Commonplace Book

'"...The fine arts are the blessing and the treasure of the poor man; but wealth demands powers of a sterner temper to support the weight of the obligations it imposes."'

from The Sin of Monsieur Antoine by George Sand (Chapter XII)

The Little World by Stella Benson (1925)

As her novels were slowly growing stranger, even quite odd, in the mid-twenties, Benson was still producing, for newspapers and magazines, the material whose tone had made her famous. These are they, pulled together into an extraordinary volume of what would loosely be called travel writings. The joys are all there: self-deprecation without maudlin, fabulous wit, human smallness in the face of the big world, vivid colour, and moments of great poignancy. What a lot of miles she covered - the pieces here range from motoring across North America to boat trips on Chinese rivers and in the Red Sea to amazingly vital pictures of the interior of China, India and Indo-China. She writes it as she sees it, too, which may be a little uncomfortable for modern eyes. If she finds something ugly she'll say so, be it an idiotic colonial official or a supposedly beautiful temple or indeed a face, of any race or culture. But what shines through that is an essential humaneness, when push comes to shove; her criticism is even-handed. The great contradiction in Benson is very well served with that point - she always felt that she was 'not quite real', or in some way lacking in full humanity. Deep humanity is what her writings most reveal - the quality of which is one of her main graces.

Commonplace Book

'Naga, the snake, is a stone prophecy. The ghosts of the men who linked, by means of Naga's stone body, one pinnacled gateway with another, must know now what they meant - now that the forest, many-headed, many-mouthed like Naga, has devoured their treasure. Naga, in the light of the moon, challenges strangers and binds them with a spell. Naga's monstrous taut body along the broad causeways leads strangers away and away from everything neat and known. Come along...come along...stranger...let the lions throw out their silly stone chests for the admiration of the crazy palms...let the fish mumble among the little green sequins of weeds upon the pools...let the bats, blurs of silver, swing and shimmer and mew against the frosted sky at the top of the broken tower...come, stranger, the night is short...Naga's heads are reared at the end of the wide way, arrogantly and finally. Look now...this is my Angkor, my treasure...you shall share a treasure with me and the forest...The holy place is propped on a precipice of insanely steep steps, so steep that the moonlight shuns the slopes of that fierce hill, and touches only the three proud horns that toss the stars...'

from Journey in Indo-China, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'...Doesn't the fact that you & I wd. be ashamed to say "I believe in Capitalism! I will fight for Capitalism!" rather suggest, indicate, and imply that Capitalism is right? For isn't it true that all the things that "thinking" people and "just" people and "moral" people have been ashamed of confessing have always been what is called sometimes a Law of Nature, sometimes Nature's Little Way; but more often (just rudely and bluntly) "the bloody Truth!"'

from a letter dated November 28th, 1939 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

Commonplace Book

'"My dear, they must earn their living."

"But when they have earned it, what have they done with their lives?" cried Lilias - "their lives which can't be lived over again? Wasted all the hours of sunshine in stuffy offices counting up rows of stupid figures, all for the sake of what you call gentility; to be able to wear the same ugly clothes, and do the same boring things, as the others of their kind. And yet they say that hundreds apply for every vacant clerkship, while in the country skilled labour is more and more difficult to get, because the young men are so well educated that they rush to the towns. But I think that they are only half-educated, not to see where lies the happiest life and the healthiest..."'

from Cornelius by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (Chapter XVII)

Commonplace Book

'"Go to sleep; I will sit up and work, so that you may be rich some day!"

"Ah! am I not rich enough already?" thought Emile as he left the room. "If, as my father has often and justly told me, wealth imposes vast duties, why waste our lives creating for ourselves those duties which may exceed our strength?"

from The Sin of Monsieur Antoine by George Sand (Chapter VII)

Father Brown: Selected Stories by GK Chesterton (2003)

This compilation is my first exposure to Chesterton, and has been an eye-opener. A relative was very disappointed with him, and I was influenced by that not to expect a great deal. I have to say I have a very different reaction. The most distinctive thing about these stories is their extraordinary colour - they have, like the weather in the last story in this group, The Insoluble Problem, a vibrancy and atmosphere that is almost prodigious. That story involves the odd intensity of colour that exists in storm conditions, and somehow this is what Chesterton achieves, time and time again. The word lurid keeps coming to mind, but it would need to be stripped of its shabby connotation. Iridescent, perhaps? These stories, in terms of literary history, are the connection between Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, with all the standard plots adhered to, and the evasions and coincidences too. But I think there is an extra dimension here; he plays poetically with implications, and draws long inferences out metaphorically in a really enjoyable way. This is not, as popular parlance would have it, a Rolls Royce run on Coca-Cola. Instead they are Model T scenarios written with the brain cells and panache of champagne-standard: an unexpected delight.

Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927)

This has the hallmark of what we expect from Mansfield - an almost uncomfortably intense interest in the truth, the undertruth and the searing truth. She is, naturally, particularly open and honest in these entries, as she deals with her illness and ennui, her waxing and waning relationship with John Middleton Murry and her irritations with people and life itself. The constant wars with her 'companion' LM (Ida Baker) punctuate this with intriguing bursts which are only faintly explicated - a reread of Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM is called for I think. Ranging from her early 'huge complaining diaries' in a sole saved scrap from 1910, through the period of dissatisfaction following the publication of In a German Pension, and her re-emergence just as the illness was really starting to take hold and make it hard to work, this journal is a record of a sometimes harsh human being, definitely not 'easy work', whose dedication to uncovering her inner daemon and following her own flag made for drama in spades. Murry's notes are sparing and useful in giving terms and locale for the action of Mansfield's changing mind. His final note, speaking of an extraordinary transformative peace and beauty which settled on her at Fontainebleau just as her time was up, is a moving and fitting finale.

Commonplace Book

'"...All you said was true enough."

"True, but hardly new," Lilias said impatiently.

"Why should you think to say something new?" said Cornelius, with simple sententiousness. "Who can think anything new, for that matter? We just think and act and speak, the cleverest or the most foolish of us, like our fathers before us. We have the same natures, we live on the same earth, we know the same changing seasons, the same growing and fading crops, and rising and setting sun. The same crowds in the cities and silence in the mountains. 'Tis for that we love the wisdom of old writers, because they echo word for word our own experiences of every day - our own thoughts - our own reflections."

from Cornelius by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (Chapter XIII)

Commonplace Book

'"Oh, dear God, let me stay here! I am so tired of the noise and the glare and the traffic of the town. Let me find my soul in the everlasting silence of the hills; where there is no talk of riches nor of poverty, but space to breathe and move, and leisure to think and dream. Dream! Why, it is this that is real, and only the dwellers in cities who dream away their lives, fretted by an imaginary necessity for an imaginary importance. Who lose the end in pursuing the means. Who live in a voluntary prison - while outside - oh, outside - the bees hum in the sunshine, and the fruit ripens on the trees, and the shadows fall on the grass, and the white clouds are blown across the blue heavens - in vain - for them."'

from Cornelius by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (Chapter XII)

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (1859)

Meredith now has an unenviable reputation. His collapse began with the Great War blowing apart his more structured world and continued with Virginia Woolf and company and their (admittedly thoughtful) dismissal of him. By now of course he is virtually gone, a fate which would have been unthinkable at this time last century, with the heated support of the Aesthetes particularly bolstering him. This novel of human frailty was published in the mid-nineteenth century but, for me, has the eighteenth strongly stamped upon it. The fact that many of the characters have a humorous philosophy to underpin them and then scrape them into farcical situations reminds me very much of Smollett and what I suspect of Fielding. He is strong on metaphor, and references them tangentially, drawing them out in strong curls of words on several levels of understanding - it is this insistence on poetic literacy, and on the patience it requires, that I imagine seals his fate, which is to be regarded as 'difficult', or 'an author's author'. Very occasionally in this novel it does make for fuzziness, and sometimes he can be accused of silliness (Mrs Berry's babblings in the penultimate chapter), but most of the time this reads like a vital message from the age of erudition, a pure pleasure.

Commonplace Book

'...So do we all begin by acting and the nearer we are to what we would be the more perfect our disguise. Finally there comes the moment when we are no longer acting; it may even catch us by surprise. We may look in amazement at our no longer borrowed plumage. The two have merged; that which we put on has joined that which was; acting has become action...'

from the piece on Hamlet in the Shakespeare Notes section (1921) of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield

Commonplace Book

'"Which is the coward among us? - He who sneers at the failings of Humanity!"'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XLIV)

May Fair by Michael Arlen (1925)

Arlen has a reputation for being rather throwaway which is a little undeserved. The standout thus far in my reading of him has been his 1923 collection These Charming People, to which this volume stands as a sequel. The wit and splendid lucid vividness of those stories is not quite so unstintingly evident in this one, though there are many lovely moments. There are a few which fall a little flat in the end, but, my, the journey! His style was the epitome by which the 20s in Britain understood itself in its most elegant and socially supercharged element. Dapper, dry, cosmopolitan, connected, cynical, amusing, top-hatted and slightly dangerous.....all produced by a Bulgarian of Armenian descent! These stories range from society comedy to eerie ghoulishness with the outward appearance of enormous ease, but somehow readable in them is the struggle he had in the writing - one develops phenomenally and then dissipates in "it was all made up"; one is a wonderful building-up of levels of horror and then it all turns out to be a film scenario; another cruxes on hackneyed imposture in a case of twins - the uphill push is also occasionally evident literally, where he writes openly about the need for a resolution, almost as though he were casting about for a plot and talking to the reader to cover the hiatus. But many of the other stories here are glowing with the fabulous opulence and wry-eyed wit for which Arlen is so justifiably known. I certainly don't feel minded to throw those qualities away.

Commonplace Book

'...Lady Surplice herself loved the most advanced art of the day. And the most advanced art of the day loved Lady Surplice. Playwrights, for instance, doted on her. One had put her into a play as a courtesan for money (1205 performances), one as a courtesan by temperament (2700 performances), another as a courtesan by environment (still running), and lastly another as a courtesan to pass the time. This last was never produced, as the Lord Chamberlain banned it on the ground that it was too cynical...'

from Farewell, These Charming People, a piece in May Fair by Michael Arlen

Commonplace Book

'It was luncheon time, and the foyer was crowded with people waiting for each other whilst they passed the time of day with some one else. There were many women with eager eyes and low heels. Dwight-Rankin said they were American. There were many women with good complexions and large feet. Dwight-Rankin said they were English. There was a young man who looked like a pretty girl, except that his hair was long. Dwight-Rankin said he was known as the Venus de Marlow and that his friends thought him too marvellous...'

from Farewell, These Charming People, a piece in May Fair by Michael Arlen