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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
by Michael Peverett
Section 4. 1870-1945
Contents
Links marked with a * are separate HTML pages. Click
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The Castle
of Neuschwanstein (a jigsaw puzzle) power and tourism
Arthur Rimbaud
(1854-1891) about driving a car
Benito Pérez Galdós: Trafalgar (1873)
Émile Zola: L'Assommoir
(1876) dead
to the world
Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897) formal grammar
Rev J. Jackson Wray:
Simon Holmes, Carpenter a dissenting novel
Anton Chekhov: The
Shooting Party (1885) virtuous narration
R.L. Stevenson: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) NEW
A.K. Gardner: The Conjugal Relationships as to Health sexology and evasion
Frank Norris: The
Octopus (1901)
Hjalmar Söderberg: Doktor Glas (1905)
W.B. Yeats
(1865-1939) attached
to the heart
Richard Strauss: An Alpine Symphony (1915) the sun grows dark
Handbook Encyclopedia of Engineering (1929)
The Lyceum Book of
Verse (1931) ladies’ poetry
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)* masterworks and
dirt
Oliver Strange: The
Marshal of Lawless (1933) NEW
Victor Canning talent and a place
in society
H.A.L. Fisher: A History of Europe (1935)
Harold P. Clunn: The Face of the Home Counties (1936)
Karin Boye (1900-1941) a classical oeuvre
The Oxford Book of Spy
Stories the world of the spy: this
one
C.S. Lewis: The
Problem of Pain (1940) heaven
and hell exist
Peter Yates a poet of the forties
E.B. Ford: Butterflies
(1945)
the
death sciences
The
“Oh what a brute you are!” said Mutti under her breath. “Oh, you brute!”
She held one of the 500 pieces in her hand, trying it this way and that. The puzzle (we did not call them “jigsaws”) was three-quarters finished, but there were big gaps in the sky and also in a shady tangle beside a wall.
“Got you.” The piece fitted neatly into place in an unobvious spot. “At last! What a fearful brute.”
We sat in bed with the tray across our
knees. The handles were strung with dull green beads that reminded me of peas.
In
When I was still younger, we had always played patience. The puzzles began because of an exchange scheme up at Holy Trinity. Often we’d find a piece or two missing. Mutti slipped a note into the box (torn from a used envelope), and marked the place with an X on the lid.
Forty years later, I am piecing together
the
On that journey I experienced the castle as part of nature, a thing of sun and shadows, its “architecture” inextricably mingled with the trees, its white turrets chiming with the snow-capped mountains. I never felt a compulsion to judge it. Like the arenas of other games, for example the golf-course and the cricket-pitch, the jigsaw is nature made comprehensible; it is structured. Here the structure is a levelling one. We have to focus on every inch of the picture, eventually, the straggly little tree by the rock just as much as the apex of the highest turret, ringed by battlements.
Work began on the castle in 1869. Ludwig II
announced that he would rebuild the ruins that occupied this spot “in the
genuine style of the old German Knightly fortresses ... the spot is one of the
most beautiful that one could ever find.” The latter consideration, no doubt,
suggests an un-Medieval attitude from the start. In the end the old ruins,
known as Vorderhohenschwangau, were blasted away with dynamite. The new
construction was designed by Christian Jank and Eduard Riedel, and made full
use of modern technology.
Neuschwanstein, whatever Gothic – or rather, Romanesque (the style was
changed at the design stage) - motifs it appropriates, is plainly the “old
German Knightly” viewed through imaginative spectacles; the vision of a man
besotted with Tannhäuser. Though this was actually the cheapest of Ludwig’s
three new palaces, no expense was spared. The internal grotto, the singer’s
hall, the bedroom on which (it is said) fourteen wood-carvers spent four and a
half years, above all the throne-room, were conceived with a Wagnerian contempt
for practicality. Ludwig funded his three palaces privately and on foreign
credit, but in 1885 the banks threatened to seize his property. In 1886 the
Bavarian government declared Ludwig insane. He was deposed, interned in the
That should have been the end of this folly, but for an unexpected source of revenue. A matter of weeks after Ludwig’s death, Neuschwanstein (as it now came to be known – Ludwig has called it the “Neue Burg Hohenschwangau”) was thrown open to tourists. Strangers had been forbidden in Ludwig’s lifetime – this palace in particular had been intended as a “holy and inaccessible” retreat. The construction was completed in 1892.
The castle did not, of course, have a
military function. Ludwig had been defeated by the Kaiser in 1866, and foreign
policy lay in
Let’s hear some of the visitors:
I
was in
I
visited the Neuschwanstein castle in April of 1988, when I was 16 years
old. The experience has stayed with me for a lifetime. I have
collected images of the castle over the past 12+ years, to the extent that I
have had a castle printed on my wedding invitations (I am getting married to a
"castle convert" in May 2001), and our cake topper is a crystal
replica of the Neuschwanstein. Many think I am crazy, but it is the
"fairytale" castle to go with our fairy tale wedding. Ah, to be
a princess for just one day... If you are in
In
1986 my husband and I visited this wonder. It was a lovely fall day and
the castle was enchanting. We had wonderful tour guide through the
services of the
This
is one of several castles I visited when I was station as a Military Policeman
serving between 74' to 77'in the good ole' U.S. Army. I was off duty and had a
"leave of absence" saved up so I bought a train ticket and went to
Garmisch stayed at one of the popular "military favorite" hotels and
went with a tour guide in his Mercedes with several of my friends.
Unfortunately I lost my wallet at one of the stops in Oberamergau at the
Kloster Ettal and hitch-hiked to the "Linderhof and the guy that gave me
the ride offered to pay for tour of the castle, so I went then when I finished
the tour I hitch-hiked to Fussen and tried to sell my watch to go thru
Neuschwanstein and the guy refused to take it but he gave me the money to go
thru it and I was totally blown away by the foresight of this "Mad
King". If that guy was crazy then there's no hope for the world of
imagination, creativity, and genius. I wish I could have met this guy, he had
something wonderful going on in his head but the idiots of time were so
backward they couldn't see the forest for the trees! It has been brought to my
attention that this castle alone brings millions of visitors each year to it
and they spend well over a billion dollars a year while they're visiting. Now
who is mad? I am because such a genius would be snuffed out simply because he
spent 800 million in investment dollars to bring in almost 100 billion over the
last 50 years. That is a guesstimate of course but there really is no telling
how far reaching the fore site of this Mad King's genius has spread. We do know
he was the first king to have hot and cold water plumbing, and a room that was
actually a cave with colored stalagmites and stalactites. Even Walt Disney even
recognized his genius when he designed his fairy tale castle after
Neuschwanstein. If you get to go to this castle I think you'll love it. Don't
forget to hike around and cross the
If all of this begins to evoke Michael Jackson and Neverland, it’s not altogether inappropriate.
The jigsaw puzzle craze, as an amusement
for adults, began in the
Here is a keen puzzler (from
Just wanted to pitch in my two cents regarding the large puzzles: the
12,000-piece Ravensburger "The Creation of Adam" puzzle has sat
gathering dust on my bedroom floor, awaiting completion for more than two
years. I finished the left and right panels, but
the massive area of light-blue/white in the center is extremely difficult,
probably the most monotonous stretch I've ever attempted. I'm planning to
finish that part this fall, what with all these new puzzles coming out.
Personally, I've completed some monsters: the 9,000-piece Tower of
Mutti
would not have countenanced this excess. She probably didn’t countenance jigsaw
puzzles really – she never approved when I urged her to attempt a really large
one. It was with great difficulty that her sons eventually persuaded her to have
a television – she did not like admitting that she watched anything, it was all
“terribly stupid”.
(2003)
I read Rimbaud’s Bateau ivre, in English of course, I think for the first time. Tremendous ---- verve? ----- momentum? Something, however, says: but what’s the point? Rimbaud’s poems are reviewable in the terms of a hot new album, or even the A-List in the Daily Mirror (Friday review of movies). “his language resembling a high-voltage electrical circuit” .... a phrase from the Introduction, improbably attributed to Iris Murdoch. I suppose that Bateau ivre is really about driving a car.
(2001)
Benito Pérez Galdós: Trafalgar (1873)
This is the first of that stupendous series, the Episodios Nacionales. It eventually ran to 46 novels, covering the period 1805-1880; Galdós had intended to write 4 more novels (to complete the fifth series, which like the others was to consist of ten novels) but he finally abandoned work on it in 1912 when he became blind.
Like its successors Trafalgar is a documentary-novel; one of its main aims is to provide an accurate narrative of historical events, and the details of the battle, e.g. of ships sunk, captured, or wrecked are reliable; the novel could be used, and was used, to inform the young in history classes. Galdós' researches were thorough and to some extent original; he sought out oral testimony.
Given the date of composition, one is at first struck by a certain old-fashionedness in the book; its fictional plots and characters do not seem to belong to the era of Zola; they rather recall Scott or 18th century fiction - Galdós had in fact recently translated The Pickwick Papers and his way of forming characters by comic mannerisms or catchphrases does recall the early Dickens. In the first half of the book, the detail of the debates is presented as comic pedantry, e.g. between Don Alonso and his indefatigably pacifist wife Doña Francisca. A long section deals with the hopeless love of the 14-year-old hero for his master's daughter; again, it looks a bit old-fashioned - we miss the social detail that would be automatic in serious English novelists of this date.
All the greater the shock when the battle finally begins. It is salutary to read of Trafalgar from the perspective of the losers. Their position is hopeless and the decimation of the Santisima Trinidad is bloody and prolonged. Things do not get any easier when the battle is over and in subsequent days we pass with the wounded from ship to ship in the terrible weather, and eventually to shipwreck. As this material takes over, the characters from the early part of the book - the hero, Don Alonso, Marcial and the Malespinas disappear into a turmoiled crowd, and when they emerge are transformed from the sedentary and garrulous comic characters of earlier pages into an insanity of combat. The effect of the eventual death of Marcial, after such heroic effort, is surprisingly powerful.
Here are the hero and Marcial while the fighting is still going on:
Rendido el Bucentauro,
todo el fuego enemigo se dirigió contra nuestro navío, cuya pérdido era ya
segura. El entusiasmo de los primeros momentos se había apagado en mí, y mi
corazón se llenó de un terror que me paralizaba, ahogando todas las funciones
de mi espíritu, excepto la curiosidad. Esta era tan irresistible, que me obligó
a salir a los sitios de mayor peligro. De poco servía ya mi escaso auxilio,
pues ni aun se trasladaban los heridos a la bodega, por ser muchos, y las
piezas exigían el servicio de cuantas conservaban un poco de fuerza. Entre
éstos vi a Marcial, que se multiplicaba gritando y moviéndose conforme a su
poca agilidad, y era a la vez contramaestre, marinero, artillero, carpintero y
cuanto había que ser en tan terribles instantes. Nunca creí que desempeñara
funciones correspondientes sino como la mitad de un cuerpo humano. Un astillazo
le había herido en la cabeza, y la sangre, tiñéndole la cara, le daba horrible
aspecto. Yo le vi agitar sus labios, bebiendo aquel líquido, y luego lo escupía
con furia fuera del portalón, como si también quisiera herir a salivazos a
nuestros enemigos.
Galdós' intent to combine accurate history with the trappings of a novel produces an effect that may strike us as un-integrated. The combination is not seamless; for example, we never quite understand on what basis Don Alonso, his boy-servant and his old seafaring friend have all been taken into service on the same ship; their duties appear no more clearly defined than to lend a hand and to serve their country. On the other hand it's already clear in this first volume that the method has potential; Galdós triumphantly delivers a panorama of the whole battle and its aftermath (bolstered by narratives of other encounters, when the wounded mix with people who were on other ships), and he does so from the point of view of mere participants, not strategists or politicians. It must have been immediately clear to his readers that a new kind of national epic was in the making.
(2007)
First published in Intercapillary Space.
What I've been reading is a 1925-ish pamphlet
from the series The Augustan Books of
Poetry Edited by Edward Thompson. William Canton's early poetry, written in
the 1870s, gained attention (e.g. from Thomas Huxley) for its adoption of
up-to-date materials from Darwinism, geology and archaeology. In later years
Take them to bed, nurse; but before she goes
Daddy must toast his little woman's toes.
Strange that such feeble hands and feet as these
Have sped the lamp-race of the centuries!
That last couplet, combining his two
themes, goes into my page-long anthology of the best of William Canton. Yes, it
might have been written by any number of Victorian poets, but not all
perfections are individual. Some shorthands, such as
the word "sped" in that fragile moment before motoring, are achieved
communally. (Indeed, as much as Rimbaud's Bateau ivre,
But my favourite poem is "The Haunted Bridge", partly because I have no logical explanation for the suggestive phrase "citron shadow". The ancient bridge, now cut adrift from roads, is haunted by a little lad, a Roman truant who has gone a-fishing
And, dangling sandalled feet,
looks down
To see the
swift trout dart and gleam --
Or scarcely see them, hanging brown
With heads against the clear brown stream.
It does not exactly suggest a Roman scene, sandals or no, but that's what makes the poem interesting. A similar appropriation of the past occurs in my other favourite poem, "Woodland Windows" - these are "foliage-fretted lancets" through a line of elms, which Canton oddly calls woodland - but these pillared elms, now long gone from the English landscape, did not grow in woods but around field edges. Anyway, the poet, glimpsing first an old fisherman and then "two bright sunburnt tots at play", then meditates the past into the scene:
Within the woodland's pillared shade,
I seem from
some dim aisle to see
That shore by whose blue waters played
The little lads of Zebedee.
(Those bright-coloured stained-glass narratives of Victorian churches are obviously a birth-pang of Technicolor, already envisaged etc...)
The major poem here is "Through the Ages", which is in three parts, the first a dramatic Stone Age tragedy featuring a sabre-tooth tiger. This section is fascinatingly crude;that is, it pre-dates a consensus about how to portray prehistory in literature.
By the swamp in the forest
sings shrilly in glee
The stark forester's lass
plucking mast in a tree --
And hairy and brown as a squirrel is she!
The second section is a grand processional covering vast expanses of time:
......
For lo! the shadowy centuries
once more
With wind and fire, with rain and snow sweep by;
And where the forest stood, an empty sky
Arches with lonely blue and lonely land.
The great white stilted storks in silence stand
Far from each other, motionless as stone,
And melancholy leagues of marsh-reeds moan,
And dead tarns blacken 'neath the mournful blue.
These eras and sea-pictures are eventually populous and as we reach recorded history they even name some individuals - the last is Oliver Cromwell.
The third section is a comic schoolroom scene in which an eloquent but droning professor is gently ribbed by a lively class of girls, but then young Phemie suddenly awakens in her imagination the scene with which the poem began. The verse looks like this: -
Monstrous bird stalk stilted by as
She
perceives the slab of Trias
Scrawled with hieroglyphic claw-tracks of the mesozoic days...
Not only the professor, but the whole poem, is reoriented through this mockery. The mixture of registers is piquant - the question underlying each of the poem's sections is: in what way are our lives altered by these unearthings of the past? "Through the Ages" stands modestly at the head of a proud succession that would include Doughty's The Dawn in Britain (1906), Kipling's "Puck's Song" and others, the first part of The Anathemata, Riley's Excavations, etc.
(Other readers may not value that modesty as
I do. This was an age in which the poet's eagle eye, the colonialist's eagle
eye, the ruling-class Englishman's eagle eye, the journalist's eagle eye, were
omnipresent assumptions: all subsumed into the image of a border-guard of who
sees beyond the petty campfires of the women and of lesser men. Surely
(2009)
Émile Zola: L’Assommoir (1877)
L’Assommoir is the seventh of the Rougon-Macquart sequence and the first that is still widely read, though Thérèse Raquin (1867) precedes all of them. Sometimes being a part of a larger sequence prevents due recognition. L'Assommoir is one of the supreme European novels and it really stands alone in Zola's work, despite such jaw-dropping successors as Germinal (1885) and La Terre (1887).
In English you have no choice but to read L’Assommoir through a haze of jerky interference, even in Leonard Tancock’s translation. That’s unfortunate if only because of Zola’s huge importance in the history of the British novel. If you have ever wondered why, around 1875, the amazing fertility of its own glory days, masterpiece after masterpiece, seems to yield incomprehensibly to a trifling loss of confidence, then this is why. Zola, above all, made our authors understand themselves as incapacitated (Ibsen was possibly the second most potent author in this respect – i.e the reproof was publically felt).
Thus in April 1866, Wilkie Collins wrote this, in his Foreword to Armadale:
Estimated by the Clap-Trap
morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book. Judged by the
Christian morality which is of all time, it is only a book that is daring
enough to speak the truth.
Ten years later (January 1877), Zola’s Preface says:
L’Assommoir is without doubt
the most moral of my books... It is a work of truth, the first novel about the
common people which does not tell lies but has the authentic smell of the
people.
In these combative prefaces the two novelists used almost the same language, but once Zola had done it you’d be laughed at if you spoke that way about books like Armadale.
There is thus a Zola-shaped recess in the English novel, and in the next generation it’s followed by a Zola-shaped idea of what a serious novel is, by now so ingrained and so coloured by the individuality of good authors (Conrad, Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence..) that we sometimes mistake it for their own idea. I’m sorry to say that they were, on the whole, very ungrateful.
Tancock sometimes succeeds brilliantly, but at such a long distance in time and place from the rue de la Goutte d’Or, he knew he had an impossible mission. At its worst the prose looks clunkily bolted together out of stock expressions that don’t quite fit, e.g.
she pitied her brother, that
ninny whose wife deceived him up hill and down dale, and it was understood that
the only reason why she still set foot in such a madhouse was for her poor old
mother’s sake, who was obliged to live in the midst of all these abominations.
At least Zola’s text was speaking the same
language as its characters – French, I mean. But then Zola’s project had
intrinsic impossibilities of its own. He appropriated the speech of the
streets, an essentially oral form, and tried to use it to make paragraphs in a
novel, the wrong tool for the wrong job.
“Up hill and down dale” is a phrase that you’ll never hear in real life except in some connection with transport, this being the only context where its powerful old image flames into life. There is a decorum in common speech that resists transferred usage, unless it is instantly seen to be natural (in which case it just as instantly ceases to be transferred usage, and becomes a part of the common inheritance in its own right). Extension of usage, the pressure of words placed in new contexts, is a literate practice intrinsically alien to the language of the Goutte d’Or and to any other common neighbourhood, where speech is a highly conservative medium and tiny deviations mark the outsider, the person who can never be “one of us”.
This ill-chosen phrase is presumably Tancock’s fault, but he’s not helped by having to slip these oral ready-mades into a syntactic framework that consists of essentially literary language like “deceived”, “it was understood”, “who was obliged to live”, expressions that are only used in educated settings. That has to be Zola’s responsibility, the basic contradiction in his method, which is something every novel needs to have. Fortunately for the world he had the necessary drive and insensitivity to carry it through.
When it operates as a kind of continuous unattributable commentary the method does have a slippery potential. As the paragraph continues, we drift away from Mme Lorilleux’s thinking into wider seas:
The whole district fell upon
Gervaise. She must have been the one to lead the hatter astray. You could see
it in her eyes. Yes, in spite of the ugly stories, that artful dodger Lantier
got away with it, because he went on with his gentlemanly airs in front of them
all, strolling along the pavements reading the paper, full of gallant
attentions to the ladies, always giving them sweets or flowers. After all, he
was only behaving like a cock among hens, a man’s a man, and you can’t expect
him to resist women who throw themselves at him, can you? But there was no
excuse for her; she was a disgrace to the rue de la Goutte d’Or.
The commentary doesn’t speak with a single voice, since for the space of a brief shimmy it seems to admit the “artful dodger” Lantier’s culpability. We’ve seen what happened between Gervaise and Lantier, or we think we have, so this commentary about Gervaise we assume to be a cloud of commonplace-sexist prejudice and something that Zola doesn’t intend us to accept. At the same time it has its influence on us, because its pattern is at least comprehensible. We have not after all seen Gervaise’s eyes. She didn’t mean to trap Lantier, but then you can argue that Lantier, pace Virginie’s conspiratorial fantasies when he turns up, is a sponger and a drifter rather than a Macchiavelli. He wasn’t really responsible for Coupeau fouling the marriage bed with lakes of vomit. And didn’t Gervaise tacitly accept what was bound to happen from the moment Lantier moved in? Goujet thought so. The neighbourhood view, unlike the one that we take as bourgeois readers of a bourgeois form, at least acknowledges Gervaise’s rare moment of triumph, even if the neighbourhood condemns it.
You need a pattern, even if it’s far from accurate, and in the next paragraph we see Gervaise working out her own changed circumstances on the basis of more or less accepting the neighbourhood myth. It’s like a communal thought-process.
Amid the general indignation
Gervaise lived on, calm, indolent, half asleep. At first she had felt very
guilty, very dirty and disgusted with herself. When she left Lantier’s room she
washed her hands and then wetted a cloth and wiped her shoulders hard enough to
take the skin off, as though to wash away her shame. If on such occasions
Coupeau tried on any funny tricks with her she would fly into a temper and run
off shivering to dress in the shop. Similarly she would not let Lantier touch
her if her husband had embraced her. She would have liked to change skins when
she changed men. But gradually she got used to it. It’s too tiring to have a bath
every time! Her laziness melted away her scruples, and
her longing to be happy made her get as much pleasure as she could out of her
troubles. She was as indulgent towards herself as towards others, and was only
anxious to arrange things so that nobody was too put out. After all, you see,
so long as her husband and her lover were happy, and the home went on in its
regular routine and everything in it was fun and games the livelong day, and
everybody was nice and comfortable and pleased with life, there was nothing to
complain about, was there? And besides, when all was
said and done, what she was doing couldn’t be all that terrible, since it was
all working out so well to everybody’s satisfaction, and you are generally
punished if you do wrong. So her lack of shame had turned into a habit. It was
now all as regular as mealtimes; whenever Coupeau came home drunk she popped
over to Lantier’s bed, and that happened on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays at
least. She shared out her nights, and had even taken to leaving her husband in
the middle of his sleep when he snored too loud, so as to finish off her own
sleep quietly on the lodger’s pillow. It wasn’t that she felt more attached to
the hatter. No, it was simply that he seemed cleaner and she could sleep better
in his room – she felt she was having a bath. In fact she was rather like a
dainty cat who loves curling up on nice white linen.
The paragraph begins firmly and makes its way to the phrase about changing skins as one changes men. In the same way the end of the paragraph suddenly crystallizes into the picture of the dainty cat. Both of these are things that we see Gervaise thinking, and they act like searchlights into her mind with their common emphasis on cleanliness and bathing (by the end of the paragraph, this has ended up meaning being in Lantier’s bed).
But between these illuminations the central part of the paragraph is cloudy with parallel syntax and dithering qualifications like “after all, you see... and besides, when all was said and done...”. Coincidentally or not, “fun and games all the livelong day” is another judder of the Tancock/Zola phrase-bolting machine. One of the difficulties Zola makes for himself is that he hasn’t worked out a way of representing the silences of consciousness. His Gervaise is compelled by the methodology of the novel into a discursive and verbal awareness of her situation that is exactly how she wouldn’t think or choose to think, and this is compounded by her being made to employ the street-language designed for a different social context, which is bound to make her discursiveness seem silly. She is not a novelist or a debater, and Zola has to make her into one, even when she’s sick and starving in the twelfth chapter. Nevertheless his method does lead to a dreadful effect in the final pages, when Gervaise is wandering in her mind and the prose gradually withdraws from her consciousness, eventually objectifying her as a huddled body under the stairs in Bru’s kennel.
Where the method really catches fire it becomes a brilliant expression of excited awareness – this is when Zola is going with the strength of the street-talk and not trying to make it do things it was never intended to do. This is Gervaise giving way to the thrill of the pawnshop:
Gervaise would have gladly
sold up the whole lot; she was seized with a frenzy
for popping everything, and would have shaved her own head if they would have
advanced something on her hair. It was all too easy; you couldn’t help going
there for some money when you were longing for a four-pound loaf. The whole
shoot went that way – linen, clothes, even tools and furniture. In the early
days she took advantage of good weeks and got things out of pawn, only to pop
them again the following week. But later she couldn’t be bothered about her
belongings and just let them go and sold the pawn tickets. Only one thing broke
her heart,....
The prose does wonderfully with this dire over-heating, and it is still doing it near the end, e.g. in Gervaise’s fascinated participation in Coupeau’s death:
Seeing the doctors laying
their hands on her husband’s body, Gervaise wanted to touch him too. She went
up timidly, put her hand on his shoulder, and kept it there a minute. Good God,
whatever was going on inside there? The dance seemed to be going on right down
deep in his flesh, the very bones must be jerking
about. From some remote source tremors and waves were flowing along under the
skin like a river. When she pressed a little harder she could sense, as it
were, cries of pain coming from the very marrow of his bones. All you could see
with the naked eye was wavelets hollowing out tiny dimples, as on a whirlpool,
but beneath there must be frightful commotion. What a sinister job was going on
down there, like a mole boring away! Old Colombe’s poison was wielding the
pickaxe on that job. The whole body was soaked in it, so what the hell – the
job had to be finished, crumbling Coupeau away in a general, non-stop shaking
of his whole carcase.
At such moments Gervaise ceases to be a case, the barriers come down, commentary gets left behind; it’s me and you, hellbent.
The novel begins in 1850 and ends some twenty years later. Zola has seamed so far into previously unworked chambers that we can easily overlook his cop-outs, but there are one or two. Generally his over-arching scheme of the Rougon-Macquart families does no good to the novels. Here, it leads Zola into beginning his book by taking the familiar path of introducing an outsider, Gervaise from Plassans, into a new neighbourhood. This has the initial advantage that he can describe that neighbourhood through an outsider’s fresh eyes, but it also means that he largely fails to confront working-class experience as seen from within the structure of a family. Zola wishes to reserve Claude and Étienne for other books, with the odd effect that Gervaise appears to have no consciousness of her sons after they have been relocated. At the time of her lonely death, she has two sons (or, as he later decided, three sons) in the prime of manhood. These sons were born to her and Lantier before the novel begins. Its difficult to decide whether Gervaise’s lack of emphasis on her own motherhood is a novelist’s insight into the reality of dispersed families or whether it’s just a convenience that frees her up to play out her tragic decline on the stage that Zola has assigned to her. It’s a matter of observation that families near the foot of the social ladder are often divided by longstanding separations that no-one feels it’s possible to overcome – it only makes more trouble – so you learn with surprise of children or brothers who live in the next street but are totally out of contact. Many people lead such extremely circumscribed lives, maintaining them with such difficulty or lassitude, unable to accept even the most minimal derangement that any leg-up necessarily entails, that contact with relations soon founders. But these observations are misplaced; such family separations occur because of distress and Zola nowhere concerns himself with Gervaise’s feelings about her sons, distressed or otherwise; in the early pages they are quietly children, and then they disappear, but this ought to mean more in the book than it does. Gervaise also has a sister in Paris, whom she never contacts.
Nana is a different matter, and yet not altogether. Conflicts between Nana and her parents are dealt with at length, but in these striking pages there remains a sort of vacuum, at least to my eyes. Coupeau’s rages and his sentimentality are comprehensible expressions of drunken feeling, but there is a blankness where we look in vain for Gervaise, elsewhere so implausibly verbal, to show some awareness of herself as a mother and Nana as her daughter. It’s understandable that Nana should be experienced by Gervaise primarily as a trouble, but what’s odd is that she seems to be only the same kind of trouble that you might incur by taking in someone else’s teenage child. For whatever reason, the bond on which all animal society is founded seems to have gone missing from Zola’s novel. What I end up thinking is that the novel is falsifying its account by omitting daily hours in which Gervaise and Nana must have interacted in undramatic ways that would in fact have seriously complicated the catastrophic image that Zola is trying to project.
But no matter. All reservations aside, L’Assommoir directly confronts the most concealed of society’s existences with an amplitude that even now few other novels have ever managed. For hundreds of pages, unbroken by the entrance of even a single educated person, it operates outside bourgeois limits in the nearest yet most intractable of territories. Now that we are not exactly bourgeois ourselves, and a clearer understanding of the world around us at last seems possible, it ought to be one of the dog-eared books we do more than read.
*
Arto Melleri (Finnish poet, b. 1956) “attacks Zola as a new-style
writer of a media age, and invokes the poets of the past as alternative sources
of insight and guides to truth.” (Contemporary Finnish Poetry, ed.
Herbert Lomas)
La Débâcle (1892). Here the
omniscient narrator shades into being a historian, and is then not omniscient,
because he hasn't invented what he tells us about. However, we rarely dissent
from him; he does not choose to put the principal political or military
decision-makers on stage and does not claim an understanding of the motives of
Macmahon or Thiers, only reports what was said about them. The battle of
A little fall of plaster
made him look up. It was a bullet that had chipped a bit off his house, one
side of which he could see over the party wall. This annoyed him very much, and
he fumed:
'Are those bastards going to demolish it for
me?'
Then he was startled by
another little thud behind him. He looked round and saw a soldier, who had been
shot through the heart, falling on his back. The legs made a few convulsive
movements, the face stayed young and calm, suddenly still. This was the first
man killed, and Weiss was particularly upset by the crash of his rifle as it
fell on the cobbles of the yard.
The experience of the real beginning of the battle of
The curious matter-of-factness with which, for each observer, the
sundry events of existence, however uncomfortable or foreboding, suddenly
transform into the full-on horror of a battle - this is what Zola is after. The
misery and exhaustion of the campaign up to that point has been emphasized to
the full, but only to point up that this, after all, is as nothing compared to
the brutal frenzy of killing that is to follow. Brief, paradoxical lapses still
interrupt the widening conflict. It is still strangely local. Delaherche, at
serious risk of being killed on the way from Bazeilles, suddenly "made up
his mind and ran all the way to Balan, whence he regained
These chapters ought to make interesting reading for a new soldier.
It's a paradox of La Débâcle that
while it seems to provide all the material anyone would require for an utter
repudiation of war in any shape, it also allowed its nation of readers a strong
surge of indignant patriotism and the message that France ought to be better
armed and better led, more ready for modern conflict.
(2005, 2009)
String Quartet in A minor, op. 51 no. 2
(1873)
.. But the date of composition is unclear, it may have begun as early as 1865.
I am sure this has been pointed out elsewhere, but a bar or two near the end of the finale briefly recalls the opening theme of the first movement, an idea that Brahms was to use more famously (and much more obviously) in the third symphony (op. 90, 1883).
Piano Concerto no. 2 in B flat, op. 83
(1881)
This is in one sense the most innovative of all Brahms’ concert works. (Whether Schoenberg had it in mind when he spoke of "Brahms the innovator" is a different matter.) Other composers were throwing overboard the traditional structures of symphony and concerto. Brahms tried to do something different, to make a slight change to the structure, but the consequences were drastic.
A hundred years before, when the classical forms were solidifying, the concerto (unlike the symphony or the quartet), ended up as a three-movement form. The reason, I would assume, is that the dance-movement (especially the scherzo) is intrinsically a showcase for ensemble playing; for bristling, angular rhythms and dramatic, but blocky, contrasts in tone-colour. A dance-movement without the dance itself does not develop and shifts its dynamism into our feet; as an art-piece it is essentially static, like a sculpture that you contemplate by holding in your mind and observing from all angles. This conception did not seem to offer opportunities for a soloist.
But Brahms had taken the concerto in a new and more complex direction, producing a much-changed relationship between soloist and orchestra, and the possibility of re-introducing the scherzo must have become apparent. It ended up in second position, and is said to have been originally planned for the violin concerto although hearing both works in their final forms this beggars belief.
Introducing the scherzo involved, for Brahms, a subtle re-weighting of all the other movements, including the finale, which surrenders all its usual fireworks to the scherzo and ends up being a wonderfully urbane and light-footed piece of supper-music. The scherzo itself is a passionate movement (some have used the term “romanze”), and thus the slow third movement develops in the direction of spaciousness, tranquility, and even idling; the piano finds itself among equals (notably a solo cello), like someone who has come home to recuperate in quiet and sympathetic society. The first movement pitches its intrinsic dramatic potential towards mystery and tension-building; it seems to be holding something back; what that is, the scherzo will show us. The whole work, therefore, can be seen as structured around the introduction of that extra movement.
(2004)
Rev. J.
Chapter I begins with verse by Anna Letitia Barbauld and ends with Spenser. In between it's as the title says: GIVES THE READER A VIEW OF ASPENDALE AT SUNSET; AND A GLIMPSE OF THORPE ASPEN AFTER NIGHTFALL. Wray is a skilful writer; but what catches my eye is how the popular English novel is such a strong form at this moment (I presume, some time in the 1880s) that it can convincingly support Wray's evangelical Christianity, which might seem fundamentally at odds with it - which does indeed lead certainly away from naturalism towards soul-adventure.
Of the titular hero Wray says: "I will at once avow that the quaint and intelligent old carpenter is a special favourite of mine, and ... I intend that he shall stand in the same relationship to my readers ..." At first this does not seem probable: Simon's incessant homilies, coupled with an unfairly-rigged record of guessing the future, provoke rebellion. But in the event we do grow fond of him. By the usual measures of drama he does not play a very active role in plots that concern younger actors; in Wray's evangelical conception, however, the real action takes place much more on the spiritual plane than on the visible one in which the younger folk are captured by Spanish bandits, cast adrift in an open boat on the Atlantic, etc. Interspersed with these high adventures and loves are low-life comedy with Peter Prout the miller, Tim Crouch the cobbler, and others; all very skilfully intermixed. Three marriages are triumphantly achieved, and the heroic Ethel Spofforth belatedly goes to her rest.
This night-scene will stand for the rest - the disgraced Alfred has returned incognito to his beloved village, and meets the drunk cobbler.
At one side of the road,
in a recess of hedge and bank, there was a pump whose clear cold waters had
been available for Thorpe Aspen from time immemorial. Alfred was inclined for a
drink out of the well-remembered spout, and Tim seemed to have some views in
the same direction. The cobbler laid hold of the pump handle and set to work
with vigour to fill the trough with water. Then down he went on his knees, and
doffing his battered hat he plunged his head into it, once, twice, thrice, and rose
cool and sobered to his feet. He rubbed himself fairly dry with a big coloured
pocket handkerchief from his pocket, put on his hat again, and turning to his
companion said—
"There! That's mah prescription for
cheeatin' the ninepenny. Noo, Mr. Alfred, give us a grip o' your hand. Ah knoa
yo', bud your seeacrit's as seeafe wi' me as if it
were locked up i' the Bank o'
(On the following page, Alfred's brother Robert risks his life to rescue the lovely Ruth Hartgold from the burning house - a fire whose progress was interrupted ffor other chapters.)
Also, you will want to hear Simon Holmes in homiletic flight; to the pious, fading Ethel:
We knoa, as you say, an' you an' me'll just go on trustin' an' prayin'
and waitin' on Him 'at says, 'Call on me in the day of trouble, an' I will
deliver thee.' He either means it or He doesn't. If He doesn't, why there's nowt
for it but just to shut up t' Bible an' drift doon i'
the dark. But if He does, then He means it oot an' oot, an' t' biggest faith 'll fetch the biggest blessing from the throne of God.
O Miss Ethel, Miss Ethel! Neither your prayers now mine can stop midway on the
rooad te Heaven. They're winged wi'
faith that's stranger than an eagle's wing, an' accordin' to oor faith it shall
be done.
To the despondent widow Atheling:
Ivery thing's goin' on
all right and reg'lar, an' sum o' theease days, it'll be a case o' 'lang
leeaked for, come at last.' ... It seeams te me that this mornin' afoore t' posst com' in you were all
drinkin' the watters o' Marah, bitter an' brackish beyond degree. Noo the good
Lord's tossed a wonderful healin' tree intiv it, an' you've gotten a sweeter
teeaste i' your mouths then you've had for monny and monny a dark an' cloody
day. Surely you may ha' fayth te beleeave that God 'll
go on te be gracious, an' that by-an'-by you'll sit amang the palm trees an'
the wells of Elim, here in your oan ingle-nook wi' Mr. Robert an' Mr. Alfred at
your side. The Wonder-worker that did this for yo' can do t' other.
It was interesting to me that the still-so-prevalent expression, a case of (as in "It's a case of wait-and-see") goes back as far as this. See how differently adjusted Holmes' dialect and expressions are to his different audiences.
Of Wray's own language, two things stood out:
"O Mr.
Ravensworth!" she said, in soft and winsome tones, "you are sad. Dear
friend! tell me what it is?"
As she spoke the dark
eyes of this fair daughter of the South were filled with tears, and there was
that in her tones which revealed a secret which was not as yet understood by herself, nor recognized by her own young and gentle heart.
-----
Just at that moment
Ephraim Hartgold entered the little parlour , Ruth's
own peculiar snuggery. Taking Inez by the hand and seating himself by her on
the sofa, he drew her to him. There was a winsome gentleness in his tones and
words as he said– "Where is thy father, Inez?–
Where is Captain Lanyon?"
-----
There was that in the
tone of Harold's voice that displayed how deep were his
feelings on this subject.
-----
It was now Señor
Bonanza's turn. Alfred thought he had never seen any nobler or more winsome
features in living man than those that met his gaze when that gentleman rose
from his place, pushed back from his brow his whitening hair, took Alfred's two
hands in his, and said–
-----
"Speak freely,
please," he said looking down upon her with those wondrously winsome eyes,
and in a tone that might well encourage her, and did.
Winsome=cheerful, pleasant, attractive (according to my dictionary). This now-obsolete word I had mostly associated with descriptions of females; Wray uses it of old men, the engaging Ephraim and his friend Señor Bonanza, in celebration of kindly paternalism to young women (not actually their own daughters), a type of encounter that may now be almost extinct.
There was that in (the young person's face, tone, etc) - this expression hallows the solemn and dramatic moment of revealed feeling by placing it beyond the narrowness of words. The idea is that these feelings, formerly hidden in the youth as only potential, are now brought to light; now the owner is seen to have become - permanently - the person they will be from now on. In Wray the feelings are owed to God and love, simply; in later Imperialist novels they may also be connected with patriotism, public school, the finest clay, etc.
When you see such expressions here as "What in the name of all that's wonderful" and "he said fervently", you realize that the popular novel of the next fifty years has an input not from the Church of England but from the evangelical tradition.
[The Internet
records little as yet about J. Jackson Wray. He was, I believe, Pastor of the
Whitefield Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Road. He died in 1892. I imagine him
to have been a popular evangelical preacher as well as a prolific author -
homespun homilies and history of the dissenting tradition as well as novels like
this. According to the numerous press notices advertising his other works,
these novels were seen as particularly suitable for boys and girls, but not
exclusively: "A capital book for all classes, old and young, lovers and
married. A good story, told with much feeling. No one will read it without
having their faith in God strengthened", says one of the encomia.]
(2008)
Anton Chekhov: The Shooting
Party (1885)
[The Shooting Party is an early work, not
re-published in Chekhov's lifetime. This, his only full-length novel, is no
masterpiece, but if it's to be read at all it's essential to read it without
knowing the ending, which I'm about to reveal. So make up your mind if you want
to read on.]
*
"I felt suffocated," says the editor, supposedly Antosha Chekhonte himself, on the final page. We do, too.
The Shooting Party is a novel in a frame. The inner novel is narrated by, and purportedly written by, Sergey Petrovich Zinovyev, an investigating magistrate. The murders he describes (they come late in the book) are in fact committed by him; his novel itself does not confess this, though, as Zinoviev remarks, "only a fool" would fail to observe the clues scattered through the later pages - especially as the editor underlines them.
When the identity of the murderer is finally established, a transformation occurs in our view of the narrative. We realize how much trust we put in a first-person narrator. Throughout the reading we have been continuously unsettled by the brutalities of the narrator (not the murders, but his other behaviour), and we have continuously sought ways to forgive them in order to carry on trusting him. Every time he admits something against himself, we add a minus to his moral ledger but we also chalk up a plus in his honesty ledger. We have accepted, as by convention, that he sees more sensitively into the motives and feelings of those around him than the other, relatively insensitive, characters. Now that his own character is finally seen to be psychopathic, we wonder how much else is unreliable about his narrative; for example, all those times when he reports other characters calling him "the best of men", or reports himself led astray by the moral turpitude of others, or reports women falling for his good looks and refined manners. There's actually no answer to these questions. The Chekhovian insight in the narrative implies a humane compassion that apparently doesn't square with Zinovyev's moral indifference to the fate of those his actions have ruined. The result is a suffocation that bears more than a slight resemblance to the effect of cheap genre fiction in general, but is in fact brought about by other means.
In hindsight, much of Zinovyev's insight appears as "poetic", a literary sentimentality. Try this:
Never before had Zorka borne me so
zealously as on that morning after the burning of the banknotes. She, too,
wanted to go home. The lake gently rolled its foamy waves: reflecting the
rising sun, it was preparing for its daytime slumber. The woods and willows
along the banks were motionless, as if at morning prayer.
It is difficult to describe my state of mind at the time. Without going into
too much detail, I shall merely say that I was delighted beyond words – and at
the same time I was almost consumed with shame when, as I turned out of the
Count's estate, I saw by the lakeside old Mikhey's saintly face, emaciated by
honest toil and illness. Mikhey resembles a biblical fisherman. His hair is as
white as snow, he has a large beard and he gazes contemplatively at the sky.
When he stands motionless on the bank, following the racing clouds with his
eyes, you might fancy he sees angels in the sky . . . I'm very fond of such
faces!
When I saw him, I reined in Zorka and gave him my hand, as if wishing to cleanse myself through contact with his honest, calloused hand. He looked up at me with his small, sagacious eyes and smiled.
(transl. Ronald Wilks, 2004)
In such passages we discern another writer behind Zinovyev's clichés. This other writer is less idealistic and less flippant. It's that same distance from the actual words that Chekhov sought in his plays.
(2007)
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886)
Stevenson was concerned that Zola's
pronouncement "I insist upon the fall of the imagination" reduced
fiction to a transcript of life. He thought the writer should "half-close
his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality". Stevenson was
wrong, but Zola overstated the case: his great works are triumphs of the
imagination. Anyway, Stevenson could only be the writer he is. His best book is
possibly In the South Seas, which is
the most open-eyed. But half-closure did lead him to such incomparable things -
in their way - as
Jekyll insists on distinguishing his own identity from Hyde's, but under stress before Lanyon, this breaks down to some extent - Jekyll's medical "we" comes through Hyde's voice. Hyde's taunting speech to Lanyon expresses Jekyll's scientific triumph over Lanyon. Perhaps what happens in the parable, i.e. the increasing ineffectiveness of the chemical switch, amounts to Jekyll's recognition that it is at last too much of a strain to keep up the pretence of Jekyll and Hyde being two distinct persons.
It is a world in which all the normal
characters are slightly imperfect: sly (Jekyll), theatrical (Lanyon), dusty
(Utterson), an idle socialite (
Utterson likes to think of Jekyll, Lanyon and himself as three old friends, but Lanyon has evidently long disliked Jekyll.
The battering down of the door compares to
the body jumping in the road under Hyde's blows. Though
The book's weather, fog, wine and leaping
cockroaches suggest a
Hyde is of small stature. Jekyll has some rationalizing ideas about that, but we can look deeper into it:
Accounts of Hyde are beautifully varied
depending on the implied consciousness of the observer. Lanyon's medical
narrative is amusingly distinct -
Jekyll's analysis is not quite to be trusted. It is he who defines Hyde as all evil, other people as a mixture of good and evil - comfortably assuming that in his case the proportions are about 90 to 10. But the nature of his good, except as a way of repressing his evil, is not given concrete form. Perhaps one way of reading the parable is as disputing, not only his assessment of the proportions, but the adequacy of these terms good and evil.
Kipling's bogey-tale
"The Mark of the Beast" (1890) owes something to Jekyll and Hyde. Fleete's metamorphosis into a wolf-man, obviously,
but it was particularly that beating down of the door by the righteous that
stayed with Kipling: the horror that most excited him was the sober necessity,
by the righteous, of tortures not to be printed (involving red-hot shotgun
barrels), and the different give of leprous skin under a boot.
(2010)
Augustus K. Gardner, MD: The Conjugal
Relationships
as
regards
Personal
Health and Hereditary Well-Being
Practically
Treated
Such important information
is given in this book in reference to the more healthful bringing up of our
daughters, morally and physically, and the relation of the sexes, that no
parent will fail of reading every line in the book with the most absorbing
interest. It is a boon to womankind.
The title is, I feel, rather misleading. It
is not a medical book but a polemical one which, like some later works of
popular science, is chiefly concerned with stating conclusions whose bases
cannot be examined.
And these are his conclusions.
- that the pampered modern woman is in physical decline
- that excessive sex is debilitating
- that continence is not physically harmful
- that all other methods of avoiding procreation (except the safe period) are both sinful and unhealthy; for example conjugal onanism, the use of tegumentary contraception, etc.
- that it is shameful and dangerous for the old to have sexual relations
- that it is sinful and dangerous to indulge in “personal pollution”
- that abortion is murder of one’s own flesh and blood
- that the polka and all other fashionable habits of the modern young woman are exceedingly dangerous
- that tampering with natural procreation produces hereditary weaknesses in children.
In short, they fully support recent
statements of Presbyterian and other clergymen, whom
These statements are no crude utterances of rhapsodists, thoughtless demagogues, or ambitious, charlatan sensationists. They are the carefully expressed opinions of thoughtful and conscientious men, aiming to repress wrong-doing, to promote virtue, to guard against “the sins which do so easily beset us”.
[To anyone who studies late
nineteenth-century patriarchalism, the word “guard” is soon seen to carry an
immense mythical weight. It evokes men on the outposts of the Roman Empire,
perhaps Regulus on
Verbiage has been sometimes
expressly selected instead of distinct statements, and a roundabout sentence
has often been used as the substitute for an expression which might offend
sensitive minds. Especial care, it will be observed, has been used not to admit
anything which might administer to the depraved appetites of the
prurient-minded, and, above all, not to make any statement of facts, with such
details, as might be perverted from their intended purpose to serve unworthy or
improper ends.
(This is in itself quite roundabout, but you get the point.) Accordingly, such passages as this one, near the end of the chapter on “Personal Pollution”, are open for anyone to interpret.
The sensuous intemperance is
sufficiently to be reprobated when its aliment is drawn from vigour of physical
energy, the heightened imagination, the mind pampered by the ordinary
stimulation of the aesthetic as delineated in marble, spread out on the glowing
canvas, where the great artist Guido portrays Io, with rapturous eye upturned,
as if to meet halfway the king of the gods; or by the perusal of the lubricious
writings of the day, whose foul impurity is too often gilded by genius – or by
the public exposure of the cheap charms of the modern meretricious stage. But
when even these coarse excitants for depraved minds – dead to all ordinary
sensations – when these fail and recourse is had to super-stimulation of a more
gross, mediate and materialistic character, when nature is set aside and
imaginative bestialities are foully substituted – when woman degrades the
nuptial couch by copying the foulness of the bagnio – then farewell to female
purity, to virtue, to any thing worthy!
In fact the woman when she
has her periods takes the greatest care to conceal it from all eyes. She is
affected instinctively, we will not say willingly, in her dignity. She
considers her condition as a blot or an infirmity; and although her modesty –
the most incendiary of the female virtues – has been spared by the omnipotence
of her husband, she blushes to herself at the tribute she is compelled to pay
to nature. To constrain her in this condition, to submit to conjugal caresses,
is evidently to do violence to what is most respectable in her nature; it is to
cast her down from her pedestal; it is to rob her of the prestige which the
graces of her sex assure to her. Love has need of poetry, and accommodates
itself illy to the gross realities of the animal life. Do not seek to
contradict such legitimate repugnance. The first step in this path infallibly
leads to ruptures the most to be regretted.
But it is not only at the
menstrual epoch that the wife should conceal from the husband the details of
the lower necessities to which she, as well as he, is subject; we would desire
that she should endeavour never entirely to lay aside her natural charms of
modesty and delicacy even in the intimacy of the bedchamber. She will gain more
than she can think in constancy and love – the most cruel
enemies of which come from the destruction of the illusions and from satiety.
More than one married woman
will find in these lines, if she discovers all their meaning, an explanation of
the inexplicable weariness of her husband...
To illustrate
We have at our disposition
numerous facts which rigorously prove the disastrous influence of abnormal
coitus to the woman, but we think it useless to publish them. All practitioners
have more or less observed them, and it will only be necessary for them to call
upon their memories to supply what our silence leaves.
We may, we trust, be
pardoned for remarking, upon the artifices imagined to prevent fecundation,
that there is in them an immense danger, of incalculable limits. We do not fear
to be contradicted or taxed with exaggeration in elevating them into the
proportions of a true calamity.
Both “delicacy” and “forthrightness” may thus excuse the absence of evidence. (He does not use the word “contraception”, and perhaps it wasn’t yet current – sometimes the existence of a term implies social acceptance).
The function of the book is most clearly brought out in the chapter about abortion, which presents a sequence of stories of spiralling horror.
A lady who one November came
to me “to get rid of a baby because her husband was going to Europe in the
spring, and she wanted to go with him and couldn’t be bothered by a young one”,
failing to enlist me in this nefarious scheme, finally found a – I was going to
say, physician – a somebody... I was called to her some weeks afterwards, and
she was almost exhausted with cellulitis and pyæmia. Her husband
sailed for
A lady determined not to
have any more children, went to a professed abortionist, and he attempted to effect the desired end by violence. With a pointed
instrument the attempt was again and again made, but without the looked-for
result. So vigorously was the effort made, that, astonished at no result being
obtained, the individual stated that there must be some mistake, that the lady
could not be pregnant... in due process of time the woman was delivered of an
infant, shockingly mutilated, with one eye entirely put out, and the brain so
injured that this otherwise robust child was entirely wanting in ordinary
sense.... Ten years, face to face with this poor idiot, whose imbecility was
her direct work...
At the end of the chapter,
I don’t want to suggest that these terrible stories are folklore in the sense of being untrue, though the latter one seems all too like those nightmares in which we frenziedly try to kill someone who merely becomes more and more mutilated and alive. But Gardner, who was I suppose an immensely experienced, genuinely conscientious, and highly respected man of science, did carry a lot of folklore around in his head, unwittingly forming his judgments.
I might, if I had been inclined, have made different quotations that allow us a little more sense of fellow-feeling; as when he praises sunlight and physical exercise, or argues that women are by nature as strong as men. His intentions were good, but what he thought he saw was what he already credited.
This is apparent in his comments on those listless, pasty, degenerate beings who have been onanists, or physically excessive, or used contraception; and he is also a firm believer in the inheritance of factors related to the time of conception.
[E]very one has been able to
make the observation, a more or less considerable number of times, that
children, the issue of old men, are habitually marked by a serious and sad
air... As they grow up, their features take on more and more the senile
character, so much so that every one remarks it, and the world regards it as a
natural thing... Our attention has for many years been fixed on this point, and
we can affirm that the greater part of the offspring are weak, torpid,
lymphatic, if not scrofulous, and do not promise a long career.
[Was this folk-belief in Dickens’ mind when he wrote Dombey and Son?]
we do know, that children begotten by men of general good habits, who may be at this particular time much affected by intoxicating drink, do inherit marked evidences of its consequences in their dispositions....
The general enthusiasm
attendant upon Jenny Lind’s musical tour in this country, did, to my own
knowledge, markedly affect the children generated by parents full of the
musical fervour of that period, and these children are now all over our
country, developing a musical taste very uncommon before in this land.
So:
[Parents] should sedulously
avoid connections during those periods when procreation is most likely, at
times of physical debility when recovering from disease, worn by business
cares, gloomy and despondent, oppressed by grief...
I would like to know – but I don’t –
whether
Note
Views on
Frank Norris: The Octopus (1901)
There was a strenuous gaiety
in the air; everybody was in the best of spirits. Notes of laughter continually
interrupted the conversation on every hand. At every moment a group of men
involved themselves in uproarious horseplay. They passed oblique jokes behind
their hands to each other – grossly veiled double meanings meant for the women
– and bellowed with laughter thereat, stamping on the ground. The relations
between the sexes grew more intimate, the women and girls pushing the young
fellows away from their sides with vigorous thrusts of their elbows. (Book I, Chapter 6)
The recipe “New World Zola” describes The
Octopus so well, both in strength and weakness, that
one is left scratching around for something to add. (“
What isn’t Zolaesque is the map, which is recognizably Marlboro Country; all space, and scale, and mechanized straight lines. It’s a place in which isolation is inevitable, and The Octopus describes a fragmented society in which individuals rarely occupy the kind of shared mental space that we take for granted in a Victorian novel – say by Gaskell, Trollope or Eliot. When Norris gives us a communal set piece, as for example Annixter’s party (from which the opening quotation is taken), he emphasizes the centrifugal forces that pull people away from each other, so that the cohesion of this society is seen as something of an effort. When the railroad people break it up, the dispersal is alarmingly swift and final.
This is expressed most strongly in the
chapter that switches pointedly between the helpless fragmentation of the
Hooven family and Presley’s sumptuous dinner at the Gerards. We had been led to
suppose that Presley and the Hoovens were, in
There is, it’s true, a certain crudeness in the manipulation of this chapter’s contrasts. Perhaps too in the horrible image of the massed rabbits being killed (this comes just before the shooting of the ranchers, and implies a rhetorical point about the unhealthy foundations of the ranchers’ society).
But elsewhere, that point is made without
so much contrivance; for example in the fifteen-page sequence that begins with
Dyke’s waking at the start of “a busy day” and ends with our glimpse of him
drinking steadily at Carraher’s, by now well aware that he has been ruined by
the railroad (moral: don’t put your business partners in a position where they
profit from your failure). The domesticity with which the sequence begins –
Dyke’s riotous games with his little daughter – is misleading. We are told that
“he was a bighearted, jovial man who spread an atmosphere of good humor wherever
he went”. This man, so fully and happily integrated into the society of the
home, must surely have an equally robust integration into the larger society of
This isolation means that the book breaks up into accounts of individual struggles that are important only to those individuals: Magnus and his corruption; Annixter’s involvement with Hilma; Presley worrying about his great poem; Vanamee and his obsession. The death of S. Behrman, trapped beneath a grain-chute, is highly unsatisfactory by the standard of nineteenth-century plotting; it is a meaningless accident; but possibly defensible in this saga where people’s lives are impermeably separate. In a Victorian novel we would learn who raped and destroyed Angéle; here we don’t: “the tragedy had suddenly leaped from out the shadow with the abruptness of an explosion... To Angéle’s mind – what there was left of it – the matter always remained a hideous blur, a blot, a vague, terrible confusion”.
There is no society. The nearest thing to it is the railroad people themselves, but they are something different, not a human community but a synergic operation - an institution. [When the ruined Magnus says “I’ll turn railroad”, he makes a capitulation somewhat like Winston’s in 1984. ]
The book follows Vanamee and Presley in attempting to make a coherent sense of the world that depends not on human society but on more gigantic forces: WHEAT, FORCE, LIFE. This is highly inadequate, but a century later we are still struggling with the question.
***
But as all I have said so far tends to emphasize (what is quite true) that The Octopus is over-written, I should like to make some redress.
I grew up reading Westerns and watching black-and-white Westerns on TV. I therefore considered the Western a natural sort of literary form, and I suppose always felt a vague, subconscious surprise that no work by “great” novelists ever seemed to contain mesquite, Lazy Y brands or Colt .45s.
The Octopus comes closer than most, and among the longueurs of Hilma’s thick hair and the WHEAT and Vanamee’s sixth sense there are some really exciting scenes in which Norris puts all that aside. The train hold-up is one, all the better for being presented indirectly and, for the most part, in mercilessly anti-heroic contemplation of the passengers in Annixter’s wagon. Then there’s the pursuit and capture of Dyke, the shooting of the ranchers, and (no less brutal and upsetting) the last days of Mrs Hooven. It’s, at times, a very involving book.
****
The conflict
between ranching and railroad interests also forms a background to the social
experiment (beginning in 1908) of homesteaders in Eastern Montana; a tragedy
recounted in Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land: An American Romance (1996) – an
absorbing book, the best of his that I’ve read. It also plays a part in Serge
Leone’s film Once upon a Time in the West (1968), where one can perhaps
see some of the European elements in Norris’s conception making a homeward
journey.
Much the clearest
explanation of farming that I have read is John Seymour’s The Countryside
Explained (1977). “When I was young the child’s role in the harvest field
was to chase the rabbits which bolted out of the shrinking square of standing
corn left in the middle of the field and to kill them with sticks, for rabbits
were a pest then and were also very good eating; but the arrival of
myxomatosis, which killed nearly all the rabbits, also killed this.” It will be
seen that this presents a very different view from the dysfunctional gigantism
of Norris’s description, in which the squeamish Northern Europeans go off to
picnic while the slaughter is performed by aroused, degraded Mexicans.
(2002)
Hjalmar Söderberg: Doktor Glas (1905)
Doktor Glas is a book that I thought about a lot after I'd finished reading it. Not because there seemed to be any problem with the reading that I needed to resolve. It was more that one needed to get away from the Doktor's own narration in order to gather one's thoughts; so insidiously had Söderberg led one into seeing things from Glas' point of view. Even so, it came as a shock to find that the Swedish introduction discussed whether there was a psykopatisk element to the narrator's character. That seemed wrong, but what shocked me was that until I saw the word no such idea had yet occurred to me.
The comparison of Glas with the narrator of Chekhov's Shooting-Party (see earlier entry) is fascinating - by chance I read the novels successively. The contrast, too.
In Chekhov's book the transformation in our idea of the narrator (from bumptious to a little self-centred to brutish to) means that by the end we can barely credit anything of what we were told earlier; the whole narrative reveals itself as a journey into a diseased mind, its veracity entirely compromised.
Not so in Doktor Glas. In this book the transparent veracity of the narrator, inasmuch as he lyrically relates his personal impressions and the summer life of Stockholm - these pages (the bulk of the book), being a significant, perhaps the most significant, aspect of its great power ... well, Dr Glas as narrator remains almost, if not quite, untainted by our realization - we are apt to bury it, it's so inconvenient - that he has after all committed a murder. We continue to interpret the sentence "Nor do I tell the whole truth about myself, only what it pleases me to relate, but nothing that isn't true" as rather understating, if anything, the extreme honesty of the narrative. Whereas Chekhov's narrator (though perhaps ultimately intending a confession) fills his pages with subterfuge, Glas seems never to hesitate about confessing anything that he knows to confess.
The question about truth arises, nevertheless. It becomes, in this case, not a matter of honesty but of whether Glas is capable of assessing other characters accurately. Generally his insights are strikingly keen, but no book makes it clearer that such keenness is never absolute, may indeed imply correspondingly exceptional blindnesses; above all our doubts concern Glas' view of Gregorius and his wife. Glas makes no bones about it; he finds Gregorius loathsome, and finds him loathsome long before Mrs Gregorius talks about the marriage. Glas is, one feels, ready to condemn Gregorius on any grounds whatever. As for Fru Gregorius, Söderberg's book is a pitiless examination of the illusions of love. Through the very transparency of Glas' own descriptions, we see that Fru Gregorius is not at all like the image of the loved one that overwhelms Glas' imagination. Pejoratively, you might say she is more shallow, more ordinary (Glas is definitely not ordinary). Glas in love completely ignores the commonsensical view that one might phrase in this way: After all, she has proven unfaithful, she has taken a lover... But the book is a moral minefield here. If Glas' own judgments are plainly skewed, he is also entirely successful in destroying our faith in such conventional social judgments. But what, for instance, do we make of this?
The very first
time I ever saw her it struck me how unlike all others she is. She isn't like a
woman of the world, or a middle-class wife, or a woman of the people. Mostly
the last, perhaps; particularly as she sat there, just then, on the church
steps, with her fair hair free and bared to the sun,
for she had taken off her hat and laid it beside her. But a woman from a
primitive folk, or one that never existed, where class distinctions had not yet
begun, where "the people" still had not become the lower classes. A daughter of a free tribe.
Does this really say anything concrete about Helga, or is it just what Glas would think about any woman he fell in love with? Or isn't it merely the truth about every woman, the truth that only love discovers? Or does it reflect the situation in which Glas finds Helga - discontentedly not free -, which makes her seem paradoxically all the more kin to a freedom that should be her birthright?
In a way Glas' moral crusade seems to be terribly (yet somehow comically) misguided, the bubble of a perfervid imagination; yet who doubts that Fru Gregorius has a right to her own choices, to happiness and freedom? Glas is unable to give her happiness or her own choices, but he does give her freedom; because he doesn't tell her what he's done and doesn't seek to take advantage of her, there is indeed something heroic about what Glas does. It might even be that, after the book is ended, Helga might find a happiness - a bourgeois happiness that an unbesotted Glas would probably pour scorn on.
If the book continues in this way to revolve unendingly in one's thoughts, in another way this is satisfying; we perhaps don't need to make final judgments about characters that, the book shows us, we can never entirely know.
There's another way in which Söderberg reminds me of Chekhov, who commented on the difficulty of eliminating a pistol-shot from his plays. Aesthetically the novel seems to require its murder - really, such an implausible kind of murrder for anyone to commit - in order to be a complete image; that's an aspect of its era. A few years later Joyce and Proust would show how to do without this. Söderberg's era is characterized by this essential cheapness.
I actually read the book in Paul Britten Austin's 1963 translation, reissued in 2002.
Some translation notes:
July
2
What's the matter, I asked. The word "ovillkorligen" ("inevitably") has been omitted.
-
Last night he raped me. As good as raped me.
- I natt tog han
mig med våld. Så gott som med våld.
(Literally, "took me by force, as good as by force" - but rape in Swedish is våldta.)
What does Fru Gregorius mean by her qualification? Gregorius seems to have mentally bullied her into submission with talk of duty and emotional blackmail about his salvation. So the most likely sense is that, though he did not actually use physical force, the effect was the same: she was bullied into doing something she did not want to do. It's significant that Glas never thinks of Helga refusing to comply, even with the excuse of her health - in this marriage, that is apparently not a possibility - Gregorius' power is absolute.
How reliable is Helga's account? She has a powerful motive for exaggerating the brutality of marital attentions that have become hateful to her. Yet it is certain that Gregorius at any rate begs for, and has, sex with his wife while believing that this seriously endangers her health; he effectively confirms this by his reaction later. My reading is that Helga does pour out the truth; that a doubt about her honesty here would make the novel less interesting, not more so. But she has not told her husband that she hates him, and he of course would utterly reject the imputation that he has raped her.
But
how would it look if the rich brought along artistically embellished silver
cups and the poor, maybe, a brandy glass?
This is part of the comic report of Gregorius on the communion-question. The original has "ett brännvinsglas" - brännvin being a general term for strong spirits, typically a vodka flavoured with spices such as caraway. "Vodka-glass" or "shot-glass" gives a better idea of the class-connotations in this imaginary sacrilege of the communion service. Though Gregorius is a conservative or at any rate prudently conventional priest, he is also a man of the world; there is something of gusto and of plain-speaking in this clerical chatter. Gregorius comfortably conceives his doctor as a brother-professional. As a matter of fact Glas does lead, to outward appearance, the clubman's life of a male professional. It is only within that he sees himself so differently.
Impossible
to decide, whether he's more fool or fox.
"mera får än räv" - more sheep than fox. It remains difficult to decide. Though Glas succeeds in duping Gregorius, though he may well associate Gregorius's despised views with a sheep-like stupidity, yet Gregorius' worldly success (like his sexual drive) do, we suspect, make Glas feel a little inferior - though this he does not know to confess. We come away from the book with very little solid idea of how Gregorius really thinks about anything. In certain social contexts he is, we imagine, very shrewd. Yet there is no clue that he has any conception of his wife's, or Glas', inner lives.
*
A year after the
publication of Doktor Glas, John
Galsworthy's A Man of Property also
turns on a marital rape, though Soames Forsyte, at least as troubled by his own
act as Gregorius, doesn't of course call it that. Ibsen lies behind both
novels. Galsworthy's novel is notable technically for limiting its points of
view to members of the Forsyte clan - sometimes admittedly stretching credulity
to achieve it. The points of view of Irene and Bosinney are excluded, and some
have criticized this as preventing empathy with Irene's difficult situation.
But the idea I suppose is to put the reader in the position of the family - and
of Soames in particular: to experience to the full their frustrations and to
recognize that such things as they do, we also have the potential to do.
(2008)
THE LOVER TELLS OF THE ROSE
IN HIS HEART
All things uncomely and and
broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the
roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the
ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your
image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
The wrong of unshapely
things is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew
and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky
and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image
that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
(from
The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899)
All the lines are enriched alexandrines (that is to say with extra unstressed syllables), but the first three are a specific music because of the strong medial breaks visually indicated by commas. They more or less split, amoeba-like, into restless trimeters.
This will be the most spirited part of the poem for many readers, with many detonations. In particular, setting “The cry of the child” directly after the word “old” is a wonderfully intelligent piece of concision – it tells us everything about how we are to hear this cry (in stark contrast to what it might connote): hopeless, hungry, and trapped in the cold years. But after all, the first three lines are only an introduction; we don’t know where this is going yet.
The fourth line has a quite different music. It flows from end to end, maximizing the enrichment (six accents but eighteen syllables). But though the auditory image of a rippling, unimpeded stream is certainly present, there can be no doubt that the climax of the line is “a rose”, which emerges with quiet definition at the point where, because of the preceding lines, we have learnt to expect a pause. I suppose it does not need spelling out that “a rose” blossoms in mid-line as in “the deeps of my heart”. [It is odd how this last phrase marries “the creak of a lumbering cart”, denying the opposition between them. This offers a subsidiary hint at re-integrating the lover into his surroundings and accepting the “wronging” as a natural event]
The rose in European poetry since the troubadours is a symbol that has drifted a long way from its floral source. I suppose you assume, as I do, that this rose is red, but this idea leads not towards horticulture but towards an idealized image incorporating other complex enclosures; hearts, vaginas and heavens. It’s an image that blends the desired with the desire, so you may say that here the rose means what the lover is experiencing, which is created at least as much by himself as by the person he is addressing. It is what he is dreaming about; but it is also his dream.
We are now clear about the relation between the opening lines and the rose of the title; they “wrong” it. Do they wrong the lover or his beloved? Is he really a victim, a nurturer, or both at the same time, or in fact neither? What is certain is that the rose is now associated with weakness, and if we feel that it might be less self-regarding to address the weakness of the child’s ignorant wailing and the ploughman’s grinding poverty, rather than feeling annoyed by them, we may not have much sympathy with the lover’s torments.
This reflection keeps coming back as we pick our way though the second stanza, which repeats the rhyme-sounds of the first stanza but without its force. A wrong “too great to be told” feels like an inadequate expression, and the potential energy of “build” – qualified as it already is by being only a hunger to build – is further undermined by “sit” and “apart”.
But these indications of feebleness do lead to a subtly surprising outcome. When the last line comes round again, it now appears against a different background, and gains a certain paradoxical strength. If the rose seemed a bit pallid at the end of Stanza 1, it seems to glow at the end of Stanza 2. You might express the effect in these words: Nonetheless, it still blossoms. Perhaps all the more perfectly in adversity.
As it might be: someone who feels their belief (opinion, philosophy, religion, love) slighted and collapsing continues to assert: Nevertheless, there is something in it .... there are many things we don’t understand .... somewhere, there is a happy land ... so that it is on the verge of ceasing to be a belief and remains only as a dream; then the persistence of the dream and the fact of the past belief provide a sort of testimony (at least in one’s own mind) that underwrites the long-desired Maybe. Yeats would later write of “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”, but in those very words would cling on to the sentimental romanticism of earlier days. Maybe it had after all hidden the key to transforming the world, though he had not found it.
*
Blood and the Moon
(from The Winding Stair and other poems, 1933)
A younger contemporary, I forget who, expressed his distaste for what he saw as a Fascistic temper to this poem (quoted in full below). Try it for yourself. It's possible to piece something Fascistic together -
a bloody, arrogant power
rose out of the race
Yeats is referring to ancient
Identifying Fascism or other unacceptable things in giants of literature is a game played with great intensity by all of us, university students especially. At school we get fobbed off with literature that is impeccably right-hearted, The Crucible and The Handmaid’s Tale, then our horizons widen and we have to make our own sense of the problem that famous artworks may have an uncomfortably close association with views that we find evil or actions that we find upsetting. As it happens, this provides an educative device. Not everyone knows how to be a critic, still less a reader, but everyone can be a witch-finder. There’s an inspiritingly competitive aspect to the game of trying to free our own tastes from moral aspersion, and it’s an obviously relevant way of making a meaningful engagement with what would otherwise be just boring old lit. If anything, it seems that the aspersed authors receive an unfair amount of attention.
BLOOD AND THE MOON
I
Blessed be this place,
More blessed still this
tower;
A bloody, arrogant power
Rose out of the race
Uttering, mastering it,
Rose like these walls from
these
Storm-beaten cottages —
In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the
top.
II
An image of the moving
heavens, a log-book of the sun’s journey and the moon’s;
And Shelley had his towers,
thought’s crowned powers he called them once.
I declare this tower is my
symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring,
spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair;
That Goldsmith and the Dean,
Berkeley and Burke have travelled there.
Swift beating on his breast
in sibylline frenzy blind
Because the heart in his
blood-sodden breast had dragged him down into mankind,
Goldsmith deliberately
sipping at the honey-pot of his mind,
And haughtier-headed Burke
that proved the State a tree,
That this unconquerable
labyrinth of the birds, century after century,
Cast but dead leaves to
mathematical equality;
And God-appointed
That this pragmatical,
preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant
if the mind but change its theme;
Saeva Indignatio and the
labourer’s hire,
The strength that gives our
blood and state magnanimity of its own desire;
Everything that is not God
consumed with intellectual fire.
III
The purity of the unclouded
moon
Has flung its
arrowy shaft upon the floor.
Seven centuries have passed
and it is pure,
The blood of innocence has
left no stain.
There, on blood-saturated
ground, have stood
Soldier, assassin,
executioner,
Whether for daily pittance
or in blind fear
Or out of abstract hatred,
and shed blood,
But could not
cast a single jet thereon.
Odour of blood on the
ancestral stair!
And we that have shed none
must gather there
And clamour in drunken
frenzy for the moon.
IV
Upon the dusty, glittering
windows cling,
And seem to cling upon the
moonlit skies,
Tortoiseshell butterflies,
peacock butterflies,
A couple of night-moths are
on the wing.
Is every modern nation like
the tower,
Half-dead at the
top? No matter what I said,
For wisdom is the property
of the dead,
A something incompatible
with life; and power,
Like everything that has the
stain of blood,
A property of the living;
but no stain
Can come upon the visage of
the moon
When it has
looked in glory from a cloud.
(2004)
Richard Strauss: An Alpine Symphony (1915)
"The sun grows dark" is the name of one of the many sections in
Richard Strauss' final symphonic poem, An
Alpine Symphony (1915).
Adorno remarks about the opening:
"The poverty of the sunrise of Richard Strauss’
Alpine Symphony is caused not merely by banal sequences, but by its very
splendor. For no sunrise, not even the one in the high mountains,
is pompous, triumphal, stately, but each occurs faintly and diffidently, like
the hope that everything may yet turn out well, and precisely in the
inconspicuousness of the mightiest of all lights lies that which is so
poignantly overwhelming." (Minima
Moralia 72, 1945)
Someone on the Gramophone forum
adds:
"As ever Adorno is so precise and insightful. The
crass pomposity of Strauss' Alpine Symphony is, for me, quite the most
superficial attempt to depict nature in all music. But then to quote Stravinsky
'I would like to admit Richard Strauss' music to whatever purgatory punishes
triumphant banality'."
The Alpine Symphony had
occupied a similar cultural role in
[What is perhaps as relevant - or probably a good
deal more so - is Strauss' apparent reversal of his initially positive opinion
of Schoenberg; this was from 1909 at which point Strauss' work is considered to
take a more conservative turn...]
How variably the ear can hear things! I don't find the Alpine Symphony pompous - quite the
contrary, I find it - breathtakingly - balanced. Where others hear second-rate
musical ideas, I hear music doing things it had never done before ("The
sun grows dark" being one good example). Where others hear superficiality
I hear delicacy, where others hear crassness I hear originality. (- And I do
consider myself fairly well-versed in the music of both crass pomposity and
visionary nature-realization!) But never mind what I hear. What you might not
expect from Adorno's words is that there are other ways of hearing this music.
Straussians of course admire it; you'd expect that. More surprisingly there are
others, like me, who admit to not really liking Strauss yet consider the Alpine Symphony something else
altogether.
[- It is not adequately described as programmatic - long sections like the
summit and the finale gradually dissipate their programmatic openings - they
begin when you stop moving and your heart slowly stops its thumping, but then
they transform into unapplied music.]
I feel embarrassed on Adorno's behalf, for this reason: the paltriness of the
argument. Even supposing it true that Strauss's music is pompous and empty,
even supposing it true that all sunrises are in some sense as diffident as
Adorno claims, even supposing that all humans confronted with a sunrise
register that diffidence and nothing else, even supposing that the human
imagination had never conceived and never would conceive of sunrise as warmly
triumphant - even so, can Adorno's argument be understood as anything more than
the crudest naturalism? When the hidebound bourgeoisie
filed through the Salon des Refusés laughing and poking each other in the ribs,
Why, the sun was not green, the fields were
not pink! .. - isn't that the intellectual level of Adorno's
"precise insight"? Logically speaking.
But of course it's not about logic. What Adorno was writing about was triumph
itself. Triumph, jackbooted at the Brandenberg Gate,
Triumph that Prussian, Hitlerite, Roman old enemy had to be snuffed out
altogether. Triumph was a deadly enemy, an obscene joke,
Triumph must form no element at all in our conception of reality. When the
empty rhetoric, the stale evil of Triumphalism was still heard on the
concert-platform then one must make a demonstration. And one must.
When evil comes, artistic comprehension is one of the small things that gets
ruined.
Yet Adorno, pupil of Berg, was a great music critic. Reading the passage again
- by the way, the context in Minima Moralia
doesn't help much - it begins to feel evident that Adorno's attack is pitched
just where it is exactly because he does hear the splendour of that sunrise,
and exactly because he does perfectly understand the relevance of Strauss' work
to the country of the high mountains. He wants us to know that he knows what
it's like on mountains. (25 years later, a mountain summit played a material
part in Adorno's death.)
But can Adorno have been "wrong"? I don't think so. I believe the
"banal sequences" that Adorno mentions without further specification
were really there, though for me they are undiscoverable. It was like a tone of
voice that grated - a tone whose meaning, far beyond anything so conscious as an intention on the composer's part, was
then unmistakable. Contemporaries have a cultural hotline into the work of
their time. Later the language of that moment gets lost.
*
Note 1. I also like the Metamorphosen for
23 strings, 1945. ...And the early Sonata for Violin and Piano, and Don Quixote....
Note 2. The "progress of a day" form was extremely popular. Below is an
ongoing list of other works I've come across. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony
could be suggested as a predecessor, though this doesn't really cover a whole
day. As in Strauss's tone poem, the Vaughan Williams and Holst pieces make
capital of the resemblance, in certain respects, of the calm of dawn to the
calm of dusk; they can arrive at a satisfying ending that recalls the
beginning, and the whole work is both preceded by and followed by the silence
of the night.
Frederick Delius, Paris - The Song of a
Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 2 ("A
Eric Coates, From
the Countryside, 1915 (this is really just a small suite, but like the
others it shows that there was now a rich musical language for suggesting
different times of the day)
Gustav Holst, Hammersmith,
1930 (for military band)
Schoenberg's Verklärte
Nacht (1899) should also be mentioned, though it does not really cover a
whole night.
(2006)
Thaw
Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at
their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of
grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
(The text as it's generally published, e.g. where I found it, in Country Verses,
edited by Samuel Carr, 1979. Text is from 66 poems, except for the
title and the hyphen in "elm-tops".)
10
iii 16
Going home
Over the land freckled
with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm tops, delicate as flower of
grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.
(from Notebook
containing drafts of 66 poems, 25th June 1915 - 24th December
1916. The capitalization of "Winter" is
hesitant.)
Thaw
Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed,
And saw from elm-tops delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, winter pass
(from Notebook
containing drafts of 27 poems, 1916.)
Thaw
OVER the land half freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at
their nests cawed,
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as a flower of
grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.
(from http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/thomas01.html
- internet representation, introducing caasual changes.) I do appreciate
"half freckled" - it's more accurate than what Thomas wrote. Because
if the snow is freckly in one part of the view you can bet there's
others where it's either all snow or all clear. But in another way this
modernizes the poem, because we now take for granted an English landscape that
is much more open than it was in the days of the elms. Thomas' point was that,
being down at ground-level, humans couldn't really see the bigger pattern in
the way that the rooks could. Not that the "point" is really what
makes the poem tick - the final line doesn't repay much reading, it's just an
enabler. The force of the poem really lies elsewhere: "cawed / And
saw" mysteriously evokes the scrambling activity of the rooks; "speculating",
while partly evoking the comical appearance of the rook's face (from a
distance) also emphasizes that comical solemnity (that term
follows inevitably) is exactly inappropriate to their manner, that there is a
total difference between animal experience and human experience, that their
posited wisdom/superior vantage point is a wisdom beyond and quite unlike the
wisdom of solemn old gazers in human society.
Thomas wrote this poem near Sevenoaks. He had already enlisted, but wasn't sent
to
As Thomas's poem confirms, up to the 1970s the rookery-tree of choice in
southern
(2010)
Handbook Encyclopedia of Engineering (1928)
1,240 pages, blackbound;
a book for the trade, published
Considering how central a part engineering performs in our civilization, it’s remarkable how few of its terms have entered common language. When we do use them, we’ve often misappropriated them. For instance, the “flash point” of oil is the temperature at which the volatile surface vapour will ignite, distinct from the “fire point” at which the oil itself will ignite.
Consulting this book as preparatory reading for the fine literature of its time (which perhaps was one of my secret motivations for getting it) is on the surface an unfruitful pursuit, since literary people never knowingly refer to these topics. But beneath the surface, the conditions of all their literature depends on them. And to “their”, you might as well add “my”.
Because of this utter separation between what I know about and the core interests of the encyclopedia, the most interesting reading often occurs at the frontiers. For example, jute, celluloid and cork are included only because of their occasional uses in engineering (respectively: cable filler, electrical insulation, friction clutches) but the description of their properties from these vantage-points feels enlightening. The book is also pleasingly comprehensible when outlining mathematical and chemical concepts, how chimneys work, varieties of carpentry joint (re patternmaking) and other topics that are not industrial engineering itself. On alloys, castings, gear-teeth and so on, the detail is dismaying, it condemns my ignorance:
CRANKSHAFT COLD SAW. The crankshaft cold saw cutting-off
machine is arranged for carrying two saws upon a single arbor so that two cuts
may be made simultaneously when sawing out the web of a crank.
Here, as mostly, we are reading about a machine that manufactures bits of another machine. Hence another of my motives, hoping to learn how a car engine works, was disappointed. Instead I’ve learnt how to manufacture one – but using the technology of 1928.
It’s refreshing to find that the entry on “File History” begins with the skin of the dogfish and has nothing to do with computer storage.
The first manufacturer of nuts and bolts was
Micah Rugg in
There is no trace of humour and the main sources of the book's infrequent references to humanity are notable inventions (cotton gin, telegraph, telephone; often with heroic struggles over patent) and methods for calculating wages and regulating labour. The philosophy of labour is of the time-and-motion variety, chiefly concerned with graded penalties for slackness and absenteeism. The following entry might have been more accurately titled, Non-liability etc.
LIABILITY
OF EMPLOYER. The liability of an employer for injuries
sustained by an employe is based upon the well established law that an employer
is not liable for the payment of damages for injuries sustained by an adult employe,
if it is proved to the satisfaction of the Court that the workman was injured
as a result of his own negligence. Where an employer knowingly hires a minor
without his parent’s consent and requires him to do dangerous work, in the
performance of which the minor is injured, the employer may be liable, even
though the minor’s carelessness or negligence may have contributed to a great
extent to the occurrence of the accident which caused the injury; but if it is
shown to the satisfaction of the Court that the minor falsely stated his age
and the employer believed he was of legal age, the employer may be relieved of
liability for injuries sustained unless the injury was due to the employer’s
neglect.
(2007)
The Lyceum Book of Verse ed Mollie
The Lyceum was a literary society for ladies (I might miss some nuances, but that’s not too far away). The most interesting thing, probably, is what the poets have in common - a sociological interest, I suppose. The word sprang, the devotion... This seems like a very old book. Katharine Tynan’s meters might owe something to Yeats - other influences are Georgian, with a dash of Kipling, some ballads and a bit of Chinese exoticism. Florence Ayscough’s translations from Chinese are in fact the most valuable poems, by any normal modern standard. Rachel Swete Macnamara seems the best poet: a more engaged imagination than the rest, a more determined verse movement. With all the birds and flowers you can’t help wondering if this prettified, privileged poetry will ever be read without patronization (and was it really so privileged, to be Ethel Rolt-Wheeler or Lady Aimée Scott?) The poems on Blake and Beethoven show the ladies’ culture at its most vulnerable; it does not seem equipped. The birds, the grey twilight. Sybil Bristowe’s wide resources, “Arthur Hood”’s violence, and the single, achieved poem of M. Winifred Isitt (“A London Spring Song”). Now long out of the current of any competition or significance, I can look at it with some sadness and respect.
What is the word, O brother
I may speak
And
hope
To reach your far white peak
From my green
slope?
(Rachel Swete Macnamara, “Box Hill to
(2001)
From a series of compilations published by Gollancz, beginning in 1929 with Famous Plays of Today, then continuing more or less annually until 1938-39 (and, anomalously, 1954).
1. The
Barretts of
2. The
Improper Duchess, by J.B. Fagan. Set in Washington D.C, concerning oil
negotiations with the imaginary
3. To
See Ourselves, by E.M. Delafield. Caroline's marriage to Freddie, papermill
owner in
4. After All, by John van Druten. Play about the generation gap, in widely-spaced scenes covering a six-year period. Mr and Mrs Thomas have tried to bring up their son and daughter in a liberal and confiding spirit, but are distressed to find that each is stifled by the family home and intent on moving out. By the end of the play (the parents now dead), the younger generation are showing signs of reverting to respectability, at the same time as discovering that their parents had in their youth been forced to break free in a similar way to themselves. Anyone today who reads the first two acts would take it for granted that young Ralph, like John van Druten, was gay.
5. London Wall, also by John van Druten. Set in a lawyer's office, but focussed on the admin staff rather than the lawyers; in particular, registering the relative novelty of women in the workplace. The innocent, pretty Pat manages (just) to escape the sexually-predatory Brewer, the office manager. Meanwhile Miss Janus, after ten years in office-work, still unmarried and at the desperate age of 36, walks out to a life of freedom, insecurity and loneliness.
6. Autumn
Crocus, by C.L. Anthony. Wistful Alpine romance in which for 24 hours
Fanny, a lonely teacher in her mid-thirties, snatches at Life (in the form of
the warm-hearted innkeeper Andreas, unfortunately already married) before
reluctantly giving way to the sad compulsions of practicality, realism,
respectability, etc. Sentimental, yes; yet perhaps I won't be the only reader
to be reminded, just a little, of Káťa
Kabanová. Light relief supplied by Alaric and Audrey, a hearty Kraft-Ebbing
/
These six popular plays build a fascinating
picture of a moment in history, perhaps even a unique moment. Every one of the
plays, even Fagan's Duchess, reflects
and contributes to society-wide debate about the role of women, emancipation, a new model of relationships, family and society. A
subsidiary theme in most of the plays is registering a plea for LIFE from (or
at any rate on behalf of) dreary, Life-starved existences - women's lives,
principally. Well, I said a unique moment. One key date is probably this: in
the
Chekhov complained about the difficulty of avoiding the pistol-shot. It's interesting that in these plays there is not a single death from any but natural or accidental causes. Detectives, policemen, mystery crimes, are entirely absent. That may be an unrepresentative curiosity of selection (perhaps Gollancz only went for relatively high-minded plays), but it's striking in contrast to our own cop-sated schedules.
Speaking of Gollancz prompts another observation - these plays were evidently, in part, intended for reading, and were read. Descriptions of scenery are elaborate; the physical appearance of the characters is described; stage directions are often novelistic rather than functional, aimed at a reader not an actor. "C.L. Anthony" even suppresses the usual cast-list with its names and explanations of relationships - instead referring enigmatically to "The Lady in the button-up boots", etc - this seems to be for the reader's benefit, because the usual sort of cast-list would spoil the surprise.
In contrast, movie screenplays have never sold particularly well in book form. I guess this is partly because it's easier to get to see a new film than a new play; Gollancz could expect a provincial market for these volumes. But the main reason is that moviemakers developed fluid narratorial styles that, compared to theatre, were not so dependent on language.
(2011)
Oliver
Strange: The Marshal of Lawless (1933)
This is the third novel in Oliver Strange's great series of westerns about James Green, also known as Sudden. I'm talking about the reading sequence, which is different from the dates of composition and publication (see note).
The
Marshal of Lawless finds Sudden in the south of
"Injun an'
Mex or bad white, like Durley said, reg'lar devil's brew," was Green's
unvoiced criticism.
The book, naturally, supports the hero's view. We instantly scent villainous qualities in "the hooked nose, small, close-set eyes, thin lips, and lank, black hair". Yet though Sudden's race analysis is skilled, he is too honorable a man to condemn on racist grounds alone. Several chapters later, Seth Raven still puzzles him; "Apparently a public-spirited citizen..... With an innate feeling that the man was crooked, he had to admit that so far he was not justified in that belief."
When El Diablo accosts the beautiful Tonia Sarel, she treats with contempt his claim to be a caballero of Old Spain: "Lay a finger on me, you yellow dog, and I'll thrash you." However, when Sudden has rescued her, the following dialogue takes place:
"Ride on a piece, Miss Sarel," he said.
"I'll be along."
She divined the menace beneath the casual request.
"What are you going to do?" she questioned.
"Kill a snake," he said coolly.
"No, no," she protested. "He's a
Mexican and didn't understand. Please let him go."
At one level the book shows Tonia's cultural relativism to be mistaken - she is just being squeamish, Sudden yields against his own better judgment and El Diablo comes back to haunt both of them. But at a poetic level she's of course right. Though by then Sudden has equal motive for revenge, it's Black Feather who finally salves his honour by doing for El Diablo; Sudden merely puts the bandit out of his misery when impaled screaming on a clump of cactus half-way down a cliff. We understand that though it is honourable for Black Feather to exact revenge for personal injury, it would not be honourable for Sudden to do the same. Because he is the hero? Or because he is white? Racism and romance are so intertwined that it's hard to decide. Raven has already called this one. El Diablo being now in his bad books, Raven instructs the marshal as he sets off with the posse: "An' don't make no mistake this time. If yu don't wanta kill the damn yellow thief yoreself, let yore Injun do it." With the implication: make sure it's painful.
But I don't know as much as I should about
the history of race stereotypes in early Westerns. In Oliver Strange, an
English author, they seem to me to have a contemporary British character.
Savage races are to some extent "let off" because of the prevalent
idea of the noble savage. On the other hand the most venomous racism is
reserved for the dubious category of "dirty whites", especially (for some
reason) Portugooses, who are made scapegoats for all the brutalities of
colonialism, which is to be airbrushed from the fine features of the
The roots of the fear of miscegenation lie deeper, in folk-myths designed by elders to control the too-miscellaneous breeding tendencies of their juniors. Propaganda against mixed breeding goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks with their disapproval of the foreigner and their mythical monsters (nearly always malign) produced by unlikely crossbreeding of species.
A surprising thing happens when Seth Raven, the town's most prominent citizen, is finally cornered, his crimes made public beyond dispute. Perhaps not so surprising - the Merchant of Venice lies behind this quasi-courtroom scene. Anyway, the "half-breed" (sometimes referred to, even more contemptuously, as the "breed") finds this to say:
"Yo're a clever lot, ain't yu?" he sneered.
"
The stinging, scornful voice lashed them like a whip
and he had his moment.
The book is of course sunnily untroubled by the implications of Raven's speech; as are its audience, who (after the ensuing shoot-out) forget all about it. For them, the racist context in which Raven became the villain that society already marked him down as, is invisible.
"Well, he's saved thisyer town the cost of a
rope," Loder put in.
Which was the best that anyone could find
to say of the late owner of the Red Ace.
But for Strange it is clear that racism, as well as races, is picturesque: it is itself a colourful ingredient of the tapestry that makes heroes and villains. (Later, in Sudden - Outlawed, Strange would decide that Sudden himself had been raised as a child by Injuns.)
I now find the villains interesting and surprisingly varied: consider for instance the extremely conflicted, sometimes lucid, intelligent, ineffectual and eventually crazed Paul Lesurge of Sudden - Gold Seeker. But when I read these books as a child I didn't pay much attention to the villains: it was the magnificent hero who dominated my imagination, on his splendid black horse (I wasn't going to make a big deal of this, but the horse's name is Nigger*NOTE 3). Sudden, who gains the respect and affection of straight men, the respect and hatred of crooked ones; Sudden, who makes bantering jokes with the younger pal who invariably hero-worships him and at some point awkwardly blurts out his affection for Jim after the latter has returned from some near-death scrape; Sudden, unafraid of confrontation, always quickest on the draw (only Wild Bill Hickock ever matches him, but that's just a friendly trial), self-assured and decisive in the wilds, a brilliant tracker and seeker-out of clues, stoically philosophical in adversity, modestly embarrassed by the rich stores of praise that are showered on him by those who matter and with equal modesty resisting the darkness of an undeserved reputation as an outlaw, unobtrusively driven by a private quest and deeper feelings than those around him. To aspire to be Sudden, I understood, did not have to mean being a gunslinger.
Strange's strengths as a writer are crackling dialogue, lean and expert construction, a wide and curious vocabulary (George Eliot lies behind some of it, such as "anent"), and a descriptive power less opulent than Zane Grey's but more focussed on the needs of a pacy story. Here Sudden and his sidekick Barsay have hooked up with Andy Bordene's cattle drive, pitching camp in The Pocket under a threatening sky:
Arrangements for
the night were well forward when they reached the camping-place, which they did
at leisure. The herd had been watered and now, under the ministrations of half
a dozen circling riders, was quietly settling down at the far end of the valley.
At the near end the cook had a big fire going and the busy rattle of pots and
pans sent a cheerful message to tired and hungry men. Having given their mounts
a drink, and picketed them, without removing the saddles, the visitors joined
the loungers by the fireside.
The customary
baiting of the cook was proceeding in a promising manner when a distant rumble
of thunder put a sudden end to it. Anxious eyes turned skywards, where an inky,
rolling mass of cloud was wiping out the stars in a steady advance. Then came a spot or two of rain.
"She's
a-comin', boys, shore as shootin'," Andy said. "Better be ready for
anythin' that breaks loose."
Scrambling
hurriedly to their feet, the men donned slickers...
*
NOTE 1:
In the reading
sequence, which is not the sequence of publication, The Marshal of Lawless is preceded by Sudden - Outlawed (in which the youthful hero first takes an oath
to seek revenge on the killers of his father, and gains his monicker), and also
by Sudden (in which he is secretly
employed by Governor Bleke as an agent for the forces of law and order).
These background
matters remain constant in the novels that follow. Strange follows the plan of
Spenser's Faerie Queene, with
Sudden/Jim Green as Prince Arthur: actively involved in the free-standing
adventure of each book but not (formally) its hero. It's Sudden's junior
comrade who has the life-adventure, conquers his sea of troubles and winds up
marrying the girl. Sudden rides off into the sunset, still intent on his larger
quest.
That quest culminates,
we are promised, in The Range Robbers.
However, readers who patiently follow the saga through will be more than a
little disappointed. The Range Robbers was actually the first book
Strange wrote, when already approaching retirement: he was an employee of the
publishers, George Newnes, Ltd and he lived in
The Range Robbers (1930)
The Law O' The Lariat (1931)
Sudden (1933)
The Marshal of Lawless (1933)
Sudden - Outlawed (1935)
Sudden - Goldseeker (1937)
Sudden Rides Again (1938)
Sudden Takes the Trail (1940)
Sudden Makes War (1942)
Sudden Plays a Hand (1950)
Oliver Strange
never visited
NOTE 2:
Sudden - Outlawed is among other things an account of an eventually successful
cattle drive along (or slightly off) the
NOTE 3:
This wasn't an
unusual name to give to animals. On the Terra
Nova, the ship that was supposed to pick up Captain Scott in 1913, the
black cat was called Nigger. I have been told about someone's neighbour's dog
being called Nigger in the late 1950s.
Victor Canning
We will yet save you from
the glutine. The aples is better bruised first.
There was a moon, five days
past the full, and striking sparks of quicksilver from
the outcrops
the easeful sweep of
his legs, and the feeling of hard ground under him, came like a balm after his
cramped day in the pit
A great velvet moth burred
into his face
Once from the pale sky a
shooting star drew a curve of instant fire
a train rattling
by, and as he opened his eyes he saw the brightly-lit windows swirl before him
like a cinema-screen, saw nodding heads and faces that gaped through the glass
Victor Canning was a hard-working popular novelist of the mid-century. Forty-one books are listed and I expect they are all good; the kind a straightforward reader could not merely enjoy but love. I suppose the hardbacks went into lending libraries (perhaps they are still there) and the paperbacks onto railway bookstalls in the home counties. The titles may be quotations (His Bones are Coral), sporting tags (Doubled in Diamonds) or the sort of thing that Robert Ludlum later tried to trademark (The Scorpio Letters).
I have only read two of them, and they are
very different, though not as different as they can be made to sound. Mr
Finchley discovers his
I extracted the lines above from two pages of Mr Finchley. Canning had a marvellous gift for description on the run. But the dialogue in Mr Finchley belongs to an age before the talkies, expansive and literary. Venetian Bird, on the other hand, is like this:
San Marco itself seemed cut
out of metallic paper, livid golds and greens under the powerful lights, and
the Campanile was a great raw finger scratching at the dark sky with its sharp
nail.
“Sperai ch il tempo, e i duri
casi, e queste
Rupi ch’io varco
anelando . . .”
“. . . Amor fra l’ombre
inferne
Seguirammi immortale,
omnipotente.”
The voice stopped and she
switched the radio off.
“Ugo Foscolo – one of my
favourites.”
“I like his voice.”
“You’re a barbarian, dear
boy. Foscolo’s dead. It was being read by another poet – Madeo Nervi. He’s
coming to
“I will – if I’m here.”
She said: “Within the last
hour someone’s cracked you on the forehead. The blood’s scarcely dry.”
“I ran into a wall.”
“In your job that
happens sometimes.”
He got up and walked around
the room with his glass in his hand. He stopped by the window, running one
finger gently along the slats of the blind.
“Did you find anything about
the girl Medova?”
“Not much.” She knew he wasn’t going to talk. She didn’t want to know anything for herself, but talking might help him. She’d made it her business to have a look at the girl and had been jealous – pleased in fact by her jealousy like someone coming into a cold room and finding a red ember waiting to be blown to warmth under the grey ashes.
(How easily, by the way, the author deals with everyone speaking Italian throughout the book. Mercer’s is very good, of course, but not up to engaging with a poem on the radio when it’s already half-way through. Instead, he fixes on the voice.)
(2004)
H.A.L. Fisher: A
History of
With a preface to the one-volume edition written in January 1936. The date is arresting, of course. Fisher’s 1,300 pages lead us, as it seems, right up to the threshold of a European catastrophe; yet the author, though plainly guessing much of what was to come, has no firm knowledge of what is constantly in our minds. This is how the book ends:
In the mean time the war has left us with an evil legacy. The moral
unity of
Both destinies, you might say, came to
pass; first the ruins and then the plenty. By “the war” Fisher means of course
what he calls the Great War and what we call the First World War. Part of the
evil legacy, ironically, was that right-minded ideal of good people (as in
The sanctity of life in the hill villages of
That was a remarkable and admirable thing
to say for the prospective leader of a colonial Empire, but it was colonial
thinking nevertheless. The idea of a single, unified native people was not even
expressed, it was such a basic assumption. In
A few lines earlier, Fisher meditates on
I seem to be writing about this backwards. The Epilogue begins:
After some twenty million years of life upon this planet the lot of the
major part of humanity is still, as Hobbes once described it, “nasty, brutish
and short.” Of its two thousand million inhabitants some
hundred and fifty million are still living very close to the hunger limit.”
Seventy years later, the figures are 6.5 billion (total) and 850 million (undernourished).
In detail, naturally, Fisher is like every
historian laid open to the ironies of hindsight. This is about
A second benefit conferred upon
Similarly Fisher has hope for the other new
states brought into existence by the treaty of
There were many who lamented the
disappearance of the great country houses, which had played their part in the
art, letters, and politics of the middle east [i.e. of
How irrelevant that “strong cordon” was, events were to show. All these countries fell pitiful victims to the ensuing horrors; all, to some extent, played a part in perpetrating the horrors; peasant ownership might salve some wounds, but it inflamed others, e.g. the resentment of (traditionally non-landowning) Jewish communities.
Surprisingly, the shape of
Many among the Allies hoped that the U.S
would sign the Treaty and itself join the
*
High-level overviews work best when you are
reading about something you don’t know much about. That’s how I feel, anyhow.
Perhaps there are some informed people who have a real taste for masterly
précis; the same kind of people, maybe, who admire a well-chosen anthology. But
what I was struck by was what I knew especially little of: The Seven Years War,
Napoleon’s campaigns,
I also found it interesting that the
partition of
The chapter about slavery begins: “In the
history of
However, the point is of course that Fisher’s opening sentence couldn’t have been written ten years later. That there could, on a scale of millions, be crimes against another people even more infamous than slavery, was yet unknown. Hitler intended to revive a form of slavery too. The Slav races, already slaves in name, were to be slaves in fact.
*
I want details. Let’s be a bit more probing
about this. I’d recently read Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why (1953)
– a brilliant double biography of Lords Cardigan and Lucan. The book leads up
to that terrible hour at
On the Crimean War Fisher’s account of diplomatic and military bungling is full of sharp lessons vaguely reminiscent of the classical historians; as if writing this kind of history is a behaviour that creates its own subjects. In its own terms this is good writing, and is for use: modern makers of foreign policy, attend! Reading Woodham-Smith’s book, on the other hand, we are overwhelmed by something quite outside that classical range, that is by the differentness of Victorian society, the uniqueness of the disaster. Yet where does summary stop? It’s like the layers of the onion, and Woodham-Smith’s book too is surmise and generalities; however, it’s at a level of granularity that is more interesting to me.
(2006)
Harold P. Clunn: The Face of the Home Counties (1936)
... Portrayed
in a series of eighteen week-end drives from
Leisure motoring was then something
dramatically new, and yet something very unlike what it connotes today. Clunn
exulted: "the construction of the new arterial roads leading out of
London, and the widening and reconstruction of the older roads, have made the
Home Counties seem like one vast playground laid out almost at our doors".
His eighteen intricate routes take us through every town and in some areas
nearly every village in the south-eastern corner of
DRIVE SEVEN: From
the West End to Colchester, Dedham, Ipswich, Felixstowe, Dovercourt,
Walton-on-the-Naze, Clacton-on-Sea, and back by Brightlingsea, Tollesbury,
Maldon, Danbury, Billericay, and Brentwood to the West End.
That sounds like a lot of driving, leaving little time for pausing at even the major stops (i.e. the ones that get named in this outline). Oddly, maps were not included. There was as yet no naming-system for major roads; Clunn did not seem to anticipate any difficulty in following his directions, though there would be difficulties now, and sat-nav would be hopeless at this. One begins to realize after a while that these drives are ideal conceptions, an elegant means of avoiding the tedium of a mere catalogue.
Still, I think the challenge of following each of Clunn's routes over eighteen successive week-ends would make a fine project for a retired person with plenty of time and spending-money.
What transformed leisure motoring most of all is the motorway network, which began to emerge in 1958. Now a week-end away is usually about getting as far away as possible in a straight line, and then pootling about in exotic surroundings, getting a chance to relax a bit before shooting back down the motorway on a Sunday evening. "Touring" (the origin of "tourist") is almost an obsolete idea, except for owners of camper-vans.
The town of
That last phrase catches us up short. In
our own time the motorist (except in officialese) is a person of very limited
interests: chiefly, getting from A to B and the price of fuel. In Clunn's work,
however, the motorist is interested in guildhalls, Norman churches, sea
defences, the hotel balcony from which Disraeli made his first speech, and
important local establishments such as the Royal Eastern Counties Institution
for Mental Defectives (
Clunn's prose style is, you will already
have gathered, a little buttoned-up. He will not address the reader as
"you", sometimes speaking of "the motorist" but most often
of "we" (a doctor's we) : "About one
mile west of Seal we come to the cross-roads for Sevenoaks and Farningham, and
here we turn to our right..." Views
are "spacious", spires "lofty", hotels "stately"
and "commodious". He betrays hardly any sense of humour, and his
enthusiasm is more apparent in the thoroughness of the work than in ecstasies,
though there are exceptions, as here, of "the largest and finest
garden-city in the
A week in
I don't know Bournemouth, but the generally
pristine elegance of Clunn's seaside towns is impressive, comparing them with
today, e.g. St Leonards, then adorned with a pier (demolished) to match that at
Hastings (closed down), not to mention Warrior Square, "considered by many
people to be the largest and finest square in England", now a neglected
space of melancholy public gardens adorned with notices about antisocial
behaviour, surrounded by cheap lets and buildings too dilapidated to let at
all. Change creates new centres of attention. Clunn has little to say about
Peacehaven already had the
"by-word" reputation from which it has even now not quite recovered.
Bad reputations take time. The pretty
Of smaller places along the way Clunn will
at minimum give the population and tell us what the church is made of, its architectural style and the number of bells. He is also
very interested in elevation, perhaps because steep roads were still something
of an adventure, but also because he has a high appreciation of good air and of
extensive views ("from which seven counties can be seen"). Thus
Caterham and Hindhead are little
Clunn's own routes may be an ideal to be admired rather than studiously followed, but motoring excursions were certainly popular, as reflected in the new roadhouses.
One and a half
miles from Watford and situated on the beautiful by-pass road which skirts the
town on the east side is the Spider's Web, a palatial roadhouse with a French
restaurant, a swimming-pool, and a ballroom with a balcony leading out on to a
delightful terrace.
Or, at Hook:
the new 'Ace of Spades Roadhouse and Swimming
Pool' which has been erected on the north-west corner of the
These roadhouses vied with the magnificent cinemas as the icons of democratized leisure.
*
Dagenham... a vast
new garden suburb of
(2009)
This header should really be removed. It seemed a matter of course that I would write about Karin Boye, since I'd spent quite a lot of time translating some Poems by Karin Boye, but this hasn't happened. The exercise of translating made me unwilling to be analytical.
Boye published four books of verse in her
lifetime: Möln (Clouds, 1922), Gömda land (Hidden Lands, 1924), Härdarna (Hearths, 1927), and För trädets skull (For the Tree's Sake,
1935). A fifth volume appeared after her death: De sju dödssynderna och andre efterlämnade
dikter (The Seven Deadly Sins and other posthumous poems, 1941). She also
wrote a number of novels.
(2007)
The
This is a collection of short stories - which means that I’m not meeting the spy genre on its strongest ground. It’s obvious that the murky magnificence that was foreshadowed in Bleak House and The Secret Agent cannot be developed to any great extent in this brief medium.
In fact, this limitation of scope results in a ragbag. There are perhaps no “classic” short spy stories. Nevertheless, reading through the collection (once) is enjoyable. Perhaps it is a nutty sort of education. I never expect or desire to read much of Capt W.E. Johns or Ian Fleming, but at least I can feel I’ve read something.
The best stories are “Peiffer” (A.E.W. Mason), “Giulia Lazzari” (Somerset Maugham), “Judith” (C.E. Montague), “The Pigeon Man” (Valentine Williams), “The Army of the Shadows” (Eric Ambler), “Risico” (Ian Fleming), and “Paper Casualty” (Len Deighton). Some notable names (Buchan, Greene) are represented by second-rate work. Of the stories mentioned, Montague’s is Kiplingesque - an adjective that sufficiently suggests both its strengths and its limitations -, Ambler is sentimental but exciting, Fleming’s is his own curious genre done as well as it can be done, and Deighton’s is just there because it’s well-written - it’s not much of a story. Maugham’s is the only one that has significant literary qualities of a familiar kind - it deserves to be called a “criticism of life”.
Or to put it another way, it’s the only story that in a sense justifies the assertion (on the back cover) that “they form a wonderfully entertaining literary insight into a world of intrigue and deception”. In the more obvious sense, none of the stories achieve this insight and a little reflection suggests that they couldn’t hope to do so. The “world” as it is used in this sentence can only be an imaginary construct, a nebulous impression aroused in the mind of the reader. It isn’t possible to gain “insights” into that kind of conception, because it just doesn’t have any substance. Indeed you might argue that the whole point of espionage is that it doesn’t take place in its own “world” but in someone else’s.
What might reasonably be expected is some substantial information about, for example, the tools of a professional spy. But this proves oddly elusive. Perhaps because the writers don’t have the information - more likely because the information they do supply is not credited. Any device that can be publically discussed in this kind of way is plainly just the thing that a good spy should steer clear of. The spy must manipulate the world as it is.
On the front cover is an arresting photograph of a man wearing a Homburg and lighting a cigarette. The stories don’t help us to understand him. Maugham is an exception. His characters are complicated and unlovely. In the contradictions I recognize human life - I didn’t expect to. For him the word “insight” is just, but it isn’t an insight into espionage but into something broader, something that evades categories.
[Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) is a powerful restorative.
The story of the hapless Serbian clerk Bulić is but one of
many that flourish in the book’s free-and-easy cheapness. Ambler is admired for his evocation of the
spirit of the thirties – and the book is (again, easily) conscious of this
fact. This “spirit of the thirties” is, I think, a piece of hyperreality; one
does not find it, for example, in Ronald Fraser’s Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (1979). But
hyperreal conceptions remain important.
I have since read another of Ambler's early novels, Uncommon Danger (1937, US title Background to Danger). This is good too.
The hero Kenton is a cynical journalist who, short of funds, gets involved in
smuggling some documents out of Nazi Germany. But then he finds his contact
murdered... the book eventually resolves into one of those heartwarming
unlikely-buddy novels - the buddy is a Soviet agent called Zaleshoff, minor
romantic interest being supplied by his sister Tamara, who is an ace getaway
driver. The best scene is the one in which the two buddies are being suffocated
in the vulcanizing chamber of a deserted cable factory; but see also the
earlier torture scene, the Linz coach trip and crossing the border into
Czechoslovakia, etc. The book's politics are surprisingly upfront and Ambler
seems to have solved technical problems of the spy genre that most later writers would continue to struggle with.
Ambler's later books are good too. In the The Night-Comers (1956) the narrator-hero is an English engineer
caught up in a military coup in an imaginary SE Asian country. Ambler’s jaundiced
account of realpolitik Sundanese-style is effortlessly absorbing: you’re aware
that you’re really learning things, though they may not be completely true
things. This is a literally post-colonialist situation; Ambler naturally
distorts his account to favour the European colonialists, - we don't hear much
about their atrocities - but by
creating a situation where the colonialists are weak and terrified he exposes
widely-held but now rarely-spoken beliefs about places on earth where life is
cheap and culture is alien. Horribly exposed is what the narrator is, which is
what makes the book exciting; perhaps the main thing he takes refuge in is his
superior Western understanding and judgment of the unfolding events; but the
challenges to this complacency, in the form of Suparto and Rosalie in
particular, are strong and intelligent.]
(2002, 2003)
C.S.Lewis: The
Problem of Pain (1940)
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a many-sided author. His earliest publications, up to 1930, were tentative attempts at establishing a career as a poet; but clearly he had (to put it kindly) the wrong sort of talent. In1929 he experienced a conversion, gave up his militant atheism and adopted a forthright Christianity. His academic career was by now in full swing. The 1930s saw his first scholarly books, Rehabilitations (a collection of separate essays) and the formidable Allegory of Love (1936), which was very well received and established him near the head of his field, which was medieval and renaissance literature. The creative urge had not left him and he also produced an allegory of his own conversion called The Pilgrim’s Regress; this was a poor book, but he was to make up for that later when he covered the same ground in Surprised by Joy.
His great run of popular Christian books
began with The Problem of Pain (1940). Scholarly work continued,
including the magnificent English Literature in the Sixteenth Century
(1954 - the one book of his that I have never stopped reading, and
probably never will)*. He also wrote a science fiction trilogy, and of course
the popular Narnia books for children; and much else. All his work speaks in
the same, instantly recognizable, voice; but there is some variation. During
the war years, which also produced The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity,
and the Preface to ‘
To speak personally, I don’t care anything for the science fiction books with their thinly-disguised religious themes, and I don’t care deeply for the hastily-written Narnia series – The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair are the ones I like best. His other fictions are not outstanding either. The excellent Screwtape Letters is best regarded as a series of colourful sermons. Even Till we have faces (1956) only really pleases me because it is at the opposite extreme from the stridency of the early 1940s**. Lewis learnt from his own experiences in an oddly child-like and definite way, and his books from the mid-1950s onward are the work of a wiser and humbler man: Reflections on the Psalms, The Four Loves, A Grief Observed etc.
His writing remained anathema to many progressives, though; they were scarcely able to compete with the immense though lightly-carried learning of books such as Studies in Words and The Discarded Image, but they took infuriated exception to a tone that implied on almost every page an utterly different outlook from their own. The fury was all the greater because the fundamental simplicity of his views allied to an outstanding limpidity and graciousness of expression produced a dangerously populist cocktail. They knew he would be listened to, and it didn’t seem fair. It is said that Lewis failed badly in his debate with a professional philosopher following the publication of Miracles. The perception of those who said so was that his cocksure cleverness went with a complete failure to understand the point of any twentieth-century intellectual or artistic movement; he could only make snide populist remarks like a journalist writing for the Daily Mail. It remains a disturbing paradox, the more so because (having been so deeply influenced by Lewis during my late teens and early twenties, when I was both a medievalist and a born-again Christian) I am afraid that I share a good many of his blindnesses, and am in some fundamental way arrested in an imaginary Lewisian world of values even though my conscious opinions were never conservative and are not now religious. (I should add that, though Lewis has been anthologised in collections of Conservative thought, I do not remember him ever pronouncing on a party-political matter; he seems to have been perfectly sincere in his professed lack of interest in topics of that sort. At the same time there’s no doubt who would have been most upset by his assaults on e.g. modern educationalists***.)
The Problem of Pain, at its best, can be illustrated from this passage about guilt from the chapter entitled “Human Wickedness”:
A recovery of the old sense
of sin is essential to Christianity.... [Without it,] the result is almost
bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one
who is always making impossible demands and always inexplicably angry.... Why
not live and let live? What call has He, of all beings, to be “angry”? It’s
easy for Him to be good!
Now at the moment when a man
feels real guilt – moments too rare in our lives – all these blasphemies vanish
away. Much, we may feel, can be excused to human infirmities: but not this –
this incredibly mean and ugly action which none of our friends would have done,
which even such a thorough-going little rotter as X would have been ashamed of,
which we would not for the world allow to be published. At such a moment we
really do know that our character, as revealed in this action, is, and ought to
be, hateful to all good men, and, if there are powers above man, to them. A God
who did not regard this with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being.
We cannot even wish for such a God...
In short, the “grandfather in Heaven” picture of God appeals only to those who have no sense of a living God at all, like myself. This seems to me a completely persuasive argument. Of course you can say that when someone feels guilty it often makes them feel better to be particularly self-condemnatory, taking comfort in their inner high-mindedness. But this says nothing about the truth of the insight. A real God must be, whatever else, inexorable.
The chapters on Hell and Heaven carry the same conviction. Lewis was immediately criticized for defending the doctrine of Hell, which was presumably an embarrassment to other propagators of the faith, but this criticism amounts to nothing. Anyone can see that hell does indeed exist in many places on earth, and therefore its metaphysical dimension poses no new difficulty. The Christian story makes no sense if there is no hell. How can anyone be moved by Good News unless things are seen to be bad? Why would anyone busy themselves with saving sinners unless there is something to save them from? Why is there a church entrusted with a mission if it is impossible for anyone to turn away from God? It is true that hellfire preaching and hellfire parenting had repulsively abused one element in that story, and laid the whole Christian system open to the most violent objections, but for churchmen to just go quiet about it was a trifling evasion, which merely demonstrated what most people already sensed, that if you wanted to learn the truth about anything it was no good asking a priest.
Here are some sentences from the chapter on Heaven.
You may think that there is
another reason for our silence about heaven – namely, that we do not really
desire it... There have been times when I think that we do not desire heaven;
but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have
ever desired anything else... Are not all lifelong friendships born at the
moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but
faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something you were born desiring,
and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences
between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old
age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it.
... The thing I am speaking of is not an experience. You have experienced only
the want of it. ... Always it has summoned you out of yourself. And if
you will not go out of yourself to follow it, if you sit down and brood on the desire
and attempt to cherish it, the desire itself will evade you. “The door into
life generally opens behind us” and “the only wisdom” for one “haunted with the
scent of unseen roses, is work.” This secret fire goes out when you use the
bellows: bank it down with what seems unlikely fuel of dogma and ethics, turn
your back on it and attend to your duties, and then it will blaze. The world is
like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in that picture.
Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death
you cannot see the gold. But we have reminders of it. To change our metaphor,
the black-out is not quite complete. There are chinks. At times the daily scene
looks big with its secret.
If I call this a great piece of literary criticism (e.g. of George Macdonald, whose words are quoted) I may seem to be unfairly limiting the kind of writing that it is. I don’t intend that. We tend to have a mental picture of primary writing (“literature”) that is in some way directly engaged with life, and then
of secondary writing (“criticism”, “commentary”, “review”) that stands lower in the hierarchy and only addresses itself to details of primary writing, so that engagement with life has become flickering and indirect. Unfortunately the grey bulk of any university library tends to confirm that hierarchy. But “literary criticism” as I mean it here (and Lewis is a prime example), if it moves away from the original writer’s words, does not thereby move further from life, but only sideways to get a different angle, and though further from one aspect of life nearer to another. In the same sense I might want to say that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a great literary criticism of Plutarch.
But at the same time I do intend a limitation of my praise. Unquestionably the heaven suggested in this chapter is a heaven that can be believed in and can be wished for (its very definition, indeed, is that it is wished for). The limitation is that the kind of yearning evoked by Lewis is (I suspect rather than know) an experience that only a few people can instantly relate to. If it is, as one might immediately judge, really an inchoate desire to return to the womb, then that might make it more universal. But for it to seem like a possible hint of heaven one needs to conceive it in its developed manifestation. That what evokes the yearning in Lewis’ own examples (“the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side”) reflects Lewis’s own tastes and nationality and gender and interests is not an argument against it. But it appears to me that a yearning for the unrealizable is not an intrinsic part of human experience. I don’t know; I admit that, personally, I recognize what he’s talking about very well, but then, I share many of his backgrounds. Human experience is overwhelmingly various.
As an outline of Lewisian Christianity, then, the book seems to me a success. I shan’t bother much about local criticisms; the chapter on “Animal Pain” seems to me to depend on some quite extraordinary views about non-human life – one gathers that Lewis had no interest in nature****. But on the general subject that his book purports to treat, i.e. suffering, I think his success is very mediocre.
Lewis was writing when
The natural and right human reactions to suffering are, for a sufferer, to endure it if possible; for a witness, to alleviate it if possible, or else to lament it. Lewis’s book may well have cheered sufferers and helped them to endure – in fact I’m sure it did, though he disclaims both the intention and the skill. But his argument proves far too much, and really leaves no room for lamentation, grief, horror or shock. One must be appalled at Ivan Karamazov’s accounts of children being tortured; but how can God’s world contain what one must be appalled by? And what redemptive salvation is imaginable that can ever right these wrongs? It is a fundamental challenge to the Christian story of a good God.
An instance of where I think Lewis’ book is at its weakest is his argument against the additiveness of pain. He argues, basically, that in a waiting-room where two people have toothache, no-one is experiencing “2 x toothache”; the pain threshold of one individual sufferer is all the pain there ever can be. He actually uses this example of toothache, and I think you’ll agree that it tends to trivialize the matter. People do not question the benevolence of God because of toothache. They question it when whole communities are ruined, when villages are burnt, when countries starve, when cities are sacked or when people are herded into a forest to dig their own graves.
Therefore we ask, Monarch of all that lives,
Firm in your heavenly throne,
While the destroying Fury gives
Our homes to ashes and our flesh to worms –
We ask, and ask: What does this mean to You?
(Euripides, The Women of
It's quite true that each individual can suffer no more than the worst a soul can suffer. But we are more than individuals; the wholesale destruction of communities, families, cultures, ways of life, invoke feelings that are different from those in which a single person suffers torment.
Lewis, I think, was not much of a community
person. His books are almost entirely free of patriotism or a sense of
nationhood, which is rather refreshing. He was not close to his parents (his
mother died when he was nine) and he had no children. As a scholar he had risen
untrammelled out of
Some of the shortcomings of his treatment of suffering must have become plain to him personally when, after the loss of his wife from cancer, he wrote A Grief Observed. The earlier book is in the end frivolous. In it he pretends to write about pain in order to give an athletic display of the strength and joyousness of his conviction. It was a calling-card.
*
A C.S. Lewis sentence and its influence
There are several sentences in C.S. Lewis’ works that have influenced me deeply. This is one of them:
The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find
something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside the secondhand bookshop.
In fact, like other deeply influential sentences that became part of my everyday mental furniture, I didn’t remember it at all accurately. I remembered it, approximately, as “the real sign of a good reader is being able to find something to read on a railway station bookstall”. The variation isn’t really all that important, but it meant I elided the question of what is meant by “needs” in connection with reading.
So far as this ideal of a good reader is concerned, the influence is pretty obvious, e.g. from the book you are reading now. I cultivated an interest in whatever books came to hand, and found after a while that I never really needed to go and buy new books; I preferred to loiter in the charity shops, since I was just as fulfilled by what I found there as by any imaginable alternative. (It also saved my purse and it appealed vaguely to ecological principles at the same time.)
This self-education in the books of the charity shop eventually provoked my notion of relativism. Since it was in fact possible, rather easily possible, to find something to read all the time, perhaps (I surmised) no book was really any better than any other; it was all about the reader. You could (I theorized) in principle drag the same fruit from a worthless detective pap novel or a book of recipes for the freezer that you could get from Julius Caesar and Leaves of Grass – after all, the whole of culture was encoded in the language and the moves made within those books. And what grounds have you to condemn what may seem dull or crude when you don’t know the full context, when you don’t write such books yourself and you aren’t part of their natural audience and you don’t even know what it’s like to write such books or read them in their intended context?
I don’t think Lewis would have approved that particular extension of his thought. He plainly believed in real values, and on his sixpenny tray he wasn’t envisaging recipe books. I think his example is tactically chosen, in fact because he really thought there was usually a lot more worth reading on the sixpenny tray (some Scott or Stevenson, probably) than in fashionably abstruse shelves full of the Bloomsburys and modernism and other things he didn’t feel interested in grasping, like Wittgenstein. But I didn’t understand that message or absorb it, at least not very deeply.
I didn’t remember the sentence accurately, and of course I didn’t remember its context either, at least not consciously. It comes from the chapter about “Affection” in The Four Loves (1960). Lewis remarks on the indiscriminate nature of affection and how (unlike the less humble loves) its objects are not selected; for their intelligence or sexiness, for example. We develop affection for someone because they just happen to be around. In that context he starts to talk about what it means to have a wide sympathy for other people; it isn’t demonstrated by having a large number of friends or lovers (for they are chosen) but by a ready sympathy with people that you probably wouldn’t choose. That’s when the analogy with reading comes along.
The whole chapter is good, but this is about me and the sentence. Forgetting the original context, I have extended the message I took back out from the bookstall to other art-forms, nature, place, weather and people. It’s a seductive analogy but like all analogies it has falsity stitched into it. It all works very smoothly so long as you aren’t trying to accomplish anything. If things (or people) aren’t tools, why indeed should you get hung up about value? It sounds amiable, but is limited; of course the alternative sounds terrible – the way I’ve chosen to present it – people as tools! But reading books (and being with humans, too), these actvities are diminished if they are just contemplative idylls, just about the mild pleasure of watching the clouds race and not about making things happen. I know this, but my nature didn’t want all that trouble; shrugged aside the unattractive risks of accusation or confrontation. That’s why I find the sentence a good example of what influence, too often, amounts to. You seize the little moment that fits how you already feel inclined to live. This is waking life, but it works in much the same way that dreams get composed out of materials that cohere because of multiple, stray, happy accidents. I was really influenced, but I had reasons for welcoming the influence.
But still, Lewis was a great reader, so long as “great” means being open to wonder. A colleague remembered him, shortly before his death, enthusing boyishly about Les liaisons dangereuses – not a book you might have expected him to take to. “Why has no-one told me about this before?” he demanded.
*
Notes:
* I picked it up to check the date of publication – it happened to be
already out of the shelves – and lost most of an evening reading the first
chapter for the hundredth time. [Aside from its own merit, it also produced a
fine pendant in the form of John Carey's essay "Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Century Prose", printed in English
Poetry and Prose 1540-1674, ed. Christopher Ricks (Sphere History of
Literature in the English Language, Vol. 2). Carey, and to some extent Ricks, are
post-Lewis critics quite as much as they are post-Leavis critics, and Carey's
essay consistently has Lewis in view; chiefly in his energetic assaults on
works canonized by Lewis such as More's Dialogue
of Comfort, Sidney's Arcadia and
Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity.
Though Carey reaches quite opposite conclusions from his master, he reads these
books in the same kind of way, as living repositories of values that must be
earnestly proclaimed or torn down. When neither likes the book, they say merely
the same things (Lyly's Euphuism), but Carey enjoys negative critique as much
as Lewis did and he is prepared to sacrifice Bunyan altogether in order to
spend a few pages ripping Walton's Lives to
shreds; Carey on Bunyan would have taxed the author much more.]
** It is fair to say that great swathes of Christian heartland do not
agree with me. The impressive 140 reader reviews for Till We Have Faces on
amazon.com speak of it as a life-changing discovery. (The largest number of
reader reviews that I have come across is 267 for Raymond Feist’s Magician: Apprentice.)
*** What Lewis did proclaim, at least when he was at his most
unworldly, was essentially the Augustinian argument of De Civitate Dei. The
nature of earthly government did not matter; one should be law-abiding, but
what really mattered was the heavenly city. In principle this view implies
political quietism; it lends no support to the idea that one kind of government
is better than another. But in practice this means lending no support to
political change, and in particular denying the aspirations of Marxist belief.
A more developed political view grew out of studying Hooker and others for the
“OHEL”. But the word “conservative”, even without a capital letter,
creates a false idea of the kind of writer Lewis was – he was not a follower of
ideas but a creator of them. It’s true that he often presented his views as if
he was revering some tradition or orthodoxy, but this only reflects his
myth-making temperament. His ideas were really a new development building on
romanticism and in particular some of its nineteenth century offshoots (e.g.
George Macdonald). For Lewis the ideas of the past were not a vague cloud of
worthy sentiments, as for a conservative, but a dynamic intellectual conflict
in which he eagerly participated as if it were all still alive (there are no
“dead issues” in Lewis’s world). Wholesale acceptance or rejection of the past
would have meant nothing to him; he grasped too much of the detail. He defended what he cared about, and tended
to re-invent it as he did it.
**** But he did, some years later, write a very powerful
anti-vivisection essay; the grounds were philosophical and humanist.
(2004)
In the locale of “The Explorers” the hands on the clock don’t move, but the compass needle does.
Explorers moving through the
vivid lands
Of moveless time: inebriated
urge
Towards the dreamed
Where last magnetic rays of
sunlight bend
Till vertical and horizontal
merge
In final contact,
touch of ungloved hands.
The axis in the mind
projecting hope,
The folded mountains and the
cobalt sea
Emerge; shadows of sunlight
on the rock
Seduce the senses, wind the
moveless clock,
Give birth to wishes, fears;
the will to be
Immortal, and the
twitching fingers grope.
The compass moves, glint of
the
November and the melancholy
wind,
Snow on the marbles tombs:
elastic flesh
Expands, consumes; fakes
with its fuse a flash –
The image, vivid, flickers
in the mind,
The vibrant, beautiful, exciting lie.
These are the first three of twenty-nine stanzas. The stanza-form is, by Yates’ standards, simple; six five-stress lines rhyming abccba. There are only a few internal rhymes (tombs, consumes). There are harsh chatters of prolonged alliteration, like a burst of machine-gun fire. The “iambic” flow is a constant in all his poems. Each of these stanzas gathers a sense of purpose towards the middle, when the rhymes are closer together and we feel we’re “getting somewhere”, and then loses it, reaching its firm full stop with a feeling of dissatisfaction. The form makes each stanza seem self-contained and isolated from its fellows.
Progression is by noun-phrases. Nouns are preceded by the definite article, though this is somewhat disguised by elision of particles (for example, in the first stanza we assume “the inebriated urge”, “the last magnetic rays”, “the touch of ungloved hands”). Nevertheless, the appears 155 times in “The Explorers”, and a/an just six times. What’s going on here? When we read “the vivid lands” our faces are held down, coerced by the poet’s imagination. But when we read (as above, in the third stanza) “a flash”, a familiar context is implied: we are referred to the world outside the poem in which we have seen other flashes; this is but one of them. Yates makes very sparing use of that context in his early poems. You might like to know that the next time we run across a, it is “a stifled cry”, and the next time “a shriek”. These three faint animal interjections are pitifully crushed by the engine of the poem.
“Snow on the marbles tombs” may be a misprint, but don’t be too sure; tombs may be a verb. Verbs have a tendency to seem like nouns in this moveless operation. Several stanzas (like the first) manage without any direct verb. But one verb – “move” – is insistent.
Again the compass moves; the
visions pass
and burn like
spectral fevers in the eye.
The thunder speaks, the
fatal axis moves,
Recedes, slips off its safe
and formal grooves
To where gigantic mirrors
multiply
Only the total
being of their glass.
O wanderers, betrayed by
swamp and slime,
Receding from alacrity of
youth
To move in lonely circuits
of the brain
Down pensive passages,
propelled by pain
In search of moments
motionless with truth,
Adrift, lost in
the wilderness of time.
Explorers moving through
imagined space
Led by equator’s never
ending line
In search of pyramids and
plangent curves;
Creating new sensation with
the nerves;
New instruments to heat the
blood’s decline;
New formulas to
hide the ego’s face.
Explorers sinking in
bewildered blood
I watch you through my
lenses, see you move
In search of final islands,
and that place
Where lost and rigid
parallels embrace
With kiss and crackle of
electric love
The separate
polarities of good.
Insensate time: clock
without face or hands,
Revolting torso with the
abstract eye
Made hideous by hate, I see
you move
In moveless moments in which
secret groove
Towards what formula or
frozen lie
Only the lucid madman
understands.
(Stanzas
7-11)
What, then, moves? The explorers, the compass, the mind’s eye; the poet’s mind and the reader’s eye.
They move through a dense thicket of repetitions, deterring progress. The poem does the opposite of providing a mimesis of journeying; it provides, instead, a non-progressing obstacle. There is nothing to drink; it is the explorer’s own need that inebriates.
But voyagers on gleaming
parallels
Still reach towards the
image in the mind...
(Stanza 16)
“Gleaming” gives us a sense of relief. Like the “kiss and crackle of electric love”, it falsely suggests something drinkable, and also something speedy – the gleam, as it were, shoots ahead of the voyagers. But this is deceptive relief under a burning sun. Consider that arresting phrase in Stanza 2, “shadows of sunlight”.
“The Explorers” continues Yates’ long
quarrel with thought, and is a toxic mindscape. Nothing is fixed there (we have
already seen the November wind), and much else comes within its compass;
including, with some reticence, war-time
And
in the towns, where death becomes an art... (St 21)
But Yates keeps his focus on the tangle of the self:
Where being is itself the
subtle crime (St
25)
His own mind, no doubt one of the hungry explorers too, snags on non-progressive images of futility:
And speedboats with no
destination move
Tracing their foaming
circles of false love (St 28)
So much for speed. Through much transmutation, Yates’ poems remain fixed on their object, and this idea is still lurking forty years later in the slow barge of the memorial to his wife:
Metaphor burns me with the
edge of dreams.
Love holds in need, by net
of names
The intricate and simple,
grief and joy,
Green water rippled by a
swan.
A hand, a shape, a scarf of
hair -
Pure drunkenness of open
air!
I follow where the dead have
gone
The hidden path once printed
with your name.
You wander in the dark
Beyond the comfort of my
arms!
Through scalding tears of
reverie
I watch the lion sun with
blazing mane
Creep from his cloud, and
slowly pace
The secret meadow where we
used to lie –
He draws across your
flickering lake
The Yew tree’s
shadow like a sombre barge.
(In
Memoriam E.Y.)
[Peter Yates was born in 1911. I hope it is fair to consider him
(though such considerings always involve a falsifying diminution) as a poet of
the forties. At any rate, his first two collections were published by Chatto in
1942 and 1943, and gained some attention. In many ways they will seem to be
characteristic of the era (in
(2004)
E.B. Ford: Butterflies (The New
Naturalist, 1945)
In such places the Aurelian
might not infrequently be seen with his surprising equipment.
Variety hunting had yet
attained no considerable proportions, while the difficulties of studying
geographical variation were great, nor was its interest appreciated; for
(of data labels...) What we did others could have done, and they
were culpable for their negligence.
Their knowledge was largely
empirical and died with them, but it was great; I rarely find their like today.
All these sentences are taken from the first chapter, a history of butterfly-collecting. The style is Latinate and poised, and to me the sentences are remarkable - we would labour to match their swift intelligence today. But Ford finds no use for this style in the rest of his book. Its suppleness is of use when the subject matter is human and social. When he buckles down to genetics, he writes a plain prose.
Ford was a scientist who began as a butterfly collector. A passage such as the following reveals the connection between acquisitiveness, violence and knowledge.
(The Monarch) “is the largest butterfly seen in
“On this occasion I was much impressed by the resistance of this species to pressure and by its leathery consistency; a well-known characteristic of these protected insects, which allows a bird to peck them sufficiently to realise their disagreeable qualities without killing them. As this specimen was too large to go into my killing bottle or boxes, I kept it in the net and repeatedly pinched it. This would have cracked the thorax of a large Nymphalid and caused its immediate death, but after each pinch this insect would lie still for a few minutes and then revive apparently none the worse. A faint musky odour hung about it, and I was greatly tempted to bite into it to determine if it were unpalatable but, having regard to the interest of the specimen in other ways, I thought it well to restrain my curiosity in this respect.” (pp. 159-60)
(It seems that Ford’s interest in palatability was, however, indulged on larvae of the Large and Small Whites.)
It must be admitted that butterflies are elusive, often refusing to stay still even for a photo. If you are deterred from killing them, as I am, you aren’t likely to get to know them very well. But even the collector’s relationship to an insect in the wild is brief - that’s why he tells us how it flies two feet above the heather. As for us, we are wearily familiar with the migration of the Monarch on video, even in TV adverts for inkjet printers; Ford and his readers could not have imagined that; and in this book the colour photographs of living specimens are pointed out by the editors as a significant novelty.
*
Note: The Collins
"New Naturalists".
This is a series
that I'm very fond of: I've read lots of them, though most have been sold on a
long time ago. Though the series is still going, it's the earlier volumes that
are more accessible (i.e. in second-hand bookshops) - the later ones are expensive and no
longer attract wide sales.
Insect Natural History, A.D. Imms, 1947
This is one of my
favourites and I've read it lots of times. "On Wings and
Flight", "Concerning Feeding Habits", etc, all wonderfully
readable and informative.
Birds and Men, E.M. Nicholson, 1951
"The late Sir
Hugh Gladstone calculated on the basis of data given in the Book of Numbers
that about the year B.C. 1580 the Children of Israel killed within thirty-six
hours in April upwards of 9 million quail at the place afterwards called
Kibroth-Hattaavah." Similar figures were regularly achieved in Southern
Italy in the later nineteenth century: the main market was
Dartmoor,
March 1947
produced the Great Ammil - a glazed frost of freezing rain atop two months of
snowy work. "Every bush, tree, sprig of heather, bracken-frond or reed,
every rail or post, each inanimate object, was sheathed in ice as though in a
glass case. ... The grandeur of the scene was unsurpassable, but in this
enchanted world no living thing had a place. ... 'I've been on the land for
fifty years,' one local farmer remarked to me, 'but I never saw rabbits starved
to death before.'..."
The authors argued
strongly that "it is difficult to reconcile the minimum military demands
for land on Dartmoor, in so far as these are known, with the idea of it as a
National Park" and you must admit, they do have a point. Dartmoor had just
become
(2002, 2009)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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