Bambi: from porn to fawn
QUESTION Did the author of Bambi have a sideline in pornographic literature?
FELIX SALTEN was born Siegmund Salzmann in Budapest in 1869. When he was four weeks old, his mother, father and their six children relocated to Vienna after the Austrians granted full citizenship to Jews.
As a grown man, Salten worked briefly in insurance before, in 1902, writing an impassioned obituary of French author Émile Zola which launched his literary career.
He became a prominent member of Jung-Wien (Young Vienna), a group of modernist fin de siecle writers and cabaret artists, many of them Jewish, who met and debated at Vienna’s cafés and coffee houses.
The anonymously authored erotic novel Josephine Mutzenbacher, a pornographic story about a Viennese prostitute who is initiated into the sex trade while still a child, was first published in 1906. It has now sold more than 3million copies and has been translated into at least ten languages. It has spawned many sequels, parodies and plays as well as a series of pornographic films and has been the subject of various university courses.
Salten never officially claimed authorship, but it’s widely accepted that he wrote the book.
Beverly Driver Eddy’s biography Felix Salten: Man Of Many Faces describes Salten as two-faced socially and professionally ambitious – a writer who was dismissive of his opponents but professional enough to use a pseudonym when he suspected certain works would expose him to criticism. He was a notorious spendthrift and would do anything for a bit of cash.
Bambi: A Life In The Woods (1923), the book that brought him fame, was a realistic, though anthropomorphised, account of a deer from birth to his final role as a tough old denizen of the forest, struggling with dignity to survive against his chief enemy, man the hunter.
A parallel has been traced between the fawn becoming a stag and the human child in the earlier pornographic work becoming an adult. To survive in the world, both Josephine and Bambi are forced to develop from happy young children into cold and self-reliant figures. As a book, Bambi is much more gritty than the Disney movie. He follows his father’s advice and takes to a life roaming the woods alone, abandoning his lover and two young fawns.
Ian Glover, Ashwell, Herts.
QUESTION Are the Métis in Canada a legally recognised people? CANADA officially recognises three groups of indigenous people: First Nations (comprising 630 Indian tribes), Inuit (formerly known by the now-defunct term Eskimo) and the Métis. The Métis are unusual in this context as they are of mixed race. The name comes from the Latin miscere (to mix), and historically they have been known as half-breed, mongrel, cross-bred, jackatars, mestizo, metif blood and savages – terms which are now, mercifully, defunct.
In 2011, 451,795 people identified as Métis. They represented 32.3 per cent of the total aboriginal population and 1.4 per cent of the total Canadian population.
Their origins can be found in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Aboriginal men taught the mainly French explorers and fur traders how to live in the woods. These coureurs des bois (runners of the woods) met Ojibwa, Assiniboine and Cree women and settled down to raise families with them. Later, English, Irish and Scottish immigrants contributed to the mix. The Métis became intermediaries between European and Indian cultures, working as guides, interpreters, and provisionaries to the new forts and trading companies.
Their villages sprang up from the Great Lakes to the Mackenzie Delta. The Métis homeland encompasses parts of present-day Ontario, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Métis culture was a fusion of Aboriginal and European influences that took root and flourished until the 1800s.
They developed a unique language called Michif, a combination of Cree and French. They also developed a lively form of music centred around the fiddle, combining jugs and reels often with percussive accompaniment (such as spoons). Their attire included woven sashes, embroidered gun sheaths, deer-hide caps and quilled and beaded pipe bags. They also developed technologies, including a versatile two-wheeled vehicle known as the Red River cart.
The Métis were valuable employees of fur trade companies due to their skills as voyageurs (fur transporters), hunters and navigators. They made formidable soldiers and developed a unique political and legal culture, with strong democratic traditions.
By 1816, the Métis had challenged the Hudson Bay Company’s monopoly in the fur trade and began to develop a national consciousness.
In 1936, the Alberta government granted 1,280,000 acres of land for Métis settlements, a precedent that has allowed the contemporary Métis of Alberta to obtain limited control of housing, health, child welfare and legal institutions.
Jim Boyd, Edinburgh.
QUESTION Has a major battle ever been decided by a single combat? IN Ireland, there was at least one notable example between opposing leaders – at Credran or Drumcede near Drumcliffe, Co. Sligo. There, in 1257 AD, Donegal’s chieftain Godfrey O’Donnell defeated the English Lord Justice of Ireland, Maurice Fitzgerald, but was badly wounded.
Still not fully recovered the follow- ing year, Godfrey was carried out to defeat the invading O’Neill clan near modern Letterkenny – and died of exhaustion immediately afterwards.
He was later made the hero of a famous epic poem by James Clarence Mangan, one that we all learned off by heart during our school days more than 50 years ago.
Seán O’Donnell, Shantalla, Galway.
QUESTION What is the story of Augustus Saint-Gaudens who sculpted the Parnell Statue in Dublin’s O’Connell Street?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, Irishborn Augustus had a prolific career in the US, where his parents moved the family in his early childhood. One of his most notable commissions was to design a weathervane for the second Madison Square Garden in New York. His design honoured Diana the huntress, a figure from Roman mythology, and depicted the nude female form. Installed in 1893 and at 105 metres above street level, the statue was the highest point in New York at that time, and during the day the gilded figure, catching the sun, could be seen from all over Manhattan.
However, the statue was not without controversy: critics complained that Diana’s naked form was offensive and drapery was fashioned to cover her nudity, though it later blew away.
In 1925, Madison Square Garden was demolished to make way for the New York Life Building and Saint-Gaudens’s statue was gifted to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where it remains today. Saint-Gaudens died in 1907.
Sarah Brennan, Co. Mayo.
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