Sunday, July 31, 2011

Commonplace Book

"'...Nowadays you persist in suppressing everything that has any savour of sentiment and poetry, and in its stead give them only naked, undeceiving realities. Now, my dear sir, the more love there is in books, the more love there is in life. When you invented the ideal and laid it before them, they believed in the truth of your inventions. Now that you give them nothing but stern, unadorned realism, they follow in your footsteps and have come to measure everything by that standard of vulgarity.'"

from Notre Coeur by Guy de Maupassant (Chapter VI)

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The Black Dwarf by Sir Walter Scott (1816)

This smaller piece was the first emanation of a series of stories called The Tales of My Landlord. There is a definite feeling of rusticity to its first part, where Scott was perhaps slowly making his way to a country tale with supernatural elements; I wonder if something Gothic was on the hustings. The dwarf arrives on Mucklestane Moor and without any leave sets up his stony habitation in an eerie spot, encountering wondering rough locals and spraying all comers with his misanthropic but intelligent barbs. After a contretemps in which Hobbie of Heughfoot's homestead is burnt to ashes and his girl is kidnapped by a ruffian and eventually returned to him unharmed, the story is lifted to more traditional Scott territory. In a deft twist he turns to the parallel story of the Veres and the Mauleys and a planned Jacobite uprising. Isabella Vere is betrothed against her will to Sir Frederick Langley, one of the uprisers, by her father. It is only through the interpolation of the Black Dwarf, who had befriended her earlier in the piece, that this dastardly union is avoided. It is revealed that the Dwarf is the long-lost Sir Edward Mauley, thought dead, and Isabella's good sense has awakened his abuse-hardened heart. This piece is lifted by Scott's insight into the mind of the dwarf; his humanity, and the broader comment about our society's response to the physically unbeautiful and the misery it causes, lend texture and emotion to a simple story.

Commonplace Book

'"At last I feel irresponsible. Nobody can do anything which concerns me, except to leave the door open when I prefer it shut. Really, if one has to be somewhere, to be on a death-bed is one of the very best places. Nothing can touch one; it is like getting out of a tunnel full of jarring noises."'

from The Princess Sophia by EF Benson (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'"When a thing is done, it is done, and things for the most part do not produce any consequences at all, though people who have addled their brains with trivial thinking tell us that they do. Moralists and philosophers are the most shallow people in the world, for argument is ever less sound than conviction..."'

from The Princess Sophia by EF Benson (Chapter IV)

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Man Who Missed the 'Bus by Stella Benson (1928)

There is no question about it - this story is a classic and deserves a place it does not currently occupy. It should be in any respectable anthology of the best of the twentieth century. Herbert Robinson is a typical Benson creation - enormously fallible, cranky and sweet by turns, full of contrasting confidence and squashedness. His experience at an hotel in Provence, in a little white hilltop village, unfolds magnificently under Benson's startlingly able control. It begins with his frustrations with others, his virginity and fascination with things rather than people. It develops with a lovely trope of never being able to see, through too much shadow or too much blinding light in every situation, the faces of anyone around him, analogising his groping search for the meaning of humanity, which he sees as metaphorically and literally always having its back to him. It runs to a point of diversion, where he sits in a wood above the hotel, communing in the half light with a mouse family between some tree-roots. It ends in a calamity. All these elements are fused with prose which is tender, personal and delicate, and then eerie, dramatic and poetic by turns. There are wonderful observations hidden in these relatively plain sentences, filaments of gold woven through a narrative which is masterly.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Commonplace Book

'"...We only have to think impersonally enough, and even death - well, we are all either nearly dead or just born, more or less, and the balance of birth and death never appreciably alters. Personal thinking is the curse of existence. Why are we all crushed under the weight of this strangling ME - this snake in our garden....?"

from The Man Who Missed the 'Bus by Stella Benson

Friday, July 8, 2011

Commonplace Book

'"Stone walls may have ears,' returned Ellieslaw, eyeing him with a look of triumphant malignity, "but domestic spies, Mr Ratcliffe, will soon find themselves without any, if any such dares to continue his abode in a family where his coming was an unauthorized intrusion, where his conduct has been that of a presumptuous meddler, and from which his exit shall be that of a baffled knave, if he does not know how to take a hint."'

from The Black Dwarf by Sir Walter Scott (Chapter XIII)

The Sixth Sense by Stephen McKenna (1915)

As is usual with this author, this novel makes the reader feel that they are in safe hands. McKenna is one of the links between Oscar Wilde and Michael Arlen in terms of literary history. He was applauded as Wilde's successor on the publication of his first novel in 1912, which was indeed laden with wit and tart aphoristic prose. The subsequent two have travelled on from that, into the post-Edwardian mindset, where manners are still important but not so mannerism. This third one deals with the return to England of Toby Merivale after many years of world-wandering. He is caught up in London's current political machinations in the form of militant suffragism, and with his old friends now in much more influential positions in British politics. Most are not supportive of Joyce Davenant, one of the main campaigners, but Toby falls for her. Unfortunately she is involved in a series of kidnaps, and her elder sister is the bad party in a notorious divorce at exactly the same time. The Davenants' social stock falls disastrously! The sixth sense of the title is in the mind of Toby's best friend Aintree, known as The Seraph, who finds, through its agency, one of the kidnapped. This is a standard story of love, energised by fine elegant writing and cool stylish worldliness.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Commonplace Book

'...The difference between eccentricity and madness may be measured in pounds sterling. A rich man is never mad in England, unless, of course, his heirs-at-law cast wistful glances at the pounds sterling...'

from The Sixth Sense by Stephen McKenna (Chapter XII)