Sunday, August 29, 2010

Commonplace Book

'...I believe that there is an opportunity for a new form of novel, in which the novelist, as well as the reader, will skip all the dull people, and merely indicate such of them as are necessary to the action by an outline or a symbol, compressing their familiar psychology, and necessary plot-interferences with the main characters, into recognised formulae. For the benefit of readers voracious for everything about everybody, schedule chapters might be provided by inferior novelists, good at painting say tiresome bourgeois fathers, gouty uncles and brothers in the army, as sometimes in great pictures we read that the sheep in the foreground have been painted by Mr. So-and-so, R.A.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book II, Chapter VI)

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Commonplace Book

'The heart does not more love the heart that loves it than the brain loves the brain that comprehends it.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book II, Chapter V)

Once Again for Thucydides by Peter Handke (1995)

This is a volume of essays which are musings based on travel. Handke has the German knack of keeping to facts without making them boring. This is a harder thing to do than that simple statement might imply - these pieces have the feeling of a quiet man looking at things with wide eyes and trying to find the centre of them. Admittedly, this sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There are a few of these pieces which feel a little nowhere, as if the fire in one's mind doesn't quite catch. And there are some which are strangely good. So as not to give a false impression, it must be said that these pieces rarely reach poetry; they are not histrionic in any sense. They have the feel of being a dissection without the pointy nastiness. The German author who comes to mind as a comparison is Wolfgang Borchert - the quiet echo and sense of simplicity in his short stories finds a modern answer here. These essays are in a sense catalogues of facts, but presented with the interest inherent in the facts, and delicately put, and very carefully placed in space and time. Reading up on Handke, I find that he has been regarded as the enfant terrible of German literature - this is my first exposure, and I find that hard to believe. Further reading, which I am encouraged to by the reading of this, will no doubt elucidate......

Friday, August 27, 2010

The Laburnum Branch by Naomi Mitchison (1926)

This is the first of Mitchison's two volumes of published poetry, set so far apart at either end of her career. It is full of her classic brand of natural exuberance. What makes it remarkable is the fact that the poetry is occasionally technically quite poor, with bad overruns of line-length marring the rhythm and lack of finish causing fatal trailoff. Her inimitable enthusiasm saves it. Ranging through all sorts of subjects from history to childbirth to friendship to politics, she sometimes effuses in a unmeasured way which survives its own lack of foresight mysteriously. At other times the work is strongly fortified with rhyme and rhythm and just as affecting. The poems are divided into nine sections which are vaguely thematic. I remember reading, I think in one of the volumes of her autobiography, that she had loads of unpublished poetry in a bottom drawer at home. I hope that this has been saved following her death at the age of 101 in January 1999. And the reading of The Cleansing of the Knife, the extraordinarily-belated 1978 successor to this volume, will take on extra meaning. Mitchison is not known for poetry, or for poetry in her prose, but it's there. Just, in her usual and low-key way, it gleams from behind her emanations of stalwart personality.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Commonplace Book

'"I do think," Caroline was saying in her most reasonable voice, "that another time...of course, it doesn't matter in the least while we are alone...obviously, it's of no importance to me that you take the last rissole...I'm not the faintest bit hungry, and, if I were, could have had more cooked...but perhaps it would be a bad example to the children if they were here for you just to - without offering it, I mean - to take it as a matter of course. I hate having to say this, but it is a question, I suppose, of principle...after all, we were always agreed that this isn't one of those houses where the man is lord and master and boss and bread-winner, taking everything for granted..."

"He could certainly not do that," Hugo said, tipping the nut-rissole on to Caroline's plate.

She flushed. "My dear Hugo, surely you have not taken offence because I spoke frankly?"

"It is what people do take offence at."

"You know I couldn't eat another thing."

She returned the rissole to his plate.

"And now I could not either," he said, abandoning some spinach as well and putting his knife and fork together. The rissole was back on the dish where it had begun, among the shapes of the other rissoles which had been outlined by cold fat.'

from A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor (Part One, Chapter 1)

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Commonplace Book

'It is often said that a man may be judged by his dog; it may be said with equal truth that a woman may be judged by her cat.

Musidora's cat was white, but of a fabulous white - whiter than the whitest swan; milk, alabaster, snow, all that has served for white comparisons since the beginning of the world, would seem black by the side of this cat. Among the millions of imperceptible hairs which composed her ermine fur, there was not a single one that was not as dazzling as the purest of silver.

Imagine an enormous powder puff, with eyes adjusted into it. Never has the most coquettish and affected woman had in her movements the grace and perfect finish of this adorable cat. She had incomparable undulations of the spine, curvatures of the back, tosses of the head, curls of the tail, and unimaginable ways of advancing her paws.

Musidora copied her as far as she could, but without attaining the success she desired. But though the imitation was imperfect, it had made of Musidora one of the most graceful women in Paris - that is to say, in the world, for nothing exists here below but Paris.'

from Fortunio by Theophile Gautier (Chapter III)

Cressida's First Lover by Jack Lindsay (1932)

I wasn't expecting a great deal of this and was pleasantly surprised. Lindsay was the son of the more famous Norman, and had a long career of 60 years or so where he never quite reached notability in the broader sense. This, his first novel, is a strange amalgam of the tone of a 30s romp and the setting of ancient Greece. Cressida is concerned that her life is going by and no lover is presenting himself. Caught while entering a tryst with a sentry, her sailor captors whisk her off into adventure. She kills their leader, roams a foreign land, meets and beguiles a young prince, amuses herself intriguing with his grotesque father, makes jealous a prospective princess and her interfering mother, fascinates an oily advisor who plans a revolt, and escapes when everything gets a little too hot! All the while, of course, manipulating like mad to keep everybody on side. Some of her inventions and twists on a sixpence are lovely. Lindsay makes this, with elegant, well-modulated prose, a pleasure, if a slightly guilty one. I shall be interested to see whether he returns to comedy in subsequent novels - he's good at it. There are one or two moments where the prose loses control and becomes efflorescent, but on the whole this is a joy. The stuff of which TV adaptations could easily be made.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Brothers and Sisters by I. Compton-Burnett (1929)

This is Ivy Compton-Burnett's third novel and very typical. The thing to reckon with in her writing is the unreality. These deceptively quiet novels are full of characters displaying their frustrations with tight circumstances, usually associated with family. In this case the core is, extraordinarily, incest. Though unwitting transgression it must be affirmed. Her people inhabit a seething world where speech is a swordfight and amused irritation and its harsher darker companion-feeling the instigators. But the way this plays out is not what can really be called realistic, other than in its essence, perhaps. The play of it is theatrical, over-stark - "not the way real people behave or speak". This, by rights, should make it ultimately unsatisfying, and to some extent that's true, but there is an odd pleasure to be gained, mainly based in fascination with Ivy's originality of craft. What an unusual effort these books are. I can see why they are not popular, and conversely why she is lionised among a tiny sector of the reading population. Certainly the feeling is that she deserves notice, but so do her faults - she has virtually no universality in the ordinary sense at all, the sense that helps a writer survive down the ages. But I can't help it - I'm intrigued..........

Commonplace Book

'".....I must go home to see about the party's being a simple one, to be in keeping with the parlour, and with your bereavement; though I don't mean that was a second thought. But I do want to be loyal to the parlour to the last."

"You had better leave us out," said Robin, "to be loyal to the size of the parlour, and to the desire of your guests to talk about us."'

from Brothers and Sisters by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter X)

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Commonplace Book

'He presently disappeared as suddenly as he had come, but he had left me a companion, a radiant reverberant name; and for some little space the name of Shelley clashed silvery music among the hills.

Its seven letters seemed to hang right across the clouds like the Seven Stars, an apocalyptic constellation, a veritable sky-sign; and again the name was an angel standing with a silver trumpet, and again it was a song. The heavens opened, and across the blue rift it hung in a glory of celestial fire, while from behind and above the clouds came a warbling as of innumerable larks.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book I, Chapter XVIII)

Monday, August 9, 2010

Commonplace Book

'"...Cousin Christian is a man whom anything that came out, or might come out, would leave simply as he was. I declare that he is. I say that about him."

"It goes without saying, doesn't it?" said Judith.

"I am glad it didn't have to this time," said Julian. "I can hardly bear that sort of thing to go without saying."'

from Brothers and Sisters by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter V)

Friday, August 6, 2010

Commonplace Book

'A mad piper, indeed, this spring, with his wonderful lying music, - ever lying, yet ever convincing, for when was Spring known to keep his word? Yet year after year we give eager belief to his promises. He may have consistently broken them for fifty years, yet this year he will keep them. This year the dream will come true, the ship come home. This year the very dead we have loved shall come back to us again: for Spring can even lie like that. There is nothing he will not promise the poor hungry human heart, with his innocent-looking daisies and those practised liars the birds. Why, one branch of hawthorn against the sky promises more than all the summers of time can pay, and a pond ablaze with yellow lilies awakens such answering splendours and enchantments in mortal bosoms, - blazons, it would seem, so august a message from the hidden heart of the world, - that ever afterwards, for one who has looked upon it, the most fortunate human existence must seem a disappointment.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book I, Chapter III)

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (1867)

This is a novel of mixed fortunes - it is over-exuberant, seeming to have been written when Broughton was particularly young. There are judgments she makes in the craft of its writing which seem quite ill-advised. The best example is a tendency to utilise quotations at far too many junctures; there is one early chapter absolutely littered with them. On the other hand it has many fine moments, and some sparkling wit, and has a brightness and resulting colour which cannot be denied. At the time of publication I believe it was regarded as quite racy, given that the heroine, Kate Chester, falls passionately for a married man, and a wicked one. Interestingly the crucial scene of their relationship is enacted in the now-destroyed Crystal Palace. Its tone now feels of course much more standard, falling somewhere between Jane Austen and Elizabeth de la Pasture - and comfortably so. It can be a damning thing to say but it's appropriate in this case: this is a novel which holds out promise. Her talent for the comedy in family is already obvious here, as is her capacity to keep a plot humming, though this element needs ensubtling (if there is such a word). The word which sums the whole book up is 'hothouse' I think - dangerous stuff in these young hands. I look forward to watching develop the ameliorations and the expansions of her growing maturity.