (top) © oneinchpunch/Shutterstock, Inc.; (bottom) © Marijus Auruskevicius/
Shutterstock, Inc.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16   5 4 3 2 1
For Jack Ledwith
Still and always the best of friends
Contents
Preface | ix

PART ONE THAT WAS THEN


1 From Sue Barton to the Sixties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 The Sixties and Seventies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

3 The Eighties—Something Old, Something New . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

4 The Early Nineties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

5 The Rest of the Nineties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

PART TWO THIS IS NOW


6 A New Literature for a New Millennium? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

7 Genre on the Agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

8 Romancing the Retail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

9 So, How Adult Is Young Adult? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

10 Meanwhile, Back in the Real World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

11 Reality Redux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

12 Sex and Other Shibboleths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

13 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Literature . . . . . . . . . . 187

14 Still the Controversies Continue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

15 The Viz Biz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

16 The New Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

17 Of Books and Bytes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

References | 249
Appendix | 271
About the Author | 277
Index | 279

vii
Preface

WELCOME TO THE THIRD EDITION OF YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE: FROM


Romance to Realism. You’ll find it has been completely revised, updated,
and expanded to reflect the many dynamic changes and trends that have
visited the field of young adult literature since the publication of the sec-
ond edition in 2010.
Among the many trends you’ll find addressed in this new edition are the
following:
For starters, we are seeing a continuing increase in the sheer number of YA
titles being published. Twenty-five years ago, when I first became involved
with the field, we considered it a good year for YA if 250 titles appeared.
Today the number is more like 7,000!
The explosion of titles being published is, in part, a reason that YA has
become the tail that wags the dog of publishing, but in larger part it is the
related fact that sales of the literature continue to escalate; for example: sales
of books for young readers were up 22.4 percent in 2014, while adult sales
took a nosedive, down 3.3 percent. Admittedly, sales of young readers’ books
were down about 3 percent in 2015, but continued to far outstrip the field,
demonstrating that young adult literature is the most dynamic, lively area of
contemporary publishing.
Speaking of sales, one of the most dramatic new trends in the field is the
role of adults as buyers of YA books. Though estimates vary, it is safe to say

ix
x | Preface

that adults are now responsible for an astonishing 65 to 70 percent of all


sales of young adult books. Why is this? The answer can be found in five
little words: Rowling, Meyer, Collins, Roth, and Green—J. K. Rowling, Stephe-
nie Meyer, Suzanne Collins, Veronica Roth, and John Green, that is. I think it
is their tantalizing celebrity—thanks to their books and the movies that are
being made from them—that is a major reason for this market phenomenon.
It has driven sales of their books into the stratosphere and, accordingly, has
landed the five on the Forbes 2015 list of the sixteen top-earning authors of
the year. I should add another reason being offered for the new adult interest
in YA is that a hallmark of the form is story. Unlike too many adult novels, YA
books are simply enjoyable to read.
It’s worth noting that the crossover readership we’ve been discussing has
led to a growing sophistication of YA books in both subject and style, as evi-
denced by the increasing number of titles I see being published for grades
10 and up. The “up” now includes a special category of adults, those who are
being called “The New Adult,” that is, readers nineteen to twenty-five years of
age. Publishers are increasingly targeting this category of crossover reader.
Another continuing trend that’s related to crossover is the migration of
adult authors to young adult literature. Publishers encourage this, of course,
because it is presumed that these authors will bring their established read-
ership to their forays into YA. As for the authors themselves, one reason for
their interest in our genre is the opportunity to do something new and cre-
atively different.
Unfortunately, there is not enough new to report about multicultural lit-
erature, which remains the most underpublished segment of YA. There are
many reasons for this—there aren’t enough editors of color for one thing–
fully 90 percent of them self-identified as white on a recent Publishers
Weekly survey. There aren’t enough authors and illustrators of color either;
sales of multicultural books remain modest; teens seem reluctant to read
them (there are scarcely any multicultural titles on the various Teen Top
Ten lists); and on and on. That said, we are finally seeing a modest rise in
the number of multicultural books being published. According to the Co­op-
erative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin—Madison,
which tracks diversity in books for young readers, the number of books with
significant African-American content nearly doubled between 2013 and 2014
from 93 titles in 2013 to 179 in 2014. During the same period there was also a
significant increase in Asian books, from 69 to 112. Unfortunately publishing
Preface | xi

for Native Americans (34 to 36) and Latinos (57 to 66) remained virtually flat.
We obviously have a long way to go, but the modest increases hold out some
hope for a more diverse field. K. T. Horning, Director of the CCBC, points
to a new organization, We Need Diverse Books, as “really keeping diversity
front and center.” If you’re not familiar with WNDB, check out its website at
www.weneeddiversebooks.org.
Speaking of diversity: I’m happy to report that there has been a dramatic
increase in the number of LGBTQI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender,
Queer/Questioning, Intersex) books; a new record of sixty-four titles with
such content were published in 2015. This is twenty-four more than were
published during the entire decade of the 1980s and only eleven less than
were published in the 1990s. The field is broadening, too. The year 2015 saw
the publication of two books with intersex characters; there were also three
books about bisexuals, three about transgenders, and one each about gender
fluid and genderqueer kids.
Finally, YA is returning to its roots. After a decade of obsessively focusing
on speculative fiction, we are finally returning to a renascence of realistic
fiction—thanks in large part to two authors, the teen whisperer John Green
and Rainbow Rowell.
In addition to these general trends, here are some of the specific features
you’ll also find in this new edition:

1. New and expanded treatment of genre fiction, including dystopian


literature and steampunk.
2. A new, detailed examination of the retail market for young adults,
including such dramatic new trends and features as the appearance
of the New Adult audience, the adult consumer, and the significant
impact on the market of such best sellers as John Green, Suzanne
Collins, Veronica Roth, and Rainbow Rowell.
3. Interviews with leaders in the field.
4. Updated and expanded coverage of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-
der, and intersex fiction.
5. New chapters focusing on teen demographics, multicultural litera-
ture, and teen literacy, including multiple literacies.
6. Coverage of the renascence of realistic fiction.
7. Coverage of new trends in graphic novels.
8. Revised treatment of the burgeoning audiobook field.
x ii | Preface

9. Discussion of the future of print.


10. Attention to the importance to the field of motion pictures being
made from young adult novels.
11. Expanded attention given to narrative and creative nonfiction.

And much more. My hope is that the reading of this new edition may give
you as much pleasure as the writing of it has given to me.
—Michael Cart
PART ONE:

THAT WAS THEN


1

From Sue Barton to the Sixties


What’s in a Name? And Other Uncertainties

THERE IS READY AND WELL-NIGH UNIVERSAL AGREEMENT AMONG EXPERTS


that something called “young adult literature” is—like the Broadway musi-
cal, jazz, and the foot-long hot dog—an American gift to the world. But the
happy concurrence ends when you then ask these experts to explain pre-
cisely what this thing called young adult literature is, because that act is
about as easy as nailing Jell-O to a wall. Why? Because the term, like the
gelatin, is inherently slippery and amorphous. Oh, the “literature” part is
straightforward enough. Who can argue with the British literary critic John
Rowe Townsend (1980, 26) who defines it as “all works of imagination which
are transmitted primarily by means of the written word or spoken narra-
tive—that is, in the main, novels, stories, and poetry.” No, the amorphous
part is the target audience for the literature: the young adults themselves.
For it’s anybody’s guess who—or what—they are! Indeed, until World War II,
the term young adult—like its ostensible synonym teenager—was scarcely
used at all. For a while it was acknowledged that there were human beings
who occupied an ill-defined developmental space somewhere between
childhood and adulthood, the idea, the concept, the notion that this space
comprised a separate and distinct part of the evolution from childhood
to adulthood was still foreign in a society accustomed to seeing children
become adults virtually overnight as a result of their entering the full-time

3
4 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

workforce, often as early as age ten. Who, then, had the discursive leisure
to grow up, to establish a culture of youth, to experience a young adulthood
when there was so much adult work to be done? Indeed, as late as 1900 only
6.4 percent of American seventeen-year-olds postponed adult responsibil-
ities long enough to earn high-school diplomas (Kett 1977); in fact, no more
than 11.4 percent of the entire fourteen- to seventeen-year-old population
was even enrolled in school, and those that were received—on average—
only five years of education (Mondale and Patton 2001). Simply put, until
1900 we were a society with only two categories of citizens: children and
adults.
This situation was about to change, however—and in only four years, at
that. The agent of impending change was G. Stanley Hall, the first American
to hold a doctorate in psychology and the first president of the American
Psychological Association. It was in 1904 that he “invented” a whole new cat-
egory of human being with the publication of his seminal work Adolescence:
Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex,
Crime, Religion and Education. As the length of its title suggests, this was a
massive, multidisciplinary, two-volume tome that Joseph F. Kett (1977, 26) has
described as “a feverish, recondite, and at times incomprehensible book, the
flawed achievement of eccentric genius.”
It was flawed, because much of what Hall posited about this new stage of
life that he called “adolescence” has been discredited, especially his notion
of recapitulation (i.e., child development mirrors that of the “race”). Never-
theless, his theories were enormously influential in their time, particularly
among educators and a growing population of youth workers. The latter
embraced Hall’s view of adolescence as a time of storm and stress (a phrase
that invoked the German Sturm und Drang school and visions of Goethe’s
sorrowful young Werther), along with inner turmoil, awkwardness, and
vulnerability, all phenomena that invited, even required, adult intervention
and supervision in such controlled environments as schools and a growing
number of youth organizations like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. Neither
Hall nor his disciples used the term young adult, of course, but their defini-
tions of adolescence generally embraced our modern sense of young adults
as somewhere between twelve and nineteen years of age. Indeed, Hall was
prepared to extend his definition’s reach as far as the early twenties, but edu-
cators generally stopped at nineteen and youth workers at sixteen. In addi-
tion to these two groups, Hall inspired two other sets of influential devotees:
members of the vocational guidance movement (Hall believed in teaching
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 5

adolescents practical life and job skills) and the authors of “parents’ man-
uals,” which sought to guide the management of teenagers in middle-class
and upper-middle-class homes (Kett 1977, 221). Michael V. O’Shea, one of the
most prolific writers of these manuals, was also among the first to capitalize
on the potential economic importance of adolescents, so much so that Kett
(1977, 224) has dubbed him “the first entrepreneur of adolescence.” As we will
see, there have been many others.
As a result of this new focus on the perceived needs of adolescents, the
percentage of young people in school gradually began to grow. By 1910, 15.4
percent were enrolled (Rollin 1999) and the old model of the six-year high
school was beginning to change, too, as over the next decade, more and more
junior high schools were created. “By 1920,” Lucy Rollin (1999, 8) noted, “the
pattern of the four-year high school was well established,” and by 1930 almost
half the adolescent population was enrolled there. This was the good news
for advocates of education, but the bad news was that slightly more than half
of America’s adolescents were still not in school but in the workforce, where
they continued to be regarded as adults. But this, too, was about to change.
Indeed, it had already begun as the workplace was employing increasingly
sophisticated technology that required additional education, as—more
forcefully—had a spate of compulsory education laws.
It took the economic devastation of the 1930s, however, to effect truly seis-
mic change. As Grace Palladino (1996, 5) has written, “The Great Depression
finally pushed teenage youth out of the workplace and into the classroom.”
Lucy Rollin (1999, 85) concurred: “The Thirties were a fulcrum for this shift.”
The numbers alone, are telling: by 1939, 75 percent of fourteen- to seventeen-
year-olds were high-school students, and by 1940 nearly 51 percent of
seventeen-year-olds were earning diplomas (50.8 percent according to Kett
[1977]).

The Emergence of Youth Culture


This influx of students into high school was an important step in advancing
universal education, but what was even more important—in terms of the
later emergence of young adult literature—is that putting young people into
each other’s company every day led to the emergence of a youth culture cen-
tered on high-school social life, especially in the newly popular sororities and
fraternities, which provided the context for a newish wrinkle in courtship rit-
6 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

uals: dances and dating. Quick to recognize this was the already entrenched
Scholastic magazine, which had been founded in 1922 by M. R. “Robbie” Rob-
inson, another of the early entrepreneurs of adolescence. In 1936, Scholastic
introduced a new column to its pages. Titled “Boy Dates Girl,” it was writ-
ten by Gay Head (the pseudonym for Margaret L. Hauser), whose columns
would provide the fodder for a number of later books, including First Love;
Hi There, High School! and Etiquette for Young Moderns. As the last title sug-
gests, the column focused more on manners than on advice to the lovelorn.
Among the topics Hauser addressed, according to Grace Palladino (1996),
were how to make proper introductions, which fork to use at a dinner party,
and whether or not to wait for a boy to open a car door. Although boys took
pride of place in the column’s title, its intended readers were clearly girls,
who were admonished not to correct their dates, because boys did not appre-
ciate “brainy” girls. In the early days of youth culture, it was obvious that it
was already a male-centered one. This was a reflection of the then-prevail-
ing cultural attitudes, of course, as was Hall’s almost single-minded focus on
male adolescents in his own work. He had written so little about girls, in fact,
that H. W. Gibson, an early disciple and social worker with the YMCA, dubbed
adolescent psychology of the time “boyology” (Kett 1977, 224).
Although boys may have been the objects of lavish attention, the ste-
reotypical image of the male adolescent that emerged in popular culture
was an unflattering one: the socially awkward, blushing, stammering, acci-
dent-prone figure of fun typified by William Sylvanus Thaxter, the protago-
nist of Booth Tarkington’s best-selling 1916 novel Seventeen, (the inspiration
for Carl Ed’s long-running comic strip Harold Teen, which first appeared in
1919. Twenty years later this image was still the rage, this time informing the
spirit of radio’s Henry Aldrich and the movies’ Andy Hardy. (The Aldrich Fam-
ily debuted on NBC in July 1939, while the first Andy Hardy movie, A Family
Affair—starring Mickey Rooney—was released in 1937.) With the first appear-
ance in 1941 of another soon-to-be youth icon, the comics’ Archie Andrews (in
Pep Comics No. 22, on December 22, 1941), it became clear that Hall’s “adoles-
cent” was fast morphing into a new kind of youth, the teenager. In fact, the
first use in print of the term teenager occurred in the September 1941 issue
of Popular Science Monthly (Hine 1999; see also Palladino 1996), and the term
became commonplace in the decade that followed, though it wasn’t until
1956 and Gale Storm’s hit record Teenage Prayer that the term passed into
currency in the world of popular music (the same year saw the debut of the
singing group Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers).
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 7

The co-opting of the adolescent—now teenager—by popular culture did


not mean that psychologists and other serious thinkers had abandoned the
subject. Far from it. Two of the most significant works in the academic litera-
ture would appear less than a decade later: Robert James Havighurst’s Devel-
opmental Tasks and Education and Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society
both appeared in 1950, and both broke new ground in the field of psychology,
especially as it pertains to stages of human development. Each writer defined
specific stages of this development; Havighurst identified six stages and
Erikson, eight. For both, two of these stages were “adolescence” and “young
adulthood,” which they identified—respectively—as thirteen through eigh-
teen and nineteen through thirty (Havighurst), and twelve through eighteen
and nineteen through forty (Erikson). In short order other significant work
followed, most notably Jean Piaget’s The Growth of Logical Thinking from
Childhood to Adolescence (1958) on cognitive development, and Lawrence
Kohlberg’s on moral development (published intermittently throughout the
1970s).
All of this work—like that of Hall’s—would have significant influence on
therapists, youth workers, and especially educators, who found an equiva-
lence between the tasks that Havighurst associated with each developmen-
tal stage and books for teens that dramatized the undertaking and accom-
plishing of these tasks. It’s worth noting that the introduction of the term
young adulthood into these various professional vocabularies may have
been instrumental in the American Library Association’s decision to form,
in 1957, the Young Adult Services Division (YASD). This was a long overdue
professional acknowledgment not only of a now au courant term, but also
of the singular life needs of those we might as well now call young adults.
Why “young adult” and not “adolescent,” though? Well, there is no definitive
answer. However, the term young adult was not altogether foreign to the
library world. The youth services librarian Margaret Scoggin had first used
it in the professional literature as early as 1944 (Jenkins 1999) and Kenneth R.
Shaffer, then director of the School of Library Science at Simmons College,
recalled in 1963 “our excitement of nearly a quarter of a century ago when
we made the professional discovery of the adolescent—the ‘young adult’—
as a special kind of library client” (Shaffer 1963, 9). Also, one might presume
that adolescent smacks a bit too much of the clinical, and some might even
regard it as sounding faintly patronizing, though young adult might not be
much better. As we will see, such uncertainty as to precisely what to call such
youths has continued to invite much heated discussion and debate even to
8 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

this day, though in 1991 YASD did finally decree, in concert with the National
Center for Education Statistics, that young adults “are those individuals
from twelve to eighteen years old” (Carter 1994).

A Literature for Young Adults


What impact did all of these developing attitudes and theories have on the
writing and publishing of books targeted at such young people (however
they might have been labeled and categorized at any given moment)? The
short answer is “not much.”
Because adolescents, teenagers, or young adults were—at least until the
late 1930s—still widely regarded as children (even if the boys had mustaches
and the girls, breasts!), there was no separate category of literature specifi-
cally targeted at them. However, as—over the course of the first four decades
of the twentieth century—opinions began coalescing around the viability of
recognizing a new category of human being with its own distinct life needs,
books aimed at these “new” humans began to emerge. This happened very
gradually, though, and may have had its roots in the long-ago publishing
world of the immediate post-Civil War years when, as Nilsen and Donelson
(2009, 42) have asserted, “Louisa May Alcott and Horatio Alger, Jr. were the
first writers for young adults to gain national attention.” The two authors’
respective novels Little Women and Ragged Dick both appeared in 1868, and
gave impetus to an era—already under way—of series fiction: dime adven-
ture novels for boys and wholesome domestic stories like the Elsie Dinsmore
books for girls. Then, as now, it was firmly believed there were girl books
and boy books and never the twain would meet.1 The always opinionated G.
Stanley Hall had much to say about this, too. In a 1908 Library Journal arti-
cle, he allowed: Boys loved adventure. Girls sentiment. Books dealing with
domestic life and with young children in them, girls have almost entirely to
themselves. Boys, on the other hand, excel in love of humor, rollicking fun,
abandon, rough horse-play, and tales of wild escapade (Nilsen and Donelson
2009, 52).
Series books for both sexes hit their stride with the formation of the
Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1900. Edward Stratemeyer, who had worked as a
ghost writer for Alger, had the bright idea of hiring other ghosts to develop
his own cascade of story ideas into novels. The result became what Carol Bill-
man (1986) has called The Million Dollar Fiction Factory. Working pseudony-
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 9

mously, these otherwise-anonymous writers churned out hundreds of titles


in endless series, most of them now forgotten, though a few—The Rover
Boys, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, and Ruth Fielding—are still remem-
bered with a twinge of pleasurable nostalgia.2 Arguably the most successful
of the Stratemeyer series—and the ones that come closest to our modern
conception of young adult fiction—didn’t appear until well after World War
I. The Hardy Boys solved their first case (The Tower Treasure) in 1927, and
Nancy Drew hers (The Secret of the Old Clock) in 1930.
Coincidentally 1930 is the year the ALA formed its Young People’s Read-
ing Roundtable, whose annual list of best books for “young readers” (think
“young adults” here) contained a mixture of children’s and adult books. The
first list, for example, ran the gamut from Will James’s Lone Cowboy (1929) to
Edna Ferber’s adult novel Cimarron (1930).
This situation endured until 1948 when librarians—realizing the new but
still amorphous group of older “younger readers” no longer had any inter-
est in children’s books—changed the name and content of their list to Adult
Books for Young People (Cart 1996).
Meanwhile, prescient publishers, taking notice of the emerging youth
culture of the 1930s, began cautiously publishing—or at least remarketing—
what they regarded as a new type of book. One of the first of these was Rose
Wilder Lane’s adult novel Let the Hurricane Roar. Published in 1933, this story
of two teenage pioneers by the daughter of the Little House books’ author
offered intrinsic appeal to contemporary teens. Recognizing this, its pub-
lisher, Longmans Green, quickly began promoting it as the first in its prom-
ised new series Junior Books, a frankly patronizing phrase that lingered in
publishing like a bad odor in the refrigerator for nearly a decade. Neverthe-
less, it may have set the stage for another book that would be published by
Little, Brown in 1936.
This one caught the eye of the pioneering young adult librarian Marga-
ret Alexander Edwards of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Writing
some years later in the Saturday Review, she reported Little, Brown’s edito-
rial bemusement when the publisher received a manuscript from the writer
Helen Boylston. “While it was not a piece of literature, it was an entertaining
story which did not fit into any category. It was too mature for children and
too uncomplicated for adults. In the end Little, Brown took a chance and pub-
lished the story under the title ‘Sue Barton Student Nurse’ and the dawn of
the modern teen-age story came up like thunder” (Edwards 1954, 88, emphasis
added).
10 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

The thunder was, presumably, the sound of fervent adolescent applause,


as Sue Barton (for reasons that seem elusive to modern readers struggling
through its turgid pages) quickly became one of the most popular books in
the history of young adult literature. In 1947—eleven years after its publica-
tion—a survey of librarians in Illinois, Ohio, and New York chose it as “the
most consistently popular book” among teenage readers, and it remained in
print for years thereafter, along with its six sequels, which saw young Sue fin-
ish her training, serve in a variety of professional capacities (visiting nurse,
superintendent of nurses, neighborhood nurse, staff nurse), and finally
marry the young doctor she had met in book number one (Cart 1996, 41).
The popularity of the series may have derived in large part from its veri-
similitude. Boylston was a professional nurse herself and there’s truth in the
details of her settings, but there are also stereotypes in her characters and
clichés in the dramatic situations in which they find themselves embroiled.
Told in an omniscient third-person voice, the books betray their author’s
often too-smug, patronizing attitude toward her material and her charac-
ters—not only Sue, but also, and especially, the “quaint” immigrants who are
the chief patients at the big-city hospital where Sue receives her training.
Nevertheless, because of its careful accuracy regarding the quotidian
details of the nurse’s professional life, Sue Barton was the prototype of the
career story, an enormously popular subgenre among the earliest young
adult books.
Rivaling Sue for the affection of later nurse-story lovers was Helen Wells’s
own fledgling professional Cherry Ames, who debuted in 1943 (Cherry Ames,
Student Nurse), and whose subsequent adventures filled twenty volumes.
Wells also gave eager girl readers stories about plucky flight attendant Vicki
Barr. Still another writer who re-created occupational worlds that she was
personally familiar with was the remarkable Helen Hull Jacobs, whose many
books about the world of championship tennis and military intelligence
reflected her own life as the number-one world tennis player and a com-
mander in the Office of Naval Intelligence during the World War II.
As for boys, they had been reading vocational stories since Horatio Alger
offered his paeans to the rewards of hard work (and marrying the boss’s
daughter). More contemporary writers like Montgomery Atwater, Stephen W.
Meader, and Henry Gregor Felsen offered fictions about such real-life jobs as
avalanche patrolling, earth-moving, and automobile mechanics. In the years
to come other less talented writers would report on virtually every other
conceivable career—in often drearily didactic detail.
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 11

A decade before Boylston’s initial publication another influential and


wildly popular author for adolescents debuted: it was 1926 when Howard
Pease published his first book, The Tattooed Man. A better writer than Boyl-
ston, Pease would soon rival her in popularity. In fact, a 1939 survey of 1,500
California students found that Pease—not Boylston—was their favorite
author (Hutchinson 1973).
Like Boylston, Pease specialized in a literary subgenre: in his case, it was
the boy’s adventure story set—usually—at sea. And again, like Boylston,
Pease knew his material from firsthand experience. For him, this was service
in the United States Merchant Marine during World War I.
In 1938 still another important early writer, who also specialized in genre
fiction based on personal experience, made his auspicious debut: John R.
Tunis, the “inventor” of the modern sports story, published the first of his
many novels, The Iron Duke. Tunis had played tennis and run track as a stu-
dent at Harvard and, following service in World War I, had become a sports-
writer for the New York Post. What set his work apart from that of earlier
sportswriters was that he focused less on play-by-play accounts of the big
game than on closely observed considerations of character, social issues, and
challenges—not to his characters’ hand-eye coordination but, instead, their
personal integrity and maturation.

The First Young Adult Novel?


In retrospect any of these writers (though especially Pease, Boylston, and
Tunis) could be reasonably identified as the first writer for young adults, but
most observers (myself included) would opt to join the redoubtable Edwards
(1954, 88) in declaring (on second thought in her case) that “it was in 1942 that
the new field of writing for teen-agers became established.”
The signal occasion was the publication of Maureen Daly’s (1942) first, and
for forty-four years only novel, Seventeenth Summer.
Amazingly, the author was only twenty-one when her history-making
book appeared, though how old she was when she actually wrote the book
is irrelevant. Ms. Daly herself claimed she was a teenager, but The New York
Times reported that only fifty pages of the book had been written before the
author turned twenty (Van Gelder 1942). Daly herself was quick to point out,
though, that her novel was not published as a young adult book. “I would
like, at this late date,” she wrote in 1994, “to explain that ‘Seventeenth Sum-
12 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

mer,’ in my intention and at the time of publication, was considered a full


adult novel and published and reviewed as such” (Berger 1994, 216).
John R. Tunis was similarly—and unpleasantly—surprised to learn from
his publisher Alfred Harcourt that The Iron Duke was a book for young read-
ers. He was still fuming thirty years later when he wrote, “That odious term
juvenile is the product of a merchandising age” (Tunis 1977, 25).
The merchandising of and to “the juvenile” had begun in the late 1930s,
coincident with the emergence of the new youth culture. The movement
picked up steam in the 1940s as marketers realized these kids—whom they
dubbed, variously, “teens,” “teensters,” and finally (in 1941) “teenagers”—were
“an attractive new market in the making” (Palladino 1996, 52). That market
wouldn’t fully ripen until post-World War II prosperity put money into the
kids’ own pockets, money that had previously gone to support the entire
family. The wild success of Seventeenth Summer was, however, an early indi-
cator to publishers of an emerging market for a literature that spoke with
immediacy and relevance to teenagers. In the case of Daly’s novel these fac-
tors were not only due to her own youth and the autobiographical nature of
her material (“What I’ve tried to do, you see,” she told an interviewer, “is just
write about the things that happened to me and that I knew about—that
meant a lot to me.” [Van Gelder 1942, 20]) but also to the fact that she chose
to tell her story of sweet summer love in the first person voice of her pro-
tagonist, seventeen-year-old Angie Morrow. For its time, the book was also
fairly bold and thus further reader-enticing because of its inclusion of scenes
showing teenagers unapologetically smoking and drinking. And yet to mod-
ern readers Angie seems hopelessly naïve and much younger than her years.
Her language now sounds quaintly old-fashioned and the pacing of her story
is glacially slow, bogging down in far too many rhapsodic passages describing
the flora and fauna of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin (the book’s setting). If Ang-
ie’s diction is now dated, so—more painfully—are her attitudes. Humiliated,
for example, by the bad table manners of her new boyfriend, the otherwise
desirable (and always very clean) Jack Duluth, Angie frets, “His family prob-
ably didn’t even own a butter knife! No girl has to stand for that!” (Daly 1942,
147). Clearly Jack and his deprived family had never read Gay Head’s column
or her books!
Despite all this, Seventeenth Summer has remained tremendously popu-
lar; it’s sold well over a million-and- a-half copies since its publication, and it’s
still in print in a smartly redesigned paperback edition.
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 13

Even more important than Seventeenth Summer to the cultivation of a


readership for a newly relevant literature was the inaugural publication of
the new girls’ magazine Seventeen in September 1944. Teens were thrilled to
be taken seriously at last. The first printing of 400,000 copies sold out in two
days and the second—of 500,000—in the same short time. One reader wrote
the editors to thank them for “looking upon us teenagers as future women
and Americans, instead of swooning, giggling bobbysoxers.” Another cho-
rused, “For years I have been yearning for a magazine entirely dedicated to
me” (Palladino 1996, 91–92).
Here was a niche to be exploited, and the editors of Seventeen were quick
to recognize it, making theirs one of the first magazines to actually survey
its readers—not to determine their editorial interests but, instead, their taste
and interests in consumables. Oddly, such research was “unheard of at the
time in fashion magazines.” But Seventeen quickly changed that by hiring
research company Benson and Benson to conduct the important market sur-
vey that it called “Life with Teena” (the name of the hypothetical everygirl it
conjured up to report the survey’s results breathlessly). “Teena has money
of her own to spend,” the editors enthused, “and what her allowance and pin
money earnings won’t buy, her parents can be counted on to supply. For our
girl Teena won’t take ‘no’ for an answer when she sees what she wants in ‘Sev-
enteen.’” The not-so subtle message to American business was “place your
ads here.” And the business wasn’t confined to the manufacturers of sweater
sets. “We’re talking about eight million teenage girls who can afford to spend
$170,000,000 a year on movies,” the magazine trumpeted to motion picture
producers (Palladino 1996, 103–106).
The year this happened was 1945. In Chicago, nineteen-year-old shoe clerk
Eugene Gilbert was wondering why so few teenagers were buying shoes in his
store. His conclusion: “Stores and manufacturers were losing a lot of money
because they were largely blind to my contemporaries’ tastes and habits. I
started then to become a market researcher in a virtually unexplored field.”
Four years later, as head of the Youth Marketing Company in New York, Gil-
bert was sagely observing, “Our salient discovery within the last decade was
that teenagers have become a separate and distinct group in our society”
(Palladino 1996, 109–10).
It was a revelation and a revolution, such a liberating experience for teens
that The New York Times published a Teen-Age Bill of Rights (Rollin 1999,
107–8). Here it is:
14 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

The right to let childhood be forgotten.


The right to a “say” about his own life.
The right to make mistakes, and find out about himself.
The right to have rules explained, not imposed.
The right to have fun and companions.
The right to question ideas.
The right to be at the Romantic Age.
The right to a fair chance and opportunity.
The right to struggle toward his own philosophy of life.
The right to professional help whenever necessary.

Oddly—if one is to judge by the gender of the pronoun employed through-


out—these rights belonged exclusively to male teenagers! Odd, because—
otherwise—the decade pretty much belonged to the girls, who certainly
owned much of the media attention of the time. Not only did girls have
Seventeen, they could also read another popular magazine devoted to them.
Calling All Girls actually antedated Seventeen; it launched in late 1941. Mean-
while, manufacturers and the motion picture industry kowtowed to the girls,
as did radio, which offered them such popular fare as A Date with Judy, Meet
Corliss Archer, and Your Hit Parade, while newspaper comic strips served up
daily doses of Teena, Penny, and Bobby Sox.
As for the fledgling young adult literature, imitation was definitely the
sincerest form of flattery. For in the wake of Seventeenth Summer’s suc-
cess, romance fiction quickly captured the hearts—and balance sheets—of
American publishers. One of the earliest of the faux Angie Morrows that fol-
lowed was sixteen-year-old Julie Ferguson, the heroine of Betty Cavanna’s
1946 Going on Sixteen. As its title suggests, the book is an almost homage to
Daly. In fact, Cavanna’s protagonist, Julie, actually mentions having “just last
month read a newspaper account of a book written by a girl of seventeen”
(Cavanna 1946, 89). This is offered in the context of Julie’s own longing for a
career in publishing—not as an author but as an illustrator. In this regard,
Cavanna borrows not only from Daly, but also from career books like Boyl-
ston’s. There are other similarities as well. Both books are about the inter-
relationship of dating and popularity; the book’s dust jacket even claims
that it offers “numerous useful tips on how to overcome shyness and how to
become ‘part of things.’”
Perhaps Cavanna’s heroine read the book herself, because she finally does
become ”part of things” by finding true love (and dates) with a neighbor boy
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 15

named Dick Webster, who habitually calls her Peanut and Small Fry. One
supposes these are intended as endearments, but they sound merely conde-
scending. Consider the following: “‘Hey!’ Dick scolded, suddenly masculine.
‘We’ve got to get going.’ Dick looked at her Dad in a way that said ‘Women!’
and grabbed her hand authoritatively. ‘Come on.’” (Cavanna 1946, 220).
Girl readers were apparently quite ready to go along, too, because Cavanna,
ultimately the author of more than seventy books, became one of the most
popular authors for adolescents of forties and fifties. Going on Sixteen was
the third most popular book in a 1959 survey of school and public libraries,
close behind—yes—Seventeenth Summer.
Another romance author who rivaled Cavanna for popularity was Rosa-
mund du Jardin (who was the only author to have two titles on that 1959 sur-
vey: Double Date and Wait for Marcy). Du Jardin’s own first book, Practically
Seventeen (do you detect a trend in these titles?) was published in 1949, and is
yet another pale imitation of Daly.
Like Seventeenth Summer, Practically Seventeen is told in the first person,
in the dumbfoundingly arch voice of Du Jardin’s protagonist Tobey Heydon
(which sounds too much like hoyden to be a coincidence). Like Daly’s Angie,
Du Jardin’s Tobey has three sisters—two older and one younger. Like Angie’s
father, Tobey’s is a traveling salesman. He is fond of saying that because he
is “completely surrounded by females in his own home” he “would go crazy
without a sense of humor and that he has had to develop his in self-defense.”
“But none of us mind,” Tobey hastens to reassure the reader. “He is really
sweet, as fathers go” (Du Jardin 1949, 4).
Like Seventeenth Summer (again), Du Jardin’s book is a story of young love
but much slighter in substance and lighter in tone. Tobey’s big dilemma—and
the theme that unifies the book’s highly episodic plot—is whether her rela-
tionship with boyfriend Brose (short for Ambrose) will survive until he can lay
hands on the class ring he has asked her to wear. Given the episodic structure
of her first novel, it’s no surprise to learn that Du Jardin had been a successful
writer of magazine fiction, her short stories having appeared in such popu-
lar women’s magazines as Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and
McCall’s. Certainly her work is slicker, more innocent, and funnier than Daly’s.
For at-risk teens of the current day, there is something pleasantly nostalgic
and comforting in reading about peers (even long-ago ones) whose biggest
problems are pesky younger sisters, about who will take them to the big dance
(the “Heart Hop” in this case), and about how to resolve a rivalry for a boy’s
affection with a visitor from the South named, appositely, Kentucky Jackson.
16 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

The book’s dust-jacket blurb speaks, well, volumes—not only about Prac-
tically Seventeen, but also about the type of book that would prevail in pub-
lishing for young adults throughout the forties and fifties. Here’s a sample
paragraph:

In recent years, permanent recognition and popularity have


been accorded the junior novel . . . the story that records truth-
fully the modern girl’s dream of life and romance and her ways
of adjusting to her school and family experiences. Practically
Seventeen is such a book—as full of life as the junior prom.

And about as relevant to today’s readers, I would add, as Rebecca of Sunny-


brook Farm.
And yet, were it and other such books relevant to and reflective of their
contemporary readers’ lives? Perhaps more than modern readers might
realize. In 1951, J. B. Lippincott published a fascinating book called Profile of
Youth. Edited by Maureen Daly (yes, that Maureen Daly), it collected profiles
of twelve “representative” teenagers that had appeared in issues of Ladies’
Home Journal throughout 1949 and 1950.
“We chose our young people from the North and South, the East and West;”
Daly writes, “From the hangouts and the libraries; from the popular and the
aloof; the leaders and the followers. Some are planning professional careers;
others are preparing themselves for marriage. Some just want a job—any
job. We asked them about their lives—and let them tell their own stories. We
asked them about their problems—and joined with them on the solutions”
(1951, 9).
Although there are differences among the kids—especially in their circum-
stances (though none is homeless or impoverished)—the one thing they have
overwhelmingly in common is, for twenty-first-century readers, an aston-
ishing innocence. Almost none of them smokes or drinks; drugs are never
mentioned; none of the students is gay or lesbian or a gang member. None is
emotionally troubled or the victim of abuse. Instead, their biggest concern
(the book calls it “A National Problem”) is whether to go steady. They also
“resent” parents who refuse to understand or recognize the importance of
fads and customs in high school. (In her introduction, Daly [1951, 10] expresses
hope that a parent reading this book “may listen with greater patience to a
sixteen-year-old’s plea for orange corduroy slacks or a red beanie when he
realizes how vital ‘fads’ are to adolescent security.”) Reading the profiles is
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 17

eerily like reading the novels we have been discussing, especially when one
comes to the editors’ valedictory summing up of their findings (“American
Youth—Full View”), where they affirm, “We have recorded, as told by youth
itself, the things they find important—the good schools, the basketball rival-
ries, the college scholarships and Friday night dates” (Daly 1951, 256).
Perhaps life really was simpler back in the 1940s!
To the editors’ credit, though, their book does differ from the YA literature
of the 1940s by including one African American teen (called “Negro” here),
though one wonders how representative she may be. Her name is Myrdice
Thornton, and she is the daughter of an affluent mother (her father, the first
African American member of the Chicago Park Police, was killed in the line
of duty). Living in the North, she attends an integrated school in the Hyde
Park neighborhood and seems to have experienced little racial prejudice or
related problems, telling her profiler, “I never did feel different . . . I see no
reason to act that way.” Perhaps more indicative of reality was the reaction
of the “Negro” boy who, when interviewed (though not profiled) expressed
amazement that anyone would be interested in his opinion.
One other teen in the book, Hank Polsinelli, the son of Italian immigrants,
is also “different.” Alas, his parents are presented as the same kind of stereo-
typed and “quaint” eccentrics that Boylston featured in Sue Barton. Hank’s
mother, for example, is said to be “a real Italian mother; she believes it is
her main business to cook, keep house and make a home for her husband
and children and not ask too many questions.” She does scold Hank when
he misses mass, “but Hank takes reprimands lightly and his mother under-
stands men. ‘He is a good boy at home,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what he does
outside’” (Daly 1951,76).
That Hank and the several other working-class teens who are profiled seem
much more mature than their privileged peers reminds us that adolescence,
in its first several decades at least, was primarily an experience of middle-
and upper-middle-class kids, who lived, for the most part, in all-white small
towns. According to Kett (1977, 245), such “towns and small cities proved to
be much more responsive to the institutions of adolescence than were rural
and metropolitan areas, while a mixture of apathy and antipathy continued
to mark the attitudes of lower class youth.” Small wonder that urban settings
and youth remained largely invisible in YA fiction until the social upheavals
of the turbulent 1960s.
There are other disconnects between the idealized (fantasy?) world of
early YA fiction and the real one. This is inadvertently reflected in the Profile
18 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

book in a series of topical essays in which the editors and profilers step back
from their individual subjects and do some actual research and investigative
reporting, which leads to a somewhat less sunny picture of teenage life in the
late forties. It’s there we learn, for example, that “boys estimate that about
half the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys have had sex experience” (Daly
1951, 153); that “in almost all cases the boys feel it is up to the girls ‘to keep
things under control.’ She should know how and when to say ‘stop,’ for after
all it’s just natural for a fellow” (152), and that “pregnancy itself is still consid-
ered a social disgrace and a personal disaster” (153). Also, “society as a group
has little sympathy for the unwed mother” (154), especially if she is econom-
ically deprived. “These girls may be placed in a charitable institution, to be
trained in sewing or a trade while waiting out the birth of a child” (154). Sex,
of course, remained absent from YA fiction until the late 1960s and it was
equally absent from any serious discussion in the home. “Most teen-agers
do not get sex information from their parents” (65). Nor did they get it from
schools. “Oregon is the only one of the forty-eight states in which sex educa-
tion is generally taught” (73). Nor, of course, did they get it from books—at
least not the whole story. As one girl states, “I read all about ‘that’ in a book
when I was eleven. But nobody ever told me I was going to get so emotional
about it” (155). Too bad, for that’s what a good work of realistic fiction, with
fully realized characters whose lives invite empathy from the reader and
with it emotional understanding can do—had there been any such books
available. That there weren’t may be evidence that adult authors (and pub-
lishers) did not yet trust YA readers with the truth of reality.
Another example of an invisible topic is the consideration—or lack
thereof—of juvenile delinquency and the presence of gangs in teen life. Juve-
nile delinquency has been an issue in American life since the mid-nineteenth
century; the 1930 White House Conference on Children and Youth formally
defined it as “any such juvenile misconduct as might be dealt with under the
law” (Kett 1977, 309). However, it wasn’t until adolescents or teenagers had
become a distinct—and distinctive—culture that popular attention turned,
with a vengeance, toward the “problem.” A significant catalyst was the uni-
versal hand-wringing over the spate of unsupervised—and possibly out of
control—youths during World War II, a situation that was the product of
fathers at war and mothers at work. Thus, “during the first six months of 1943
alone, twelve hundred magazine articles appeared on this subject (juvenile
delinquency)” (Palladino 1996, 81). One of these, “Are These Our Children?”
which appeared in the September 21, 1943, issue of Look magazine, inspired
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 19

RKO to produce a movie based on it. Youth Runs Wild was released in 1944
and ads promoting it featured such titillating headlines as “What Happens
to These Unguarded Youngsters? The Truth about Modern Youth” (Barson
and Heller 1998). The war ended in 1945, but the fascination with “dangerous”
kids endured. In 1947, Irving Shulman published his adult novel The Amboy
Dukes, about life in a Brooklyn gang. A host of original paperback novels,
each more lurid than the last, followed in its wake. And then, suddenly, it
was the 1950s, and not only were delinquents and gang members big news
(and bigger box office), so were teenage rebels. The movie The Wild One, star-
ring a leather jacket-clad, motorcycle-riding Marlon Brando, was released in
1954. It contained an unforgettably culture-defining moment in this priceless
exchange between a horrified adult and Brando: HA: “What are you rebelling
against?” MB, mumbling, “What have you got?”
Adults were further outraged (and teens, enthralled) the following year
when not one but two cinematic classics of youthful disaffection were
released: Rebel without a Cause starring the soon-to-be-iconic James Dean
(who had died in an automobile crash only months before the movie was
released) and Blackboard Jungle, a gritty film about an inner-city teacher’s
confrontation with his gang leader students. The most remembered aspect
of the latter is the song that played over the movie’s opening credits: it was, of
course, Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.” Forgive a personal
note here: I was thirteen when this movie was released and I’ll never forget
sitting in the balcony of the old Logan Theater in my hometown (Logansport,
Indiana) and hearing this song, the likes of which I had never heard before
and the likes of which I couldn’t wait to hear again! It was a transfixing and
transforming experience that captured the imaginations and sensibilities of
every teen in America, too, and presto, rock and roll was born and nothing
was ever the same again.
Except young adult literature of the fifties, that is! Well, that’s not quite
true. One aspect of the new, harder-edged reality of teen life did find a place
in that fiction: the car gang, a franchise that Henry Gregor Felsen seemed to
own; he capitalized on it in such novels as Hot Rod (1953), Street Rod (1953),
Crash Club (1958), and others.
The wave of prosperity that accompanied the end of World War II had
turned America into a nation of car-crazy kids. Profile of Youth devoted an
entire chapter, “Teen-Age Drivers Talk Back,” to the topic, in fact. It began,
rather breathlessly, “Sixteen, when a driver’s license can be taken out in most
states, is a far more important milestone in the life of the typical American
20 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

male than twenty-one, when he reaches his majority and can vote, because
‘cars are more fun than anything else in the world’” (Daly 1951, 46). Inevita-
bly this phenomenon led to more adult hand-wringing (“I never close an eye
any more until I know John or Mary is in at night!” [45]); a spate of popular
songs about fatal car crashes involving teens; the magazine Hot Rod, which
debuted in 1948; and a literary gold mine for Felsen.
The late forties and early fifties produced another wildly popular genre
for boys. These books weren’t about street rods but space rods! Science fic-
tion found a welcoming home in young adult fiction with the publication
of the already established adult author Robert A. Heinlein’s first book for
teens, Rocket Ship Galileo, in 1947. Space Cadet followed the next year and Red
Planet the next. In short order Heinlein was joined in the science fiction lists
by Andre Norton (pseudonym of Mary Alice Norton), whose first YA novel,
Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D., appeared in 1953—many, many others followed.
As in the forties, the books of the fifties continued to focus on romance
for girls and other genre fiction for boys, who—in addition to car books and
science fiction—were reading novels of adventure, sports, and animals.
For both sexes, there was a soupçon of more serious literature that focused
principally on historical fiction and what the educator G. Robert Carlsen
called stories of foreign culture. The latter had been a mainstay of juvenile
fiction since the turn of the twentieth century, though most of the titles,
written by well-intentioned white Americans, were of the “little-children-of-
foreign-lands” type (most seemed to be twins). But there were exceptions.
Elizabeth Foreman Lewis had written knowledgeably and insightfully about
the lives of young people in China, having lived and taught there herself.
Similarly, Anne Nolan Clark wrote widely about Latin America, but the best
work in this category came from abroad in the years immediately following
World War II, “an era,” according to legendary editor and publisher Marga-
ret McElderry (1994, 369), “in which American children’s book editors actively
sought out the best in writing and illustration from abroad.” McElderry her-
self inaugurated this era when, in 1953, she published Margot Benary-Isbert’s
The Ark, the first German book to be published for American young readers
following World War II. However, the strident imperative that books about
other cultures could only be written by those from within that culture did
not emerge until the 1980s and the advent of multiculturalism and political
correctness.
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 21

For now, another advent—the arrival of a whole new decade and the dra-
matic changes it would visit on youth culture and the literature produced for
it—is at hand. For a discussion of that we begin a new chapter!

Notes
1. Speaking of “twain,” a singular work of fiction for boys—to match Little
Women for girls—appeared in 1885: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
2. As “Victor Appleton,” Howard R. Garis wrote many of the Tom Swift books,
while under his own name he created the more enduring literary character
of Uncle Wiggily. Interestingly, his wife, Lillian, was the pseudonymous
Laura Lee Hope who penned the Bobbsey Twin books. Their two chil-
dren also wrote for Stratemeyer, thus turning the Garis household into a
mini-fiction factory of its own, though not, alas, a very happy one! See the
ironically titled House of Happy Endings by Leslie Garis (2007).
2

The Sixties and Seventies


The Rise of Realism and the First Golden Age

“Teenagers today want to read about teenagers today.”


—S.E. Hinton, “Teen-Agers Are for Real,” 1967

HINTON MAY HAVE BEEN WRITING IN 1967, BUT SHE WAS ECHOING A CON-
cern that had been expressed by American educators for at least two
decades. In 1946, for example, George W. Norvell wrote, “Our data shows
clearly that much literary material being used in our schools is too subtle,
too erudite.” According to Nilsen and Donelson (2009, 59), he went on to
suggest, “Teachers should give priority to the reading interests of young
adults,” concluding that “to increase reading skill, promote the reading
habit, and produce a generation of book-lovers, there is no factor so power-
ful as interest.”
Although I can’t imagine any of them had read or even heard of Norvell,
many of the early fifties teens featured in Daly’s (1951) Profile of Youth echoed
his views, while acknowledging their personal dislike for reading. One senior
boy, for example, reported switching to journalism from English Literature
because “they were giving us English writers of the seventeenth century and
way back when” (41). A girl, it is reported, “doesn’t like to read books and much
prefers articles with many pictures” (62). It took another girl six weeks to get
through the first hundred pages of Pride and Prejudice (163), and a horse-lov-
ing Wyoming boy asserted, “I read A Tale of Two Cities last month for English
class—didn’t like it.”
“Another young cowboy,” the profiler writes, “looked up. ‘Last month,’ he
recalled morosely, ‘last month we done Macbeth’” (215).

23
24 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

And so it goes. Would these teens have been more enthusiastic about
reading if they had been permitted to self-select their books? Perhaps. The
Dickens disliker did acknowledge reading about horses occasionally (though
in farm and ranch magazines, not in books). And another boy demanded to
know, “Why can’t we read Cheaper by the Dozen in class instead of some old
has-been?” (96).
The problem, of course, was that even if teachers had been inclined to use
young adult books in the classroom instead of books by old has-beens, it’s
obvious from our survey of the field that few works of young adult litera-
ture before 1960 would have qualified as literature. Indeed, many academ-
ics would have asserted that putting the words “young adult” and “litera-
ture” together produced nothing but an oxymoron. And yet enough serious
work was being done that the first tentative attempts at critical analysis
had already begun to appear by the mid-1950s. Richard S. Alm (1955, 315), for
example, noted in 1955 that “the last twenty years has seen the coming of
age of the novel of the adolescent,” perhaps, he ventured, because writers,
“noting the heightened attention given to adolescents and their problems
by psychologists, educators, and librarians, have turned to the personal con-
cerns of the teen-ager.”
Perhaps, but the writers of the novel for the adolescent whom Alm sin-
gled out for particular praise were all adult novelists like Maureen Daly,
James Street, Dan Wickenden, William Maxwell, and Marjorie Kinnan Raw-
lings. This was consistent, though, with the approach Dwight L. Burton had
taken in an earlier essay, “The Novel for the Adolescent,” that is often cited
as being the first criticism of young adult literature. In it Burton (1951, 362)
devoted the lion’s share of his attention to an analysis of work by four adult
authors whose novels either showed “a keen perception of the adolescent
experience,” or “have a peculiar appeal to certain elements of the adolescent
reading public.” (For the record, the four authors were Dan Wickenden, Ruth
Moore, C. S. Forester, and Thomas Wolfe.)
The point we infer from both of these early pieces of criticism is that
although there may—by the 1950s—have been a separate, identifiable body
of books to be read by that separate, identifiable body of readers, that is,
young adults, too many of its constituent titles were what Alm (1955, 315)
himself had glumly described as “slick, patterned, rather inconsequential sto-
ries written to capitalize on a rapidly expanding market” (emphasis added).
In 1956 a third early critic, Frank G. Jennings, was even blunter, grumbling,
“The stuff of adolescent literature, for the most part, is mealy-mouthed,
2: T he Si x tie s and Se v entie s | 25

gutless, and pointless” (226). This may smack of overstatement for dramatic
effect, but it is true, I think, that “much of the literature written for young
adults from 1940 through 1966 goes largely and legitimately ignored today”
(Nilsen and Donelson 1993, 574).

Books or Ladders?
Adolescence has always been viewed as a period of transition, of moving
upward from one stage of development to another, and so it is not surpris-
ing that its literature, in the early years at least, should have been viewed
as a ladder—or, more precisely, a rung on a ladder—between children’s and
adult literature. This idea of reading ladders may have been the inspiration
of Dora V. Smith, who, in the 1930s at the University of Minnesota, taught
the first college-level course in adolescent literature. At least one of her most
celebrated students, G. Robert Carlsen (1984, 29), thinks so, recalling that “in
her classes we constructed ladders placing titles on the rungs according to
our judgment of quality . . . through reading guidance a teacher was to move
readers from one level to a higher one.”
Consistent with this concept is the corollary notion of stages of reading
development (which echoes psychological stages of adolescent develop-
ment!), that is, it is possible to identify certain specific types—or categories—
of fiction that will appeal to young readers at specific ages or grade levels in
school. In his influential 1980 work Books and the Teen-Age Reader, Carlsen
identified three such stages: (1) Early Adolescence: ages eleven to fourteen,
grades five to eight; (2) Middle Adolescence: fifteen to sixteen, grades nine
and ten; and (3) Late Adolescence: seventeen to eighteen, grades eleven and
twelve (Carlsen 1980). He then developed corollary categories of books that
he believed offered unique appeal to students in each stage of development.
For example, early adolescents would like animal, adventure, and mystery
stories; middle adolescents would welcome war stories and historical novels;
and late adolescents would dote on searches for personal values and books
of social significance.
Carlsen linked these aspects of reading development to University of Chi-
cago psychologist Robert J. Havighurst’s influential theory of developmental
tasks, which seemed to suggest that if teenagers were to successfully climb
the ladder of personal development from childhood to adulthood, they must
successfully complete seven distinct life tasks:
26 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

1. Achieve new and more mature relations with age-mates of both


sexes.
2. Achieve masculine or feminine social roles.
3. Accept their physiques and use their bodies effectively.
4. Achieve emotional independence of parents and other adults.
5. Prepare for marriage and family life.
6. Prepare for economic careers.
7. Acquire a set of values and an ethical system as a guide to behavior;
(i.e., develop an ideology that leads to socially responsible behavior).

“To accomplish [the tasks],” Havighurst claimed, “will lead to happiness and
to success with later tasks, while failure leads to unhappiness in the individ-
ual, disapproval by society, and difficulty with later tasks” (Havighurst 1988,
61). Havighurst’s ideas influenced work other than Carlsen’s. Evidence of this
may be inferred from the Alm article cited above, where the critic described
what he perceived as the prevailing focus of young adult writers’ attention:
“In the main,” he asserted, “these authors deal with an adolescent’s relation-
ships with others his own age, with his parents and other adults, and with
such worries as deciding upon and preparing for a job, ‘going steady,’ marry-
ing and facing the responsibilities of adulthood” (Alm 1955, 315). Though unac-
knowledged, this simply echoes Havighurst’s list of developmental tasks.
Carlsen (1984, 29) was more candid, recalling of his own teaching methods,
“I applied Robert Havighurst’s concept of developmental tasks to adolescent
books. It seemed to me that the most popular and successful titles, like Daly’s
Seventeenth Summer, were books in which characters were dealing with one
or more of the developmental tasks. So we looked not only at the story con-
tent, but also at the conflicts and turmoils besetting the characters.”
Personally I think this persistent attempt to transform literature into util-
itarian ladders too often turned the early critics’ attention from the work
itself to the personal problems of the reader; that act, in turn, invited the
transformation of a promising literature into the series of formula-driven,
problem novels that would emerge in the sixties and seventies. I also think
that frog-marching literature into ready-made category pens labeled for read-
ing age suitability homogenizes readers, while also smacking of the didactic
and dogmatic and threatening to turn literature from art to tool. Small won-
der that young readers, beginning to feel manipulated, joined their voices in
the chorus that greeted the looming new decade: “Never trust anybody over
thirty.”
2: T he Si x tie s and Se v entie s | 27

The Times, They Were A’—Well, You Know . . .


This brings us to the 1960s, when the times and the literature would both be
a-changin’! If one song—nasal balladeer Bob Dylan’s 1964 release “The Times,
They Are A’ Changin’”—epitomized the social mood of this turbulent decade,
one novel did the same for the nascent genre soon to be called “young adult
literature.” As had been the case in the 1940s with Maureen Daly and her Sev-
enteenth Summer, this new sea change would arrive with the appearance of a
single young writer—again, a teenaged girl—and the publication of her first
novel. This time the book was The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
And so it is that we have two young women and two books, each having
far-reaching influence on young adult literature and each receiving enor-
mous popular attention because of the novelty of their authors themselves
being teenagers when their respective first novels were written. But there the
similarities end and the differences begin. For starters, Hinton was writing
about boys, not girls (one reason her publisher suggested she use her initials
instead of her given name, Susan Elizabeth). And she wasn’t writing about
tree-shaded streets in small-town middle-America. Instead, she was writing
about mean urban streets where teenagers didn’t have time to agonize over
first love and dates for the prom; they were too busy agonizing over whether
they would survive the next skirmish in their ongoing war with a rival gang.
For it was warfare that Hinton (1967a) was writing about—class warfare
as symbolized by the two gangs that appear in The Outsiders, the Greasers
and the Socs. Soc was short for “Socials, the jet set, the Westside rich kids”
who “wreck houses and throw beer blasts for kicks” (10–11). (The Soc, as both
a term and a social type, had been around since the early fifties. One of the
students in Daly’s 1951 Profile of Youth is referred to as “a ‘real sosh,’ short
for ‘social.’” “That meant he was considered one of the right crowd, dated
the right girls and went to the right dances”) (109). As for the economically
deprived “Greasers,” they are “almost like hoods,” and are given to their own
antisocial behavior—they “steal things and drive old souped-up cars and
hold up gas stations” (11).
Significantly, Hinton’s story is told in the first-person voice of one of the
Greasers: fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, who lives with his older broth-
ers Sodapop and Darry, the latter of whom acts in loco parentis, because the
Curtis boys’ real parents have been killed in a car wreck before the story
begins. As Ponyboy reports, “The three of us get to stay together only as long
as we behave” (11). They try to avoid the more law-breaking Greaser activi-
28 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

ties outlined above, contenting themselves, instead, with wearing their “tuff”
hair long, dressing in blue jeans and T-shirts, and lifting a fist in the inevita-
ble rumble.
Hinton’s was not the first novel to deal with gangs. Frank Bonham’s story
of Los Angeles, Durango Street, had been published in 1965, but there was
something about The Outsiders that captured the imagination of its readers
and spawned a new kind of literature, “books,” as Richard Peck (1994, 154) put
it, “about young people parents thought their children didn’t know.” Hinton
knew them, though; she went to school with them every day in Tulsa. She
knew from personal observation what their lives were like but, as a reader,
she didn’t find that kind of first-person reality being depicted in the pages of
young adult literature.
“The world is changing,” she wrote in an impassioned New York Times
Book Review article, “yet the authors of books for teen-agers are still 15 years
behind the times. In the fiction they write, romance is still the most popu-
lar theme, with a horse-and-the-girl-who-loved-it coming in a close second”
(Hinton 1967b, 26). Hinton continues, “Nowhere is the drive-in social jungle
mentioned . . . In short, where is the reality [?]” Hinton was not alone in won-
dering that.
In 1966, George Woods, then children’s book editor of The New York Times
Book Review, wrote, “One looks for modernity, boldness, for realism. The teen-
age novel, especially, should grapple with the delights and the dilemmas of
today’s teen-agers. Delicacy and restraint are necessarily called for, yet all too
often this difficult problem is resolved through avoidance. A critic in touch
with the world and aware of the needs of the young expects to see more
handling of neglected subjects: narcotics, addiction, illegitimacy, alcoholism,
pregnancy, discrimination, retardation. There are few, if any, definitive works
in these areas” (169).
Not quite four months before Hinton’s piece appeared, Nat Hentoff deliv-
ered a similarly scathing indictment of young adult literature in The New York
Times. Writing of his own first YA novel, he asserted, “‘Jazz Country’ failed, as
have most books directed at teen-agers . . . My point is that the reality of being
young—the tensions, the sensual yearnings and sometime satisfactions, the
resentment against the educational lock step that makes children fit the
schools, the confusing recognition of their parents’ hypocrisies and failures—
all this is absent from most books for young readers” (Hentoff 1967, 3).
A year later Newbery Medal­–winning author Maia Wojciechowska (1968,
13) joined the chorus, criticizing authors of books for the young, who keep
going back to their own turn-of-the-century childhoods, or write tepid
2: T he Si x tie s and Se v entie s | 29

little stories of high-school proms, broken and amended friendships, phony-


sounding conflicts between parents and children, and boring accounts of
what they consider “problems.” The gulf between the real child of today and
his fictional counterpart must be bridged.
Hinton’s great success came from managing to bridge that gap and, by
giving fictional counterparts to the real teenagers she knew, introducing to
young adult fiction new kinds of “real” characters—whether they were the
alienated, socioeconomically disadvantaged Greasers or the equally alien-
ated but socioeconomically advantaged Socials.
Her novel was innovative, too, in its introduction of thematic relevance.
Hinton (1967b) had been quite right when she pointed out in her New York
Times piece, that “violence, too, is part of teenagers’ lives.” Before her, though,
authors had tended to ignore this basic reality of adolescent life. But Hinton
used it as a tool to define the daily lives of her characters, both as individuals
and as gang members, and this use was groundbreaking and consistent with
the demands of the realistic novel.
As we have seen, Hinton rejected the literature that had been written
for her generation, calling it “the inane junk lining the teen-age shelf of the
library.” And her rejection of the established literature for young adults is
also consistent with the universal rejection of the status quo that was such
a hallmark of the iconoclastic sixties, a decade that belonged to the young.
Because of her own youth, Hinton came to symbolize that rejection as well
as its replacement by a new kind of literature. Richard Peck (1993, 19), writing
of authors like himself whose work would follow Hinton’s, said she “may be
the mother of us all.”
The Young Adult Library Services Association confirmed that assessment
in 1988 with the presentation, to Hinton, of the first Margaret A. Edwards
Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement in writing young adult books.
Hinton’s significant place in the evolution of young adult literature is
secure, yet reading her first novel today one is struck by what an odd hybrid
it is: part realistic fiction and part romantic fantasy that, at its self-indulgent
worst, exemplifies what critic Terrence Rafferty (1994, 93) has called “morbid
adolescent romanticism.” Her Greasers are such romantically idealized fig-
ures, in fact, that it is small wonder that Ponyboy is, himself, enchanted by
other romantic figures—the Southern cavaliers of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone
with the Wind. There is some verisimilitude in this, however. The sociologist
Frederic Thrasher had earlier, in his 1929 study of 1,313 Chicago gangs, pointed
out that gang members placed a high value on physical prowess, peer loyalty,
and even chivalry (Kett 1977).
30 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

Another element of romanticism is Hinton’s sometimes sentimental treat-


ment of her theme of lost innocence that may, in turn, invite some revisionist
comparisons with Barrie’s Peter Pan and his band of lost boys.
This loss of innocence was also the theme of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher
in the Rye (1951), a more distinguished work of fiction that, though published
for adults, is also a more viable model for the modern young adult novel than
Hinton’s. Catcher’s most powerful contribution is the idiosyncratic, first-per-
son voice of its narrator, Holden Caulfield. But the book is also quintessen-
tially adolescent in its tone, attitude, and choice of narrative incidents, many
of which are ritually rite-of-passage, including the obligatory (and obligato-
rily embarrassing) encounter with a prostitute. The latter introduction of
sexuality may explain why none of the early critics of YA—Alm, Burton, Jen-
nings, Carlsen—included Catcher in their analyses (Catcher did make it into
Carlsen’s 1971 revision).
Wry, cynical, funny, and intensely self-conscious, Holden’s voice is one of
the more original in American fiction, and the story he tells is a marvel of sus-
tained style and tone. Even more than Seventeenth Summer, Catcher helped
to establish a tradition of first-person narrative voice for young adult fiction.
Holden’s tone and manner are clearly echoed in the work of Paul Zindel,
whose own first novel The Pigman was published in 1968, a scant year after
Hinton’s. Zindel’s debt to Salinger is the more obvious, as his characters, like
Salinger’s, hail from the urban East—New York City, to be precise. Another
YA pioneer, John Donovan, whose first novel, I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth
the Trip, published in 1969, also employed the New York setting and, like Zin-
del, echoed Holden’s unmistakable voice and attitude.
Because Zindel was an accomplished playwright and a demonstrated
master of dialogue (he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1971), it’s not sur-
prising that he chose to tell his story in not one but two first-person voices:
those of teenage friends John and Lorraine, whose brash, colloquial tone
invites further comparison with Holden’s. There are other similarities: John,
like Holden, is both “extremely handsome” and a prodigiously gifted liar. He
hates school, too, and has a horror of being a “phony in the crowd” (Zindel
1968, 71).
Holden’s favorite word is “madman,” and after having some kind of inde-
terminate breakdown, he tells his story “about this madman stuff” from a
sanitarium where he has been sent “to take it easy” (Salinger 1951, 1). There
are numerous references to mental illness in The Pigman, too. Lorraine tells
readers “how really disturbed” two of her classmates are. and believes herself
2: T he Si x tie s and Se v entie s | 31

to be paranoid. For his part, John announces he is a lunatic. Neither of the


two is really insane, of course, only terminally smart-alecky.
Zindel’s biographer Jack Forman (1994, 933) summarized critical opinion:
“‘The Pigman’ was a groundbreaking event because—along with S. E. Hinton’s
‘The Outsiders’—it transformed what had been called the teen ‘junior novel’
from a predictable, stereotyped story about high-school sports and dances to
one about complex teenage protagonists dealing with real concerns.”
Complex? Real? Perhaps—but John and Lorraine seem more types of
disaffected modern youth than real characters (and, frankly, their narrative
voices are so similar as to be sometimes indistinguishable). Compared with
their parents, however, they are positively Chekovian in their complexities.
Zindel seems to have taken George Wood’s thoughts about adult hypocrisy
to heart, for John and Lorraine’s respective parents are one-dimensional car-
toon versions of prevailing adult stereotypes. John thinks, “I would rather be
dead than to turn into the kind of grown-up people I knew” (Zindel 1968, 178).
Given their respective romanticism and dramatic hyperbole, it’s a bit sur-
prising that Hinton and Zindel have traditionally been accorded the lion’s
share of the credit for ushering in a new age of modern, realistic young adult
fiction. Especially when a third writer, whose first young adult novel was also
published in 1967, served up an authentically realistic work of fiction in terms
of theme, character, setting, style, and resolution. I refer to Robert Lipsyte,
whose gritty, often hard-edged novel The Contender offers a richly realized
theme—becoming an individual and transforming the self—that speaks to
the quintessential adolescent experience. His protagonist, Alfred Brooks, is
an African American teenager living with his aunt in a tiny Harlem apart-
ment. For Alfred, the future offers nothing but dead ends—until he discovers
Donatelli’s Gym and learns that although he may not have the killer instinct
necessary to become a successful boxer, he does have the necessary strength
of character to become a contender in the larger arena of life.
Lipsyte, like Zindel, was already an established writer before turning to
young adult fiction. At the age of twenty-seven, he was one of two interna-
tionally syndicated sports columnists for The New York Times. His experi-
ence as a journalist, trained to search for the telling detail and for reporting
the unflinching, though often unpleasant truth, guaranteed a book that is a
marvel of verisimilitude in the details of its setting: the boxing world and its
gritty backdrop of New York streets. The characters, even the minor ones, are
real people, not conventional types. They have believable motivations and
authentic reactions to each other and to the situations in which they find
32 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen

themselves. With four decades of hindsight, it now seems that it is The Con-
tender, rather than The Outsiders or The Pigman, that is a model for the kind
of novel that Woods, Hentoff, and Hinton herself had called for in the arti-
cles cited earlier in this chapter. This revisionist critical opinion was reflected
when a long-overdue Margaret A. Edwards Award was bestowed on Lipsyte
in 2001.
Regardless of who was first responsible, it is inarguable that, in the late
sixties, YA literature was in a hectic period of transition from being a litera-
ture that had traditionally offered a head-in-the-sand approach to one that
offered a more clear-eyed and unflinching look at the often unpleasant reali-
ties of American adolescent life.
It would be an uphill battle, though, for not only are young adults inher-
ently romantic, they are also inherently reality-denying. Richard Peck (1994,
159), as usual, put it well:

In depicting reality our books are often on a collision course with


our readers’ most deeply felt beliefs: that they cannot die or be
infected with sexually transmitted diseases, or get pregnant
unless they want to, or become addicted to anything. Our books
regularly challenge their conviction that the rules don’t apply to
them. There are limits to the amount of reality the novel form
can encompass. Young adults test the boundaries.

Lipsyte—and Hinton and Zindel and Donovan, and even Bonham and Hen-
toff—were among the first to test these boundaries and, in the process, to set
aside certain shibboleths that had contributed to the rosy unreality of previ-
ous YA novels. The taboos that had hobbled the literature in terms of subject
and style had flourished in the complicity of silence that authors had main-
tained in the forties and fifties. But in the late sixties and early seventies, a
new and bolder generation of authors began to break the silence with the
power and candor of their voices. “Authors [now] wrote the way people really
talked—often ungrammatically, sometimes profanely” (Nilsen and Donelson
1988, 275).
Zindel had written the way two people really talked; in 1973 Alice Chil-
dress would go him ten better and write in twelve different voices while also
addressing the hard-edged issue of heroin abuse in her novel A Hero Ain’t
Nothin’ But a Sandwich. Hinton would also write about drug abuse (That
Was Then This Is Now [1971]). As for other taboo-breaking topics, Zindel would
Other documents randomly have
different content
Frédéric II amassa un trésor de 60 millions de thalers en vendant
des mercenaires à l'Angleterre pendant la guerre d'Amérique.
Cette prospérité permit au landgrave de satisfaire ses goûts
fastueux. Il fit venir de France un architecte, Simon-Louis Ry qui
embellit Cassel, abattant les remparts, dessinant des jardins à la
Lenôtre. Tischbein, peintre allemand, mais de talent si français qu'on
l'a comparé à Nattier, fut chargé de la décoration des appartements
princiers.
Le landgrave entretint aussi une troupe dramatique et lyrique qui
jouait les chefs-d'œuvre classiques de la scène française, les opéras
et les opéras-comiques français, car Frédéric, contre le sentiment de
l'Allemagne du XVIIIe siècle, préférait la musique française à
l'italienne, de même qu'il mettait avant toutes les autres la littérature
française de son temps. La dévotion du Landgrave ne l'empêchait
pas au demeurant de partager les idées des Encyclopédistes et
d'honorer Voltaire avec lequel il correspondait.
A cette époque, le philosophe de Ferney était fort embarrassé
d'un de ses admirateurs qui se trouvait dans une mauvaise situation.
Jean-Pierre-Louis Luchet, Marquis de La Roche du Maine, puis
marquis de Luchet, était né à Saintes en 1774. Il avait pris du
service dans un régiment de cavalerie et avait démissionné pour
épouser une Genevoise. A Paris, il mena grand train et se tailla de
beaux succès littéraires. Mais la marquise eut le tort d'admettre dans
son salon les mystificateurs fameux pour avoir turlupiné ce bizarre et
ridicule Poinsinet qui finit par se noyer dans le Guadalquivir, à
Cordoue: «Notre langue lui doit, disent les Mémoires secrets, de
s'être enrichie du terme de mystification, terme généralement
adopté, quoi qu'en dise M. de Voltaire, qui voudrait le proscrire on
ne sait pourquoi».
Mais ces mystificateurs, parmi lesquels on comptait le comte
d'Albanel, l'avocat Coqueley de Chaussepière, les acteurs Préville et
Bellecour, de la Comédie-Française et un commis dans les fourrages
qui était connu sous le nom de Lord Gor, firent d'autres victimes que
Poinsinet et ils mystifièrent grossièrement différentes personnes. Sur
la plainte d'une dame de qualité, la police intervint. Il y eut des
menaces de prison. Cette affaire finit par s'arranger, mais tout le
monde tourna le dos aux Luchet et toutes les portes se fermèrent
devant eux.
A cela vint s'ajouter la faillite du marquis qui s'occupait de mines.
Il dut fuir et après un séjour chez Voltaire, il s'en alla à Lausanne où
il fonda en 1775 les Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. Il
engloutit ainsi ce qui lui restait de fortune. C'est alors que Voltaire le
recommanda au landgrave de Hesse-Cassel qui l'accueillit.
Luchet était un homme agréable et disert. Les Allemands, même
ses ennemis, accordaient qu'il fût un «connaisseur en beautés
théâtrales comme presque tous les Français de qualité». Sa
réputation de littérateur était faite.
Il plut beaucoup à Frédéric II qui dès le 1er juin 1776 écrivait à
Voltaire: «Plus je connais M. de Luchet, plus je l'estime. Quel charme
dans la conversation; quelles idées nettes! Il s'exprime avec la plus
grande facilité et précision. Je l'ai fait directeur de mes spectacles et
l'on dirait qu'il est fait exprès pour cette place». C'est pour Luchet
l'époque des triomphes: il est successivement nommé conseiller
privé, directeur du Théâtre-français, surintendant de l'orchestre de la
cour, bibliothécaire du Muséum de Cassel, secrétaire perpétuel de la
Société des Antiquités fondée à Cassel en 1777, historiographe du
Landgrave, vice-président du cercle du commerce à Cassel. Il était
déjà ou allait devenir membre de la Société d'Agriculture de Berne,
des Académies de Marseille, de Turin, de Dijon, de Saint-
Pétersbourg, d'Erfuhrt, de celle des Arcades, de la Société des
Antiquaires de Londres, de la Société royale de Lunebourg, de
l'Institut de Bologne, etc. Tout-puissant à la cour du Landgrave, il y
introduit des compatriotes.
Comme intendant de la musique et des spectacles de la cour, le
marquis recrutait et dirigeait la troupe française, qui jouait à Cassel,
et suivait la cour dans ses déplacements d'été, à Wabern, à Geismar,
à Weissenstein. Dans ces résidences on jouait devant la cour seule.
M. de Luchet s'occupait de la mise en scène et c'est lui qui
désignait les pièces à représenter. Sachant que le Landgrave serait
flatté que l'on jouât pour la première fois à Cassel des œuvres
d'auteurs français, Luchet recherchait les pièces nouvelles.
Vers la fin de 1779 il reçut l'offre d'un opéra-comique. Celui qui
l'offrait, et qui était l'auteur des paroles et de la musique, s'appelait
le Chevalier Andrea de Nerciat. Le marquis de Luchet, qui l'avait
connu à Paris, brillant officier de la maison du Roi, se dit que ce
serait une bonne recrue pour la cour de Frédéric, que ce lieutenant-
colonel français, auteur et musicien, et lui répond que l'opéra-
comique est reçu et que si l'auteur se trouve sans situation, il n'a
qu'à venir à Cassel où on lui en trouvera une.
Le chevalier de Nerciat fut très flatté. Il pensa qu'on utiliserait ses
talents comme sous-directeur des spectacles ou dans quelqu'autre
fonction du même genre et se mit en route. Il arriva à Cassel dans
les premiers jours de février 1780 et fut très bien reçu. Il se logea
dans la haute ville neuve [20] . On le nomma aussitôt conseiller et
sous-bibliothécaire de S. A. S. le landgrave Frédéric II. Nerciat
n'entendait rien à cette fonction, mais il accepta le poste, en
attendant mieux. Par reconnaissance, peu de jours après son
arrivée, il donna lecture à la Société d'Antiquités d'un discours dans
lequel il manifestait son étonnement devant les projets magnifiques
d'un prince, un des plus grands pour la protection qu'il accordait aux
sciences et aux arts, un des meilleurs pour le souci qu'il prenait du
bien-être de ses sujets: c'était un Titus, un Auguste, etc. Le discours
eut le succès qu'on en attendait et Nerciat devint un courtisan
apprécié dans la cour frivole du landgrave.
[20] Je pense qu'Andrea de Nerciat venait de se
marier. Sa femme mourut probablement en couches en
1782. Quoi qu'il en soit, le chevalier se remaria en 1783.

Le marquis de Luchet y tenait la première place. On l'appelait «le


roi du pays». Il régnait véritablement, décidant de tout ce qui avait
trait au goût, à l'élégance, à l'étiquette, et Frédéric l'écoutait avec
déférence. Il y avait aussi le marquis de Trestondam, qui de 1772 à
1780, figure sur les états de la cour comme «premier gentilhomme
de vénerie». Il était glückiste et musicien de talent. Ses talents sur le
violon étaient, paraît-il, incomparables, il y joignait ceux de danser le
menuet à ravir et d'être redoutable dans ses fréquents duels. A
partir de 1781, il seconda Luchet comme sous-intendant de la
musique. On voyait aussi un maestro nommé Fiorillo qui écrivait des
Opéras légers, un chimiste du nom de Prizier qui coûtait cher au
Landgrave, un français officier au service de la Hesse, le marquis de
Préville, des savants comme Forster, Johann von Müller, Sœmmering,
Dohm, des artistes comme Böttner et Nahl, et le chevalier Andrea de
Nerciat qui parmi tous ces courtisans dont les conservations
roulaient sur l'art militaire, l'Encyclopédie, le magnétisme, la
littérature ou la musique, racontait avec grâce ses voyages ou
gravement tenait des propos sur la philosophie française. Ce dernier
trait est rapporté par Lynker, un des rares auteurs qui mentionnent
Nerciat; et c'est d'ailleurs tout ce qu'il en dit [21] .
[21] Geschichte des Theaters und der Musik in Kassel
bearbeitet von verstorbenen Hof-Theater-Sekretär W.
Lynker, etc. (Kassel, 1865).

On représenta l'ouvrage du Chevalier, Constance ou l'heureuse


témérité, opéra-comique en trois actes, au Komœdienhaus de Cassel
où le Théâtre-français donnait ses représentations.
On peut supposer que le duc de Wurtemberg assistait au
spectacle et que c'est sur sa demande que Nerciat lui envoya le
manuscrit de la partition de Constance, qui est conservé à la
bibliothèque de Stuttgart. La cour et la ville étaient réunies, le chef
d'orchestre était un français nommé Finet et l'Opéra-comique eut un
succès que n'encouragea pas le glückiste marquis de Trestondam. Le
sujet de Constance ou l'heureuse témérité «n'offre rien de nouveau,
dit M. Jean-Jacques Olivier [22] . C'est l'éternelle histoire de l'ingénue
promise à un barbon ridicule et qui, secondée par une soubrette
intrigante, parvient à force de ruses à épouser son jeune amant.
Mais le livret est coupé avec adresse et les couplets sont joliment
tournés.
[22] Loc. cit.

«Pour la partition, si elle contient des maladresses et des


négligences de style, qui dénotent un travail d'amateur, elle
renferme un grand nombre de morceaux d'une heureuse inspiration,
où ne manque ni la couleur, ni la vivacité.»
Ces paroles de l'Air de Finette donneront une idée du livret de
Constance:

Si je me donne un mari,
Je ne le veux ni joli
Ni galant, ni fait pour plaire,
Un benêt, c'est mon affaire,
Il en est tant Dieu merci.
Pour époux, vive une bête,
Madame fait à sa tête,
Elle gouverne monsieur
Et d'un maître sans malice
Fait, au gré de son caprice,
Son très humble serviteur.

Et voici encore celles-ci, de l'Air de Madame Armand:

Se faire craindre d'un époux


Est un méprisable avantage.
D'une femme sage
L'empire est plus doux;
Pour la paix du ménage,
De la part d'un jaloux.
Elle sait avec courage
Souffrir un léger outrage
Les caresses, la douceur
Ramènent un mari volage,
Il fuit l'humeur;
Beauté qui veut être affable
De l'homme le moins traitable
Désarme enfin la rigueur.

Certains livrets d'aujourd'hui ne valent pas celui de l'heureuse


témérité.
La même année, Nerciat fit paraître le texte de son opéra-
comique, à Cassel, mais la musique resta inédite. Jusque-là le
chevalier n'avait guère été dans cette bibliothèque dont il était le
Sous-Bibliothécaire. Il n'avait pas eu le temps. Mais le Bibliothécaire
en chef le rappela à ses devoirs. Le marquis de Luchet avait en effet
trouvé en venant à Cassel que les livres de la Bibliothèque étaient
mal classés. Un de ses amis lui avait fait une description de la
Bibliothèque du comte de Clermont. Luchet s'enthousiasme pour le
plan d'après lequel elle avait été conçue, et ayant adopté ce plan, il
rédige un Projet d'arrangement de la Bibliothèque dans le Muséum
Fridericianum présenté à Son Altesse Sérénissime Mgr le Landgrave,
par son premier Bibliothécaire à Cassel ce 29 février 1779. Tout était
rangé sous cinq dénominations ou facultés: Théologie,
Jurisprudence, Sciences et Arts, Belles-Lettres, Histoire. Le
Landgrave adopte aussitôt le projet et le marquis fait diligence pour
qu'il soit exécuté. Les livres sont envoyés au relieur et au fur et à
mesure de leur retour, classés sur le nouveau plan dans le nouveau
catalogue. A cette époque la direction intérieure du Muséum était
confiée à un certain Schminke qui s'opposa à tout changement et
préféra se démettre de son poste plutôt que de prêter la main aux
fantaisies de Luchet. Outre les deux bibliothécaires, il y avait à la
bibliothèque un Bibliotheksskribent. Luchet engage de nouveaux
employés: un ancien comédien français, deux anciens valets, un
inspecteur des lanternes révoqué et tombé dans la misère, un ci-
devant négociant dont le négoce n'avait pas réussi, qui vivait
d'écritures, tenait des livres et à l'occasion faisait des courses, et
enfin un sous-officier du 1er bataillon de la garde. Tout ce monde
changeait les étiquettes sous la direction du Bibliotheksskribent. Les
savants de Cassel ne voyaient pas d'un bon œil ces modifications et
le Bibliotheksskribent, homme du métier, était le premier à protester
dans la ville, disant que les précédents bibliothécaires étaient fondés
dans leur science et n'auraient pas attendu messieurs de Luchet et
Nerciat pour établir une classification nouvelle, utile aux savants et
amateurs de lettres. Cependant il n'osait enfreindre les ordres du
marquis tout-puissant et les exécutait, se promettant de prendre sa
revanche. Ce Bibliotheksskribent se nommait Friedrich Wilhelm
Strieder. Il était né à Kinken le 12 mars 1739 et il mourut à Cassel le
13 octobre 1815. Il avait d'abord servi dans les troupes hessoises et
était employé à la Bibliothèque depuis le 13 décembre 1765. Après
la mort du Landgrave Frédéric II et le départ du marquis de Luchet,
il fut nommé Premier Bibliothécaire. Il haïssait les Français et c'est
lui qui nous a conservé le récit de ces petits événements [23] .
[23] Grundlage zu einer Hessichen Gelehrten und
Schriftsteller Geschichte seit der Reformation bis auf
gegenwaertige Zeit… (Cassel, 1788), tome 8.

A vrai dire, Strieder ne nous dit pas le rôle qu'il a joué, mais
qu'on devine.
Inexperts, les nouveaux employés de la Bibliothèque multiplièrent
les erreurs. Un jour, le marquis de Luchet vint au Muséum et voulant
donner un exemple sur la façon de classer les livres, inscrivit
gravement dans le catalogue: Commentaires de Saint-Paul sur
quatre épîtres de saint Paul, Galates, Ephésiens, Philippiens,
Colossiens, Genève 1548. En réalité, il s'agissait des commentaires
de Calvin sur les Epîtres de Saint-Paul.
Le Chevalier de Nerciat vint aussi. Il apportait ses ouvrages
imprimés pour en faire don à la Bibliothèque. Ils y figurent toujours.
Ce sont: Contes nouveaux, Dorimon ou le marquis de Clairville,
Constance ou l'heureuse témérité et Félicia ou mes fredaines, édition
de 1778, sans indication de lieu, en quatre volumes.
Le chevalier de Nerciat ayant vu le buste du Landgrave qui se
dressait dans la Bibliothèque, composa aussitôt ces vers:

Frédéric à la gloire alliant les vertus,


Du Sage et du Héros offre ici le modèle,
Dans ce marbre animé par un ciseau fidèle
Nous voyons Ptolémée, Auguste avec Titus.

Le chevalier de Nerciat.

Avec l'approbation du marquis de Luchet, ce quatrain et la


signature furent gravés sur une plaque dorée que l'on plaça sous le
buste du Landgrave.
Strieder dit à propos de Nerciat: «Comme il a en qualité de
Bibliothécaire beaucoup plus travaillé avec les pieds qu'avec la tête
et les mains, il n'a pas fait beaucoup de bévues à réparer». Ce qui
signifie sans doute que Nerciat se remuait beaucoup et ne faisait
rien. Au demeurant, il inscrivit dans le Catalogum Historiæ litterariæ
une indication: Friedr. Geo. August Loberthan. Versuch einer
systematischen Entwickelung der gantzen Lehr von der
Gerichtsbarkeits, der weltlichen sowohl als der kirchlichen, Halle
1775, 8 o relié neuf. Son travail se borna là. A partir de cette époque
Nerciat commence à devenir mécontent de son engagement, et un
peu jaloux de son supérieur avec lequel il eût volontiers partagé la
surintendance des spectacles.
Luchet et le Landgrave tenaient pour la musique française, le
marquis de Trestondam était glückiste et Nerciat n'aimait que la
musique italienne. De là, des propos aigres-doux entre Nerciat et
Trestondam. Celui-ci parvint à évincer le chevalier, et lorsqu'on
nomma un sous-intendant de la musique, Trestondam obtint ce
poste que le marquis de Luchet avait promis à Nerciat. Le chevalier
manifesta son mécontentement, mais le marquis de Luchet, qui
commençait à le trouver encombrant et trop exigeant, était assez fin
pour le tenir à l'occasion dans les limites de la subordination, selon
son engagement. Nerciat était hésitant: devait-il rester à Cassel
comme employé à la Bibliothèque, ainsi qu'il disait, et attendre que
le bon plaisir du landgrave ou plutôt celui de Luchet l'appelât à un
poste plus en rapport avec ses goûts, ou devait-il chercher du
service auprès d'un autre prince allemand?
C'est à cette époque que parut dans la Gothaer gel. Zeitung un
article qui selon Strieder rendit célèbre en Allemagne le marquis de
Luchet et la bibliothèque de Cassel. Au Musæum, dans les
catalogues, les erreurs se multipliaient et Strieder se gardait bien de
les redresser. Nul doute que ce soit lui qui ait rédigé l'article paru
dans la feuille de Gotha. L'exploit érostratique qui avait bouleversé
une vieille bibliothèque allemande était sévèrement jugé:

«J'ai encore vu la Bibliothèque de Cassel dans l'ordre où elle


était primitivement. Tout y était bien. On pensa l'améliorer en y
changeant tout et l'on présenta au Landgrave un plan sur lequel
il paraîtrait qu'est arrangée en France, une bibliothèque qui
m'est d'ailleurs inconnue.
Le prince trouva le plan si bien exposé qu'il y donna son
consentement en ajoutant une somme suffisante à
l'achèvement d'un nouveau catalogue qui était devenu
nécessaire. Aussitôt, on fit relier luxueusement en 20 volumes
un grand nombre de rames de papier et on y fit inscrire les
livres d'après l'ordre dans lequel on les avait mis. Les copistes
chargés d'indiquer au catalogue, brièvement et clairement, les
titres des ouvrages, n'avaient pas la moindre des connaissances
nécessaires. Chaque volume du catalogue comporte encore des
divisions par format et on y laisse des blancs en vue de
l'accroissement de la Bibliothèque.
Cependant, les livres dont elle est déjà pourvue sont inscrits
à la suite les uns des autres, de telle façon qu'il ne serait pas
possible d'y intercaler un volume à la place qui conviendrait,
mais il faut porter à la suite toute nouvelle acquisition. D'après
les renseignements que je vous donne sur le classement, vous
pourrez raisonnablement juger que ce défaut dans ce catalogue
a de graves inconvénients.
Par exemple, à l'Histoire naturelle on trouve, et non pas,
comme on pourrait le croire, reliés ensemble, les livres suivants:
Milii diss. de origine animalium, Genevæ 1705, et La vie du Père
Paul de l'ordre des Serviteurs de la Vierge, etc., Amsterdam,
1663, in-12. A la Généalogie et la Diplomatique on trouve côte à
côte: Constitution, hist., lois, charges, etc., acceptées des
Francs-Maçons, trad. de l'Anglais par J. Kuessen à la Haye,
1763, 4 o et Idea de el Buon Pastor por Numez de Cepada en
Léon 1682 4 o. Une histoire orientale est perdue parmi les livres
relatifs à la Hollande. Les Ambassadeurs par Wiquefort et les
Droits des gens par Vattel se trouvent dans les Sciences
Economiques. Le Médecin du Cheval (Rossartz) par Winter a été
rangé parmi les ouvrages sur l'Art. A peine le croirait-on! Les
cartouches et les pupitres, sur lesquels sont marquées les
différentes classes indiquées par des lettres, donnent aussi la
preuve des connaissances qui ont présidé à cette installation.
J'ai copié quelques-unes de ces indications. Historia Europæana,
Historia Exeuropæana, Litteræ Diarii, Theologia Sermon…»

C'était l'époque où Schlœzer était dans tout l'éclat de sa


renommée. August Ludwig Schlœzer né à Jaggdstad dans le
Wurtemberg le 5 juillet 1738, mourut le 9 septembre 1809. Il
s'immortalisa en liant l'Histoire aux Sciences Politiques. Il professa à
Saint-Pétersbourg et ensuite à Gœttingue: On a dit de lui qu'il avait
mis la science en contact avec la vie, qu'il avait été un journaliste
d'avant les journaux, un voyageur d'avant les voyages, un historien
de la civilisation avant l'existence d'une opposition politique. Il fonda
les Staatsanzeigen.
En 1781, il faisait paraître le Briefwechsel. Il y releva l'histoire de
la Gothaer gel. Zeitung sous le titre de Bibliothèque de Cassel:

«Cassel, depuis longtemps l'ornement de toute notre patrie


allemande, progressera encore d'année en année grâce à la
sollicitude de son Altesse. La bibliothèque fameuse depuis le
temps d'Arkenholz s'est sans cesse accrue et compte 40.000
volumes. Elle est une des plus importantes de l'Allemagne. Elle
est conservée dans un édifice qui manifeste un faste princier. Le
choix des nouvelles acquisitions témoigne des grandes
connaissances du Prince. Mais dans le Gothaer gel. Zeitung du
20 janvier 1781, il y a des nouvelles étonnantes au sujet de
l'agencement intérieur de cette Bibliothèque, ce qui
naturellement est l'affaire de MM. les Bibliothécaires… [Ici
Schlœzer cite les bévues mentionnées par la feuille de Gotha].
«On ressent quelque chose de pénible à apprendre tout cela
et à penser que le Prince protège les Arts et les Sciences et
paye très cher ses serviteurs. Il est tout à l'honneur de M. le
Conseiller Schminke, que peu satisfait de pareilles installations,
il ait abandonné la direction de la Bibliothèque.
«Voilà des nouvelles incroyables, mais elles sont imprimées
dans la Gothaïschen Gelerten Zeitung qui notoirement est lue
loin à la ronde. On demande patriotiquement: 1o, au cas où ces
informations ne seraient pas vraies, une prompte rectification,
afin que la calomnie ne se répande pas et ne passe pas la
frontière allemande, ou 2o, au cas où tout cela serait vrai, on
exige les noms de ces messieurs qui ont proposé et exécuté les
dits nouveaux agencements. Car ce serait toujours consolant
pour nous autres Allemands, si comme la légende en court, ce
n'étaient pas des Allemands, mais des étrangers ignorants [ou
manquant d'érudition: ungelehrt] ceux qui ont provoqué des
plaisanteries publiques sur une capitale allemande qui possède,
tout le monde le sait, un grand nombre d'Allemands érudits,
auprès desquels ces étrangers pourraient apprendre à décliner
et plus encore.»

La Goth. gel. Zeitung répliqua aussitôt:

M. le professeur Schlœzer a publié avec quelques


commentaires dans le cahier 44 de son Briefwechsel quelques
passages relatifs à l'agencement et arrangement intérieur de la
Bibliothèque du Landgrave à Cassel. Il se pose, en quelque
sorte, en juge et avec un souci patriotique de l'honneur des
Allemands il exige: 1o qu'au cas où ces informations ne seraient
pas vraies, etc… [Le rédacteur de Gotha cite ici l'article de
Schlœzer].
Le premier point est pour l'auteur de la lettre le plus
intéressant et l'amène à certifier qu'il n'a pas forgé ces
informations d'après les récits d'un tiers, mais les a tirés à la
source même. Quelques heures qu'il passa dans la Bibliothèque,
il les employa seulement à se faire une idée de l'arrangement
auquel il entendait quelque chose. Il nota ensuite dans une
société assez nombreuse, tout ce qui avait trait à la
Bibliothèque. On peut présumer que M. le professeur Schlœzer
a lui-même une connaissance assez précise de cet arrangement
de la Bibliothèque et qu'il a quelque idée des auteurs, car pour
ce qui concerne ceux-ci, il se réfère à un bruit qui court, que ce
ne sont pas des Allemands, mais des étrangers ignorants qui
doivent porter le poids des moindres bévues commises non
seulement dans l'agencement, mais aussi dans les inscriptions
que l'on a laissé mettre sur les cartouches de la Bibliothèque. La
lettre suivante qui nous a été envoyée par un des bibliothécaires
pour être rendue publique est une preuve que nous ne disons
rien qui soit ignoré. C'eût été l'occasion d'un démenti que nous
n'aurions pas supprimé. Aucune syllabe de cette lettre ne réfute
les informations que nous avons données. Elle répond aussi,
pour ceux qui connaissent le personnel de la Bibliothèque de
Cassel, à la 2e question de M. le professeur Schlœzer: que sont
ces messieurs qui ont proposé et exécuté ces nouveaux
agencements? Pour ce qui est de l'exécution, l'auteur de la
lettre [24] suivante s'y reconnaît expressément:

[24] En français.

«La manière dont Vous Vous êtes expliqué dans une de vos
feuilles au sujet de la Bibliothèque de Cassel a mis le rédacteur
du journal littéraire de Gœttingue dans le cas de commettre une
injustice que Vous voudrez bien sans doute réparer. Il qualifie
collectivement d'ignorants étrangers les Bibliothécaires de
Cassel, comme si deux ou plusieurs étrangers ignorants étaient
les auteurs solidaires des bévues que Vous aviez indiquées, et
que relève la correspondance de Gœttingue avec des réflexions
peu flatteuses pour les étrangers assimilés.
«Deux Français à la vérité sont rattachés à la Bibliothèque de
Cassel, mais l'un est un chef, une espèce de Primat des
Sciences, lettres et Arts. Ce chef a seul imaginé la distribution
actuelle; divisé les matières; placé les livres, et composé les
légendes latines qui indiquent leur arrangement. Tout cela était
conçu avant que l'autre Français eût mis le pied dans le
nouveau Musée, où il n'a accepté une place très surbordonnée
qu'afin de ne pas manquer une occasion précieuse de s'attacher
à un Prince éclairé, bienfaisant, qui à cette époque n'avait pas
besoin du nouvel étranger pour les choses auxquelles celui-ci
pouvait être propre.
«Je suis ce Français et je vous proteste, Monsieur,
qu'employé à la Bibliothèque de façon à ne pas partager la
gloire de mon Supérieur s'il en avait acquis, je ne veux pas plus
partager ses disgrâces. Bien ou mal, j'ai fait avec une muette
subordination, mais avec toute la diligence possible, ce qu'on
m'a commandé.
«Si Vous aviez su ces particularités, Monsieur, Vous m'auriez
sans doute mis à part dans Vos remarques et le journaliste de
Gœttingue qui Vous a copié m'aurait aussi tiré du pair. Vous êtes
trop équitable, Monsieur, pour ne pas faire usage pour ma
justification de la lettre que j'ai l'honneur de Vous écrire, et à
laquelle je Vous prie de donner place dans Vos feuilles. J'ai
l'honneur d'être, etc…

Le Chev. de Nerciat

à Cassel

le 6 mars 1781.»

L'article de la Goth. gelerte Zeitung et la lettre de Nerciat


n'étaient pas tendres pour Luchet. Quelques jours auparavant, le 22
février, le chevalier avait adressé à Schlœzer la lettre [25] que voici:
[25] En français.
«Monsieur,

«Un article du 44e cahier de Votre journal de cette année


copiant mot à mot un article de celui de Gotha contre certaines
bévues commises dans le nouvel arrangement de la
Bibliothèque de Cassel finit par une tirade très patriotique où,
traitant d'ignorants les sujets auxquels Monseigneur le
Landgrave a confié les livres de Son Muséum, Vous témoignez le
désir de connaître ces Etrangers, apparemment pour leur faire
le procès comme criminels de Lèse littérature.
«Eh bien, Monsieur! Je suis l'un des coupables, que vous
citez à votre tribunal, je n'attends pas qu'on me dénonce, et
j'ose vous présenter ma courte justification que je me flatte de
voir bientôt insérée dans vos feuilles, ne doutant pas plus de
votre équité, que d'une franchise dont votre diatribe me fournit
la preuve la moins équivoque.
«Celui qui a l'honneur de Vous écrire, Monsieur, est très
persuadé que, pour être un Bibliothécaire passable, il faut avoir
passé une partie de sa vie parmi les livres, et s'être fait du
moins une routine qui dans une Bibliothèque peut tenir lieu de
savoir, ce qu'il serait possible de prouver, mais une simple lettre
ne doit pas être le cadre d'une discussion.
«Celui donc qui vous écrit, Monsieur, français à la vérité,
sans que ce soit un préjugé contre son état d'homme de lettres,
militaire pendant 20 ans, sous-bibliothécaire par hasard et sans
vocation, sans prétentions dans une partie pour laquelle il ne
s'était pas offert, le chevalier de Nerciat enfin, pourrait n'avoir
pas les qualités nécessaires à un Bibliothécaire, sans être pour
cela dans le cas de recevoir avec docilité la qualification d'ignare
que vous avez la bonté de lui décerner. Avant sa métamorphose
imprévue, il avait produit quelques ouvrages d'imagination en
vers et en prose, ses pièces et sa musique avaient
avantageusement occupé quelques théâtres. Comme non omnia
possumus omnes, ce qu'il cite lui suffit pour réclamer contre le
titre qu'il obtient sur parole dans Votre Journal. Si vous voulez
bien considérer outre cela, Monsieur, qu'un sous-bibliothécaire
qui se trouve sans trop savoir comment sous la discipline d'un
Supérieur, se borne à l'exécution servile de ce que ce Supérieur
prescrit, vous conviendrez que vos coups ne devraient point
frapper l'innocent instrument des erreurs émanées de l'autorité;
c'est ce dont auraient dû vous prévenir les zélés qui vous ont si
minutieusement détaillé les bévues de la Bibliothèque. Cette
distinction aurait été d'autant plus juste que, selon les
dispositions du nouvel établissement, la gloire et l'utilité du
succès devant retourner en entier au Supérieur, sans que le
subalterne y eût aucune part, celui-ci peut renoncer au bénéfice
des satires et vous prier, Monsieur, de mettre désormais au
singulier certaines épithètes, s'il vous plaît d'honorer encore de
votre attention les sujets inégaux que Mgr le landgrave emploie
au service de sa Bibliothèque. J'ai l'honneur d'être avec un très
humble respect, Monsieur,

Votre affectionné Serviteur

le chevalier de Nerciat.»

Immédiatement, le professeur Schlœzer envoya la lettre [26]


suivante au susceptible Sous-Bibliothécaire:
[26] En allemand.

«Très noble Monsieur,

«Monsieur le très honorable conseiller, je n'hésiterais pas un


instant à insérer mot à mot dans ma Correspondance,
conformément à votre demande, l'écrit dont vous m'avez
honoré le 22 courant, si d'une part il n'était pas à craindre que
cette lettre imprimée mot pour mot ne causât à Cassel une trop
grande sensation, désagréable pour vous-même; d'autre part, il
règne dans cet écrit un malentendu au sujet d'un mot allemand
qui vous a conduit à d'injustes conséquences.
«Ungelehrt ne signifie pas ignorant ni ignare, mais il désigne
le manque de ces connaissances littéraires qui sont
indispensables aux Savants de profession, par exemple:
connaissance de la langue latine, de la bibliographie, etc. Un
capitaine, un Banquier peut ne pas savoir décliner mensa, mais
plaise au ciel qu'on ne l'appelle pas pour cela un ignorant.
Seulement, lorsque ces connaissances littéraires manquent dans
une charge qui suppose nécessairement un homme de lettres,
alors ce défaut deviendra blâmable. Un homme de lettres n'a
pas besoin de connaître l'équitation et personne ne le blâmera à
cause de cela, comme on ferait s'il était écuyer.
«L'affaire ayant été portée par la Goth. gel. Zeitung devant le
seul tribunal qui lui convînt, le tribunal du public (car devant
quel tribunal de Cassel aurait-on pu la plaider?) deux cas
seulement se présentent.
«Ou bien, les dénonciations de la Gothaer Zeitung ne sont
pas vraies. En ce cas, je demanderais seulement une attestation
de l'un de Messieurs les Bibliothécaires; elle serait aussitôt
imprimée et les calomniateurs seraient entièrement confondus.
«Ou bien, elle est vraie. Et il est alors prouvé que l'artisan de
cet agencement n'entend pas le latin, n'a pas de connaissances
bibliographiques et que par conséquent il n'aurait pas dû
s'occuper d'une bibliothèque publique qui reçoit chaque semaine
tant de voyageurs.
«En conséquence, je vous conseillerais de provoquer le
silence sur ce qui tombe le plus sous les yeux, sur ce qui attire
l'attention des connaisseurs et de m'envoyer, en vue de la
publication, à moi ou à tout autre rédacteur d'une feuille
mensuelle, un avis manuscrit qui nous informerait que:
«Sur les cartouches on ne lit point Europæana mais
Europæa, ni Exeuropæana mais Asiat. Afric. Americ. et ainsi de
suite;
«Que Mosheim ne se trouve pas parmi les Pères de l'Eglise
mais là ou là, etc.
«Ainsi tout serait bien fait. Chaque voyageur pourrait ensuite
contrôler lui-même cet avis et l'odieuse enquête pour retrouver
le premier auteur cesserait.
«Vous ne m'avez point demandé en quoi cette affaire me
regardait, ni pourquoi j'ai fait reproduire l'article de la Gothaer
Zeitung, et cette question certes, vous ne me la ferez pas. Vous
êtes un Français et l'une des plus nobles et des plus fréquentes
vertus nationales de cet aimable peuple, c'est le patriotisme.
«Lorsqu'il y a de cela six mois vous parliez presque chaque
jour avec un voyageur qui venait de Paris et vous racontait avec
des rires l'érection, en public, d'une statue qui contre toutes les
règles de l'Art—à Paris où l'on connaît cet Art—due au ciseau
d'un Allemand, avait été ornée d'inscriptions françaises telles
que le grand Duguesclin ne les aurait certes pas écrites, votre
patriotisme n'en fut-il pas excité et réchauffé?
«Cassel est en petit, pour nous Allemands, ce qu'est en
grand Paris pour les Français. Cassel est notre orgueil. De plus,
nous, habitants de Gœttingue, avons un intérêt tout spécial à
cela. Cassel et Gœttingue se servent mutuellement, et maint
illustre voyageur ne viendrait pas dans notre région, si les deux
villes n'étaient d'aussi proches voisines.
«Pour les deux ouvrages imprimés que vous avez bien voulu
m'envoyer comme cadeau, je vous présente mes remerciements
les plus obligés. L'examen de ces deux ouvrages m'a confirmé
dans la haute idée que j'ai de vos talents dans ce beau
compartiment de l'érudition et desquels la renommée avait déjà
fait impression sur moi.
«Pardonnez-moi si j'écris en allemand. A la vérité, j'entends
le français, mais je ne m'aventure pas à l'écrire parce que je
cours le danger de faire à chaque ligne une Exeuropæana.
«Dans l'avenir, je saisirai avidement chaque occasion de vous
donner des preuves effectives de la considération très
distinguée avec laquelle j'ai l'honneur d'être votre très obéissant
serviteur.
Schlœzer.

«Gœttingue, le 26 février 1781.»

La politesse et l'ironie de cette réponse ne découragèrent point


Nerciat et l'on a lu la lettre que, sans craindre le scandale, il écrivit
ensuite au rédacteur de la Goth. gel. Zeitung.
Le marquis de Luchet fit semblant de ne rien savoir. Il écarta tout
doucement Nerciat de la cour et le confina dans ses misérables
fonctions d'employé à la Bibliothèque, mais le chevalier se garda
bien depuis lors de collaborer en quoi que ce fût au fameux
catalogue.
Nerciat resta un an encore à Cassel. Son nom figure en 1781 et
en 1782 dans le Hochfuerstl. Hessen-Casselischen Staats- und
Adress-Calender et il s'y trouve indiqué comme il suit: «Rath und
Sous-Bibliothecar, Herr chevalier de Nerciat.»
Cependant, Nerciat cherchait à se procurer une autre position. Il
quitta son poste de sous-bibliothécaire à Cassel en juin 1782 et
entra au service du Prince de Hesse-Rheinfels-Rotenburg, qui en fit
son Baudirector, c'est-à-dire son directeur ou intendant des
bâtiments. Nerciat avait laissé à Cassel sa femme qui était enceinte.
Parmi les manuscrits conservés à la Landesbibliotek de Cassel on
en trouve un sous la cote: Mscr. Hass. fol. 450 qui contient un grand
nombre de renseignements de toutes sortes, rassemblés par Rudolf
de Butlar, et concernant les familles nobles de la Hesse ou ayant
séjourné dans ce pays. Une page contient l'indication suivante:

Monsieur le chevalier de Nerciat, Hesse-Rotenburg


Oberbaudirektor

Georg
Philipp
August
Get. Oberneust.
fr. Gem.
9 — 15

10
1782

Ce qui signifie qu'un fils de M. le chevalier de Nerciat,


surintendant des bâtiments de la Hesse-Rotenburg, naquit à Cassel,
le 9 octobre 1782, et qu'il fut baptisé le 15 octobre, à la paroisse
française de la haute ville neuve de Cassel, sous les noms de
Georges-Philippe-Auguste.
Le chevalier de Nerciat eut deux fils qui furent boursiers de
l'Egalité. Dans les palmarès on trouve, l'An VI: «Louis-Philippe
Nerciat, né à Paris, accessit de version latine». Et l'An VII: «Auguste-
Georges-Philippe Andrea, né à Hesse-Cassel, accessit de langues
anciennes et d'histoire naturelle». Auguste de Nerciat entra dans la
carrière diplomatique. J'ai trouvé dans le tome 2e du Recueil de
voyages et de mémoires publié par la Société de Géographie (Paris,
1825) un Extrait de la traduction faite par M. le baron de Nerciat
d'un mémoire de M. de Hammer, sur la Perse…
Plusieurs des notes ajoutées à ce travail par le traducteur sont
signées: A. de N.
Le chevalier Andrea de Nerciat ne se plaisait pas beaucoup dans
son nouveau poste d'Oberbaudirektor. Sa femme venait sans doute
de mourir en couches à Cassel. Le chevalier revint à Paris en 1783 et
se remaria la même année en l'église Saint-Eustache comme cela a
été noté par Ravenel [27] : «Nerciat (André-Robert Andrea de)
épouse Marie-Anne-Angélique Condamin de Chaussan. Reg. Saint-
Eustache 1783». Il conserva des rapports avec toutes les petites
cours allemandes où il avait des amis; il publiait de la musique et
l'on trouve de lui une Romance (paroles et musique) parue en 1784
dans le Choix de Musique dédié à S. A. S. Monseigneur le duc des
Deux-Ponts:
[27] Notes Ravenel: Bib. Nat. mss. fr. n. a. 5859.
Tircis dont l'âme délicate
Fut tendre au comble du malheur
Près de mourir pour une ingrate
Nous peignait ainsi sa douleur.

De deux beaux yeux connaissez-vous le prix?


Venez admirer ceux d'Ismène,
Mais craignez-vous les maux d'un cœur épris?
Fuyez, fuyez mon inhumaine.
Vous brûleriez de mille feux
Si par malheur, cette beauté cruelle
Dardait sur vous une étincelle
De ses beaux yeux.

Tremblez pour vous! Je défiais l'amour


De ranimer un cœur de glace
Je vis Ismène, hélas! depuis ce jour
Je suis puni de mon audace.
Il me sembla d'abord si doux
Ce sentiment que soudain elle inspire;
Bientôt, il devint un martyre.
Tremblez pour vous!

Plaignez mon sort, je me consume en vain


Le roc est plus tendre qu'Ismène,
Aucun espoir, je sens que le chagrin
Lentement au tombeau me traîne.
Viens me guérir, affreuse mort
Et vous, amis qui savez ce qu'endure
L'amant qui meurt de sa blessure,
Plaignez mon sort.

Le chevalier de Nerciat avait quitté l'Allemagne sans regret, mais


non sans émotion. «Les Allemands, a-t-il écrit dans Monrose, m'ont
passablement ennuyé, tout en me forçant à les beaucoup estimer.»
Il ne songea pas avant son départ à revoir le marquis de Luchet
dont les projets étaient devenus grandioses.
Il s'était fait imprimeur et libraire, rêvant de faire de Cassel un
centre où la littérature française et l'allemande se rencontreraient
pour se vivifier mutuellement. On devait y traduire en français des
livres allemands et en allemand les succès de la librairie française.
Ces idées commerciales ne laissaient pas de choquer un peu les
habitants de Cassel et l'on se moquait ouvertement du favori qui
trouva un matin attaché à une persienne de sa maison une feuille de
papier sur laquelle on avait écrit en français: «Monsieur le marquis
de Luchet, Imprimeur, Libraire, conseiller intime de S. A. S. Mgr de
Landgrave, vend toutes sortes de livres».
La librairie du marquis de Luchet dura du 18 novembre 1783 au
11 novembre 1785. Au commencement de 1785, la Krieg und
Domainen Kasse demanda au Landgrave la suppression des
comédiens français qui coûtaient cher à la couronne.
Frédéric II allait se séparer à regret de sa chère troupe française,
lorsqu'en bon courtisan, Luchet prit à son compte, jusqu'en 1788,
l'entreprise du Théâtre-Français, moyennant une subvention de
3.000 écus la première année et 4.000 les suivantes, plus les dédits
à payer aux artistes renvoyés ayant la fin de leur engagement. A
Cassel, le Landgrave devait avoir une loge à sa disposition et dans
les Résidences, la troupe devait jouer devant la cour seule.
Frédéric II mourut le 31 octobre 1785, et presque aussitôt après
l'avènement du landgrave Guillaume IX, on conseilla au marquis de
Luchet d'abandonner les postes qu'il occupait et de quitter la Hesse.
Il se démit de ses fonctions le 10 février 1786 et quitta Cassel le
3 avril à 5 heures du matin.
La troupe française fut congédiée et la population de Cassel
approuva par des manifestations le départ des sauteurs français,
c'est ainsi que le peuple hessois appelait ces comédiens. Ceux dont
l'engagement n'était pas terminé reçurent six mois de gages.
M. de Luchet passa au service du prince Henri de Prusse. Un
roman du marquis avait à ce moment un véritable succès. Il s'agit
du Vicomte de Barjac ou Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de ce
siècle, que l'on a quelquefois attribué à Choderlos de Laclos.
Il n'y a pas lieu d'insister ici sur le reste de la carrière du Marquis
de Luchet, qui est connue.

*
* *

A son retour en France, le chevalier Andrea de Nerciat reprit le


métier des armes qui masquait sans doute celui d'agent secret. Il fit
partie des officiers qu'en 1787, le Roi envoya soutenir les patriotes
hollandais, insurgés contre le Stadhouder. Déguisé en bourgeois,
Nerciat arriva secrètement par Gorcum à Utrecht.
Il revint bientôt et il semble qu'il fut chargé la même année d'une
mystérieuse mission diplomatique en Autriche. Il alla aussi en
Bohême, et fit imprimer à Prague deux comédies-proverbes: Les
rendez-vous nocturnes ou l'aventure comique et Les amants
singuliers ou le mariage par stratagème. Il reçut en 1788 la croix de
Saint-Louis et fit paraître la même année les Galanteries du jeune
chevalier de Faublas.
Le roman de Louvet de Couvray venait de voir le jour et Nerciat
voulut profiter de la vogue d'un ouvrage où il reconnaissait
l'influence de Félicia. En 1788, il fit encore paraître Le Doctorat
impromptu dont Monselet dit qu'il est «écrit avec légèreté».
En 1789 parurent ses Contes saugrenus, en 1792 Mon noviciat et
Monrose dont il ne faut pas douter malgré Wolff [28] que ce soit un
ouvrage de Nerciat. Il semble que pendant la Révolution, Nerciat
joua un rôle assez louche, demeurant comme agent secret aux
gages de la République qu'il détestait et trahissait peut-être.
[28] Allgemeine geschichte des Romans… (Iéna,
1850).

Quoi qu'il en soit, il se préoccupait toujours de ses livres. Il laissa


paraître en 1793 les Aphrodites et vendit le manuscrit du Diable au
corps qui ne devait paraître qu'en 1803, à Mézières, après la mort de
l'auteur.
Cependant, le métier d'écrivain ne remplissait pas tous ses loisirs,
et tandis que ses fils étaient boursiers de l'Egalité, le citoyen Nerciat
exerçait la profession équivoque de policier.
Sabatier de Castres le mentionne dans sa lettre, au général
Bonaparte [29] datée de Leipzig, 19 mai 1797:
[29] Catalogue… de deux cabinets connus, 19
décembre 1871, no 95 (vendu 44 fr.).
Cette lettre (moins ce passage et quelques autres) a
été imprimée dans Lettres critiques, morales et politiques
sur l'esprit, les erreurs et les travers de notre temps.
Erfurt, pet. in-12, VI-28 p.

«L'agent chargé de surveiller Mme de Buonaparte est le baron de


Nerciat (Nercia) qui se donne tantôt pour italien et tantôt pour
français et qui est auteur de quelques romans orduriers très mal
écrits».
On retrouve ensuite Nerciat à Naples où il fut envoyé, sans doute
sur sa demande et la même année, à cause de sa connaissance de
l'allemand et de l'italien, pour surveiller la cour. Il se présenta
comme un émigré qui n'avait quitté son pays que pour venir dans
celui d'où sa famille était originaire. Il fut bien accueilli et la reine lui
accorda une pension. Il est toujours agent secret aux gages de la
France, mais ses préférences qu'il ne parvient pas à dissimuler le
portent à passer au service de Naples [30] . Paris est bientôt informé
de cette trahison et le 13 nivôse, an VI, Trouvé, chargé d'affaires à
Naples, écrit à Talleyrand: «Le citoyen Nerciat auquel j'ai envoyé
celle par laquelle vous lui annoncez qu'il n'est plus porté sur vos
états comme agent secret est venu me remettre deux tableaux de
chiffres nos 5 et 6 (Italie germinal, an V) et m'a aussi apporté la
lettre que vous trouverez ci-jointe». On peut supposer qu'à partir de
ce moment Nerciat rompit définitivement avec la République. Il avait
gagné la confiance royale et en 1798, Marie Caroline le chargea
d'une mission secrète, auprès du Pape. Le chevalier de Nerciat arriva
à Rome en février, au moment où les troupes françaises
commandées par le général Berthier s'emparaient de la ville.
[30] M. Maurice Tourneux pense que Nerciat joua un
rôle important comme agent au service de Naples, sous le
nom supposé de M. de Bressac. Ce Bressac a été
mentionné par quelques historiens. Il se trouvait à Berlin
en 1798 et il est question de lui dans plusieurs rapports
conservés aux Archives des Affaires étrangères. Gaillard
écrit de Berlin le 2 ventôse, an VI: «J'ai remis, il y a
quelques jours, au cabinet de Berlin, la note concernant
les décorations de l'ancien régime. Leur suppression
totale ne souffrira aucune difficulté, mais le ministère
tient à ce que l'ordre qui émane du roi à ce sujet, ne
porte que sur ses propres sujets et sur les étrangers qui
sont à son service ou qui jouissent dans ses Etats du droit
d'asile sans qu'il puisse concerner en aucune manière les
étrangers… Je vous prie de faire décider la cour de
Naples le plus promptement qu'il sera possible et de
demander qu'elle donne immédiatement l'ordre de se
conformer à cette mesure, à un certain M. de Bressac ou
Pressac qui se trouve à Berlin depuis quelque temps.
C'est un Français qui dit qu'il est depuis très longtemps
au service de Naples où il est chambellan du Roi. Il porte
la croix de Saint Louis. On se rappelle de l'avoir déjà vu
ici autrefois, et on lui suppose des intentions, quoique je
ne le voie en aucune autre liaison qu'avec les émigrés, ce
qui est assurément sans conséquence. Je le regarde
comme un de ces agents secrets qui aura intrigué à
Naples pour se faire donner une mission quelconque à
l'étranger et surtout de l'argent. Au reste il pourrait
arriver qu'il reçût de Naples l'ordre de quitter la croix et
qu'il le dissimulât. C'est un cas à prévoir et à prévenir et il
faudrait pour cela que le ministre de Berlin pût avoir une
connaissance officielle de l'ordre général que S. M.
Sicilienne donnera à ce sujet.»
Une lettre de Parandier portant la même date
confirme le rapport de Caillard en exagérant l'importance
de Bressac.
«Il est arrivé ici depuis quelque temps un fameux
aventurier nommé Bressac. Cet homme si connu à Naples
par son immoralité, par ses basses intrigues en politique,
par ses liaisons avec la reine, par son intimité avec son
favori et par toutes sortes d'infamies, se dit actuellement
brouillé avec Acton, et obligé de voyager tant que son
ennemi sera en faveur. Il est reçu à la cour et dans les
principales maisons avec une distinction particulière et
affecte un luxe ridicule dans un pays où les fortunes
bornées ne permettent pas de s'y livrer. Faufilé partout,
d'une activité inconcevable, ses jactances, ses manières
intrigantes, décèlent le but de son séjour ici. Quoi qu'il ne
soit qu'un intrigant subalterne et le preneur débouté de la
coalition, cependant son séjour ici ne laisse pas que de
faire beaucoup de mal. Dans un pays où nous ne sommes
pas aimés, où toute espèce de rapprochement n'est
amené que par la peur de la puissance républicaine… tout
ce qui tend à réveiller les passions, les haines, à
entretenir les soupçons et les défiances ne saurait trop
être écarté.»
Le 19 ventôse an VI, Talleyrand répond à Gaillard:
«… J'ai fait écrire à Naples relativement à M. de
Bressac, qui se montre à Berlin avec la croix de Saint-
Louis. Je suppose que c'est l'aventurier dont il est fait
mention peu honorable dans les mémoires de Gorani.
Quand je serai instruit des effets des démarches qui
auront lieu à Naples, je vous en instruirai.»
Enfin, le 18 germinal an VI, Trouvé écrit à Talleyrand:
«J'ai reçu vos deux lettres 5 et 6 en date du 18
ventôse, relatives aux démarches touchant les
décorations de l'ancien régime. Vous m'en prescrivez une
relativement à M. de Bressac, je vais m'en acquitter avec
d'autant plus d'empressement, que ce Bressac a dans
toutes les occasions, déployé l'animosité la moins
équivoque envers les Français.»
Toutefois, ces extraits ne paraissent point démontrer
que Nerciat et ce Bressac, n'aient été qu'une seule
personne. Au contraire, il y a lieu de croire qu'au moment
où M. de Bressac se pavanait à Berlin, Nerciat se faisait
arrêter à Rome, et qu'à la date où Trouvé protestait à
Naples contre la décoration de Bressac, Nerciat était déjà
enfermé dans un cachot du castel Saint-Ange.
Nerciat fut aussitôt arrêté et incarcéré au château Saint-Ange. On
n'a encore mis au jour aucun renseignement relatif à
l'emprisonnement du chevalier de Nerciat, et son nom même a
échappé à M. Rodocanachi qui a consacré (Hachette, 1909 in-4o) un
important ouvrage à la vieille citadelle romaine. La détention du
chevalier se prolongea au delà de l'évacuation de Rome par les
Français.
Il fut élargi dans les premiers jours de l'année 1800. Il était
tombé gravement malade dans son cachot et avait perdu tous ses
papiers parmi lesquels se trouvaient, paraît-il, les manuscrits de
quelques ouvrages. Aussitôt libre, tout malade qu'il était, il revint à
Naples où il mourut presqu'aussitôt, dans les derniers jours du mois
de janvier.
Psychologue subtil et raffiné, esprit dégagé de tous les préjugés,
écrivain délicieux, aux néologismes presque toujours heureux,
personnage équivoque et séduisant, le charmant auteur de Félicia
finissait en même temps que le XVIIIe siècle dont il est l'expression la
plus délicate et la plus voluptueuse [31] .

G. A.

[31] Je tiens à remercier ici le savant M. Maurice


Tourneux qui m'a fait le don précieux de ses notes sur le
chevalier de Nerciat. M. le docteur Lohmeyer, directeur de
la Landesbibliothek de Cassel et M. le docteur Sceffler,
bibliothécaire à la Landesbibliothek de Stuttgart, ont
également part à ma reconnaissance.
ESSAI BIBLIOGRAPHIQUE SUR LES
ŒUVRES D'ANDREA DE NERCIAT

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines avec l'épigraphe: La faute en est aux


Dieux qui me firent si folle. Londres, 1775.—4 vol. in-18; 12 gravures
libres par Borel (non signées) [32] . D'après ce qu'en dit Nerciat dans
Monrose, cette édition aurait paru en Belgique.
[32] Félicia a été traduit en anglais et publié dans le
tome II, de The Exquisite. A collection of tales, histories
and fancy essays, London, M. Smith.—s. d. (1842-1844) 3
vol. gr. in-4o, 45 numéros, avec figures. Magazine
hebdomadaire dont chaque numéro se vendait d'abord 4
pences et plus tard 6 pences. Les figures sont assez
libres. La plupart des ouvrages qu'on y trouve sont
traduits du français.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., 1776. 4 vol. in-18; 12 gravures.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc. A Londres MDCCLXXVI. 4 tomes


in-18 souvent reliés en 1 vol.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Londres, 1778.—4 vol. in-18, 12


grav. cette édition est celle que Nerciat donna à la Bibliothèque de
Cassel où il était Sous-Bibliothécaire. Et dans l'Extrait placé en tête
de Monrose, l'auteur dit à propos de Félicia que «la moins mauvaise
édition est celle en deux volumes, chacun de deux parties, et divisée
en chapitres, qui est sortie en 1778 d'une presse d'Allemagne. On la
reconnaît au titre gravé et placé dans un ovale de feuillage».

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc. Londres, 1782.—4 vol. in-18; 12


fig. par Borel d'après Eisen (non signées). Onze fig. sont libres.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines; etc., MDCCLXXXIV.—(sans lieu


d'impression), Paris, Cazin, 4 vol. in-18 avec 24 fig. par Borel d'après
Eisen (non signées). Onze sont libres.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., MDCCDXXXIV.—4 vol., petit in-18


avec les figures d'après Eisen. Les figures sont retournées, sauf le
frontispice; et la huitième (avec le clair de lune) est couverte.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, orné de figures en taille-douce, etc., A


Londres.—(s. d.) 4 parties reliées souvent en 4 vol. in-18. Vignette
sur le titre (panier fleuri) (Figures libres).

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Amsterdam, 1780.—2 vol. pet. in-


8o .

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., A Amsterdam.—4 parties en 2


tomes souvent reliés en 1 vol. in-8o. 2 ff. liminaires, 216. pp. et 2 ff.
liminaires, 256 pp.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., A Amsterdam, MDCCLXXXV.—


Deux tomes en 2 vol., in-18, 2 frontispices.
Les vers

Voici mon très cher ouvrage


etc.

se lisent au verso du titre du tome deuxième.


Contrefaçon des éditions Cazin.
Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Amsterdam, 1786, 2 tomes pet.
in-8o.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Amsterdam, 1792.—2 tomes pet.


in-8o.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., A Amsterdam, 1793.—2 tomes


petit in-8o.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc. A Amsterdam, Aux dépens de la


Société Typographique, 1794, 4 parties en 2 vol. in-18.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc. Amsterdam, 1795. 2 tomes pet.


in-8o.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines avec figures. Paris chez les marchands


de nouveautés, 1795.—4 vol. Pet. in-12 avec les fig. d'après Eisen.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Paris, an III.—(1795) 4 vol. in-18


avec les fig. d'après Eisen.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Paris, 1797.—4 vol. in-18 avec les
fig. d'après Eisen.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Paris, 1798.—4 vol. in-18 avec les
fig. d'après Eisen.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Londres, 1812.—(Bruxelles) 4 vol.


in-18 avec 24 fig. d'après Eisen.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Londres, 1834.—(Bruxelles), 4


vol. in-18 de 162, 179, 198 et 179 pp.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines par Andrea de Nerciat, Londres, 1869.


—(Bruxelles), Alphonse, Lécrivain et Briard qui imprimait, 4 tomes en
2 vol. in-12, avec 24 figures, d'après Eisen.
Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., (s. l.), 1869.—(Bruxelles) Vital-
Puissant (?) 4 vol. in-18; 24 fig. libres d'après celles d'Eisen.

Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc.—(Bruxelles, Kistemaeckers, 1890),


2 vol. in-16, 4 fig. dans le texte.

Monrose, ou le libertin par fatalité, suite de Félicia [s. l.], 1792.—


4 vol. in-18 et parfois in-8o [33] .
[33] The Exquisite (voir la note au 1er article de
Félicia) renferme au tome III un abrégé de Monrose.

Monrose ou suite de Félicia par le même auteur [s. l.] 1795.—4


vol. in-18 avec 24 gravures libres attribuées par Cohen à Quéverdo.

Monrose, ou suite de Félicia par le même auteur, à Paris, an V


(1797).—4 tomes in-12 avec les 24 grav. libres. Le 1er tome ou
Première Partie comprend 1 feuillet préliminaire X-179 pages et 1
feuillet pour la table; la deuxième partie 1 feuillet prél. 202 p. et 1 f.
pour la table.
Le titre répété en tête du 1er chapitre de chaque partie porte:
Monrose ou le libertin par fatalité.

Monrose, ou suite de Félicia par le même auteur, Paris, an


huitième.—vol. in-18 avec les fig. libres.

Monrose, ou suite de Félicia par le même auteur, à Paris chez le


Prieur, libraire quai Voltaire, no 12 an IX.—4 vol. in-16, 4 fig. non
signées.

Monrose, ou le libertin par fatalité, par Andrea de Nerciat, 1792-


1871.—(Bruxelles, Lécrivain et Briard, imprimé par Briard) 4 vol. in-
18, avec les grav. copiées sur celles attribuées à Quéverdo.

Les galanteries du jeune chevalier de Faublas ou les Folies


parisiennes, par l'auteur de Félicia, Paris, 1788.—4 vol. in-12. Le
Faublas de Louvet de Couvray sort manifestement de Félicia. Quoi
d'étonnant si Nerciat a voulu revendiquer un peu de cette paternité
en essayant de profiter d'une vogue où il avait part? Les sept
premières parties des Amours de Faublas venaient de paraître en
1787-1788. Je n'ai point eu entre les mains l'ouvrage de Nerciat, je
ne sais donc point si c'est comme l'insinue Vital-Puissant, une
imitation de l'ouvrage de Louvet, mais c'est peu probable. Nerciat a
dû, peut-être même à l'instigation de son libraire, changer pour celui
du chevalier de Faublas, le nom du héros d'un ouvrage déjà terminé
et prêt à être publié.

Mon noviciat ou les joies de Lolotte [avec épigraphe].

Pour être heureux, ô Lubriques mortels!


Faut-il, hélas, un trône et des autels!

Foutromanie, Chant I

[s. l.] 1792.—(Berlin), 2 vol. in-18, avec 2 grav. libres [34] .


[34] Ce roman a été traduit en allemand:
Mein Noviziat [qui forme le 3e vol.] III Band des
Priapische Romane Rom. bei Seraph Calszovulva 1791-97.
—(Berlin).
Mein Noviziat, etc.—Réimpression des Priapische
Romane faite à Leipzig vers 1810. Voici le titre complet
d'une réimpression faite à Leipzig vers 1860:
Priapische Romane III Band Dritte Abtheilung Boston
Bei Reginald Chesterfield [avec une vignette représentant
deux amours, remouleurs dont l'un repasse un… tandis
que l'autre fait pipi sur la meule, un deuxième titre porte]
Mein Noviziat III Band Erste Abtheilung. [Les autres vol.
des Priapische Romane contiennent le 1er une adaptation
du Fanny Hill et le 2e une adaptation du Meursius.] Mon
Noviciat a aussi servi, paraît-il, pour deux ouvrages
anglais en lettres; How to raise love or mutual amatory
secret London 1848—(Amérique) in-18 fig.
How to make love, or the Art of making love in more
ways than one, exemplified in a series of most luscious
adventures between two cousins, translated from the
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