Sunday, December 30, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"This wasn't an amour," came an indignant interruption. "It was a romance."

"My dear young friend, the difference between a romance and an amour is the difference between a menu and a dinner."'

from Ninety-Six Hours' Leave by Stephen McKenna (Chapter XIV)

Friday, December 28, 2012

Commonplace Book

'The pure happiness of two lovers can never take shelter in rural silence and obscurity without arousing the jealousy and hatred of all who vegetate stupidly in small provincial towns.'

from Valentine by George Sand (Chapter XXXV)

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"...If you were a girl, you'd know that girls of seventeen aren't expected to have strange young men hanging about for them in railway stations."

"But every romance starts at a railway station - and they all end at a church. I've knocked about the world a tremendous lot, and I speak with some knowledge."

"Of the churches?"

"No; that's why the romance ends there. I meant the railway stations - Victoria above all. If I were the only man in the world..."

"But you're not. My father always fetches me away when I'm on late duty, and he'd have something to say if he found out..."

"Fathers should be deceived and not heard," answered the Kitten, with an impatient wave of the hand.'

from Ninety-Six Hours' Leave by Stephen McKenna (Chapter VI)

Monday, December 10, 2012

Diogenes' Sandals by Mrs Arthur Kennard (1893)

This one definitely sits in the afterwash of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. Kennard uses instead an old Great Western railway carriage marooned on a woodland property north east of Salisbury in Wiltshire. In it she places two love-lorn young men, who have decided they need to 'rough it' in order to rid themselves not only of their torn hearts, but also the grime of city life. Like Jerome, she's interested in the trials and mishaps of such an experiment, and in a small amount of witty comment on society. I can't remember Three Men in a Boat terribly well, but the difference between the two, I think, is Kennard's love of nature and the countryside. There are some lovely descriptions here of wildlife, the locale, and nature's glory. (Perhaps Jerome did the same, and I've forgotten.) This is set near Winterbourne Gunner, called Summerslow Gunner for these fictional purposes. There is a photograph of just such a railway carriage as a frontispiece. So, the question arises: how much of this is reportage, rather than fiction? I can't imagine Nina Kennard, an 1890s woman, enjoying, or being allowed to enjoy at least, the raw life depicted here. There's so little biographical information about her that one is left to wonder. Was she atypical, and a partaker in more wildness than her fellow women? Was this book prepared on secondhand terms from talk with someone who did these things? I know she had a 'sporting' writer sister-in-law. It would be interesting to find out. Ultimately this lacks a species of unity of purpose and simplicity of incident that Jerome's book has, but equally this one does not deserve its utter oblivion - there is entertainment, wit, colour and comment here which makes for pleasure.

Pierre et Jean / The Heritage and other tales by Guy de Maupassant (1888)

This volume contains the two title pieces which are short novels and a small selection of short stories. Both Pierre et Jean and The Heritage are better than usual Maupassant, because they don't deal exclusively or even terribly strongly with his worst subject - love, or, more accurately, "love". His people are still very much exemplars of the worst of humanity, though. They are selfish, blank, thoughtless creatures, obsessed or stupid. One could hardly call them uplifting. In Pierre et Jean two very dissimilar brothers, always needled a little by one another, come to disunion through one of them being left a substantial legacy by a family friend, and the other being ignored. Suddenly, the 'losing' brother takes a new look at his sibling, thinks about how fundamentally different he is, takes the pointed legacy into consideration, and comes to the conclusion that their father is not actually that for his brother, rather that the fortune was a sign of the leaver's paternity. This causes terrible conflict for the realising brother and his mother, as his view of her is completely changed. How that conflict works its way through them and their family is the meat of this novel. The Heritage is the story of a clerk in a government department who marries his daughter off to an ambitious fellow-scribe. Each of the betrothed is kidding themselves about how interested they are in the other, and their less-than-delightful humanity begins to show through. When a wealthy aunt dies, and leaves them her money, she places a stipulation that it be dependent on their having a child. They try and try mercenarily but it doesn't happen. This delightful pair then play a game of 'avoid the truth' with one another while hating each other and his manhood being called into question by her father and his fellow clerks. She 'befriends' a rival clerk; he ignores it desperately; she gets pregnant. Thus their solution is provided. There are shards of humour in The Heritage which lift it, and tension is rich in both novels, saving them a little from the author's grim vision.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Commonplace Book

'As I crossed St James' Park in the early hours of the morning to Downing Street, on the smut-smirched grass under the umber sky lay rows of wretched figures. One morning I saw a butterfly, with outspread, primrose-coloured wings, flutter above them, almost touching their grimy faces and their hair tangled and matted with sweat. As a benison, it ought to have brought the memory of the clover fields and honeysuckle-lined hedges, amid which, most likely, their boyhood had been passed. Backwards and forwards it fluttered, until, at last, one of the men seeing it, beat it down under his hat with a curse, as he had beaten down, long ago, every pure thought that had ever been his.'

from Diogenes' Sandals by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Chapter XII)

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...There is only one pain, she knew now, and that is not to be able to give oneself, not to be able to share one's heart; and the richest hearts of all die choked by their own overbrimming wealth, for no one can take what they offer...'

from Caesar is Dead by Jack Lindsay (Chapter VI)

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...When you look straight into the depths of great Nature's calm, cruel, implacable eyes, face to face with her, you try to read the ultimate intention of the whole. Whither is the great river of life that teems and formulates with vitalised matter and brain-stuff tending? What infinite goal is it rushing on to, bearing us helpless as leaf-drift on its bosom?

Every now and then one of the higher, more fully developed forms raises a protesting voice, and says, "I will know: I will rend the secret out of the unfathomable depths." Soon he is dragged down into the current; silenced, helpless, leaving nought behind but a feeble contribution towards the existing mass of errors and blunders...'

from Diogenes' Sandals by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Chapter IV)

Monday, November 19, 2012

Commonplace Book

'The essence of Art, we are told, lies in the removal of surplusage: say what you have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner possible. "Close up," as a literary friend of mine expresses it; "exercise the tact of omission, by which the true artist may be known; you will find your ranks strengthened, your weapons carry with surer aim..."'

from Diogenes' Sandals by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Chapter III)

Friday, November 16, 2012

Triple Fugue by Osbert Sitwell (1924)

This was Sitwell's first fiction, a collection of three short stories and three long ones or novellas. He had already established a reputation for being a caustic critic of the more quiescent zones of literature, with big attacks on 'country' poets like John Drinkwater. A way of thinking about him is as someone who is there in the room, at the party so to speak, but giving no quarter to those whom he regards as stupid or banal or unworthy; a kind of self-contained assurance about who needs taking notice of, and contrarily whom the world needs to have explained to it as a dunce. These stories have varying degrees of bitchiness to them - mainly about writers and artists and their fatuous self-appreciation. In Low Tide and its picture of two old ladies, wildly made-up and oblivious to the scorn of all around in their seaside town, and in The Greeting and its portrait of a lonely nurse and the terrible mistake she makes in first letting her patient be murdered in atrocious circumstances, and then marrying the patient's supposedly distraught husband, there is adroitness of plotting and rich circumlocutory language that is very satisfying. These are both novella-length. The three shorter pieces tend to bitchy literary satire; two of them end a little whimperingly, but Friendship's Due is as fine a story as could be asked from these ingredients. The title piece is a strange novella, again of criticism of the chatter of the literary classes, but set ahead twenty-odd years in 1948, and again fizzling a little in the end, despite being a fascinating journey. The reader can detect Sitwell's admiration for writers like Ronald Firbank and Stella Benson between these lines, the spikier ones who seemed to take no prisoners and have a sly-eyed frankness about them. There is plenty here to admire, and it is a great pity that he is almost completely lost to the modern generation of readers. I'm looking forward to his first novel, published two years later, in which he is supposed to have played a blinder.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Herself by Hortense Calisher (1972)

Perhaps the clearest way to explain my response to this book is to imagine myself on one ridge in the landscape of life, and Calisher on another close by. There is an essential and telling distance between, made of our genders, experiences, cultures, and so on. But she's intent on explaining and delineating her time and times, both personally and politically. Sometimes she veers off her ridge in my direction and speaks especially convincingly, and I can look into her eyes and get soul-messages from them (that would be WAY too airy-fairy a notion for her!). Sometimes she veers off the other side of her ridge and I can barely hear her, or she disappears from view pretty completely. Just to complicate it a bit more, sometimes she comes my way, but says things I don't feel sympathy with. Sometimes I'm pretty sure I do, but something in the way she says them puts me out of range. That's the nitty-gritty of the way this book functions for me. But the amazing thing is that it is still a great experience - somehow her intelligence and depth of response, mixed though they are sympathetically, are still arresting, original and fascinating. I've been quite deeply in her presence, and I like that. This book covers her life, her responses to literature and the making of it, and some smaller occasional pieces she had written previously that fit into its "autobiographic" context - she called it life-talk, which is a good summation. She was always a maverick in what she called the 'litry' world of her times, always not quite on key, doing things which were not canonically correct, not guaranteed the usual plaudits. For this reason her reputation has naturally suffered. Her writing can be challenging, but, oddly, once you're attuned to her style and modes, it's nowhere near as daunting as it first appears. It can only be hoped that such originality will soon find its audience, albeit a necessarily smallish, discerning one.

Friday, October 26, 2012

A Legend of Montrose by Sir Walter Scott (1819)

This was the last of Scott's early series entitled Tales of My Landlord, detailing episodes in Scottish history in fictional form. This one covers the response among the Scots to the revolutionary actions which precipitated the English Civil War. Some Scots lairds were for, some against, and very much not exclusively for the same reasons as the English; their own affairs, rivalries and vying for power took up a lot of their motivation. The really fun thing about this one is the mixedness of our main character. We are led through these affairs by Dugald Dalgetty, a soldier for hire, who is full of wind. He has no compunction about rattling on endlessly to his superiors about tactics they're ignoring, or precedents they're not taking into consideration, driving them sourly spare in the process. At the same time, he is an excellent soldier, so we are invited not only to laugh at him, but admire him a little too. This lends the piece a warm geniality which is great. For a shorter piece, it has much derring-do, with criss-crossing of the Highlands, family hatreds, imprisonment in castles, political explication and a big battle. It also has a truncated love story - I'm thinking that this is the thing which Scott may have expanded had his enthusiasm kept up, as it is a little threadbare. But this was the last, and in an epilogue he admits that his relish has subsided. He also does something else that I'd like to see authors of the modern era try: he recommends in the last line a novel published anonymously a year previously. The title is Marriage and he hints as to the gender of the author. Of course we now know that to be Susan Ferrier, and that she went on to become one of the finest of her era. What a great idea for those 'in the know', not critics, but authors themselves, to recommend the books of fellows which they think their readers may enjoy next.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Commonplace Book

'For a brief interval of three years the regular course of his life was interrupted by marriage. It soon resumed its normal trend when, true to his reputation as a gallant man, he allowed himself to be divorced. Much sympathy was felt for Arthur. On the one side was to be considered a certain financial gain, on the other his reputation as a man of the world, a modern censor of morals (for such he had now become), his profession of the true faith, which does not allow of divorce, and his role of gentleman. It was a struggle for him; but in the end Arthur was relieved of his religious scruples, and Mrs Bertram of a share of her small fortune and her husband's bullying manner. Let it be understood, however, that his wife regarded it as a bargain.'

from His Ship Comes Home, a piece in Triple Fugue by Osbert Sitwell

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Commonplace Book

'One of the advantages of the writer as alien - of the disinherited, disenfranchised or dispossessed - is that whether or not they themselves are great, they can write from some nearness to the open-ended world to which all serious artists aspire. They write from an intellectual and emotional diaspora, from a past which transcends the nostalgias of childhood, and toward a future which apprehends something better than they have. Satire - the worm's eye turning - comes to them naturally, as it does to those without full passport privileges, or else they have the kind of neutral perspective that attaches to small borderland nations. At the same time, they have the furious energy of the repressed.'

from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part IV)

Friday, October 19, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"Spoken like an oracle," said Montrose. "Were there an academy for the education of horses to be annexed to the Marischal College of Aberdeen, Sir Dugald Dalgetty alone should fill the chair."

"Because, being an ass," said Menteith, aside to the General, "there would be some distant relation between the professor and the students."'

from A Legend of Montrose by Sir Walter Scott (Chapter XX)

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Alone in her bed she lay, and between waking and sleeping thought of Caesar. There had been little enjoyment is his arms, save during those days on the Nile; and yet she longed for him, no one else. Slowly the lotus of sleep closed petals about her, closed on her limbs the flower-cosmetics of her fine breeding, her glistening will. Is it the man, or the power in the man? But how separate them?

The lotus-body opened petals, restlessly dreaming the coming of Caesar.'

from Caesar is Dead by Jack Lindsay (First Part, Chapter I)

Monday, October 15, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...Much of their time, when not occupied in praising one another or laughing in a hollow Homeric manner, was spent in contemplation of suicide. Only after death - they felt - would their genius be fully recognised, while the more sudden and violent their end, the more effective for their posthumous glory. Cups of poison, a fall to the crowd below from the Nelson Monument, the lily-green death-look of Chatterton, the decline of Keats, a cloaked figure found floating on the Thames, a revolver-shot in Piccadilly followed by a dramatic collapse, or the quieter, less sensational, but sudden "Strange death of a Literary Recluse" - all these passed through their minds, were mentioned in low tones or lay hidden, for all to read, in the intentionally gloomy fire of their eyes. But the chorus of sandal-footed and golden-crowned young ladies implored them constantly to remember their families - not to do anything rash - though perhaps these same young women found that the thought of it gave them too, no less than the three protagonists, a little tremor of wonder, excitement, and importance. In their less exalted moments, however, the chance of their getting this thrill in real life seemed ever so remote - merely a dream of fair women.'

from Friendship's Due, a piece in Triple Fugue by Osbert Sitwell

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Commonplace Book

'When an epigram becomes a platitude (the Hell to which all epigrams are eventually condemned) the truth is no longer in it; and that critics are but disappointed poets has long been a platitude. In these days, on the contrary, they are the only satisfied ones, able both to confer the cake and then, subsequently, eat it themselves...'

from Friendship's Due, a piece in Triple Fugue by Osbert Sitwell

Friday, October 5, 2012

Peter's Mother by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (1905)

This novel differs from her four previous adult ones in two respects - it did a great deal better than them, and also it was quite a bit simpler. This is probably the novel of hers which was reprinted most, though there are a couple of other contenders. Certainly the second and fourth novels, which most show her trademark clarity running in tandem with a big cast of characters and really ready wit, show her at her best, and are sadly barely known by comparison. That is not to say that this one is not highly entertaining. The story centres around Mary Setoun, now become Mary Crewys, who is squashed under the weight of her domineering husband's conservatism. She barely leaves their home, Barracombe House, set near the top of one side of a river valley in Devon, Pasture's favourite locale, and does everything she is asked to by her husband, without question. Her son, Peter, is very much a follower in his father's footsteps, but still beloved by his mother, even though his thoughtlessness hurts her. Mary is surrounded by not only these two, but her husband's two sisters, Pasture's reduced comic chorus of snobbery, crotchetiness, and veiled disapproval. On the same day, Mary's husband dies in a risky operation and Peter leaves secretly for the Boer War. Her husband's cousin, the charming John Crewys, is entrusted with running the estate. Mary finds in him something she has missed most of her life - empathy. Peter returns from the war having lost his arm, but not his inherited domineering manner. He falls for Mary's protege, Sarah Hewel, the daughter of the great house opposite their own, who has grown from a tomboy carrot-top to gorgeous young woman in the time Peter has been away. The fact that Sarah is also determined that Mary will be happy, and that Peter will wake up and not just repeat his father's errors by keeping his mother locked up at home, is the crucial one. A tough conversation is had, and freedom of all kinds ensues. So, though it feels 'basic' compared to others in her bibliography, this one still has a lot of spirit.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

The Art of War by Niccolo Machiavelli (1521)

This book is very foursquare to the floor in comparison to his famous The Prince. It eschews in the main the high-falutin' of the philosophy of control, and plumps instead for the down-home how-to. This is a blessing and a curse. It reads as much more thorough somehow, much more wedded to detail as it is. It's less of a wandering piece. But it also gets bogged down in that detail, passing from strong general discussion down into the nitty-gritty, and repeating the versions of it over and over and over. It's about how to construct, discipline and formulate an army with reference to the ancients, those being the Greeks and Romans. And it's also about how poor those elements are in the Italy of the time of this book, and how these lessons in the past will serve as a blueprint for a future military renaissance, to follow on from the current artistic and philosophical one. He takes us into this by means of a discussion/symposium between young enthusiasts and the author, where the author hands down all his accumulated military wisdom in the hope that Italy's future leaders will emulate it. The topics covered range across how to withstand a siege, or how to win out as a sieger; how to march your army into various types of territories and how the terrain will affect performance and strategy; how to discipline various types of insurrection and disaffection as well as maintain firm and positive standards across your force; and how to meet an enemy in many different circumstances and all the sorts of fighters and formations that might possibly arise (this is where he can get incredibly bogged down), among others. It's not an exciting book, like its more famous predecessor. But it can occasionally quietly inspire.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"I've been waiting for you for years," said Bertie Wilson in a soft, low, impressive voice.

"Fancy! How patient of you! - How did you know it was me?"

"Oh, instantaneous-sympathy, I suppose."

"On your side, do you mean? I should call it telepathy, or perhaps - conceit."'

from The Twelfth Hour by Ada Leverson (Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'...the strongest natures are those which least incline to tyranny.'

from Peter's Mother by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (Chapter XII)

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic[,] by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

We're hierarchical animals, none of this is new. Why though is the artist[,] as a person as well as a creator, endlessly anatomised, while the psychological make-up of a critic is let go hang? Who has investigated the oedipal pulsings of a Sainte-Beuve? Or the possible anal indelicacies of a Saintsbury? Or the Gestalt of all our critics who wrote a novel once? Nobody hangs their laundry out. Or sees them as men and women for a' that, outside the hall of fame like everybody else, beating their little welfare fists against the big bank door.'

from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part IV)

Friday, September 21, 2012

Sapho by Alphonse Daudet (1884)

Another French novel of bleared love. I am beginning to lose hope in finding a male writer of the late nineteenth century in France who doesn't have this Maupassantian attitude. The use the characters put each other to - utilizing each other while spouting all the (pseudo)poetry of love, the grim deceptions and hopeless misconceptions of what constitutes loyalty certainly bring me down. The astonishing capacity of knowing someone very deeply and intimately, benefiting from their care - and being able to throw them away when their looks fade, or you want some different advancement in society, beggars belief. But then perhaps I'm a crazed idealist when it comes to these sorts of questions, or perhaps Daudet's situations are set up as an effort which is in some essential way non-realistic, a dramatisation to serve some other end - a grim depressive notion, philosophically, of what life and love amount to. Sapho is Fanny Legrand, woman of the demi-monde, and artists' model, most famously for the sculptor Caoudal, whose Fanny-inspired piece, a sensuous representation of Sapho, is often copied and sits in many homes across Paris as one of the sculptures of the era. Fanny has a background in the streets, and from time to time we are reminded of her gutter-language and -ideas. She has been 'passed around' from artist to artist, and is now an ageing muse. Young Jean Gaussin falls for her still glowing embers of beauty, and so begins a seesawing scramble between his, his family's, and her wills as first he feels trapped, then returns to her, falls for someone else, is encouraged away by his family, falls for her again, suspects her of all sorts of chicanery, watches as she loses her looks even more and joins very dubious company, falls blindly for her while engaged to someone else, and finally loses her altogether. At the very end she says, tellingly, "I'm exhausted!". I'm not surprised that she would be. And better off out of it!

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Where was he? What was he doing there? By degrees, in the reflected light from the little garden, the room appeared to him to be all white, lighted up from underneath; the large portrait of Fanny rose opposite to him, and the recollection of his fall came upon him without the least astonishment. As soon as ever he had entered and faced that bed he had felt himself lost; and had said to himself, "If I fall here, I fall without reprieve and forever." He had fallen, and under the melancholy disgust for his cowardice, he felt some sort of relief in the idea that he would never emerge from his pit. He had the miserable comfort of the wounded man who, losing blood and dragging his wounded limb, stretched himself upon the dung-heap to die, and[,] weary of suffering, of struggling, all his veins opened, sinks deliciously into the soft and fetid warmth.'

from Sapho by Alphonse Daudet (Chapter XIV)

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Opposite her, her mother sat with the shuttered, conscious look she always assumed in public places. Today there was that added look Hester also knew well, that prim display of extra restraint her mother always wore in the presence of other Jews whose grosser features, voices, manners offended her sense of gentility all the more out of her resentful fear that she might be identified with them. Today the train rang with their mobile gestures, and at each station crowds of them got off - great-breasted, starched mothers trailing mincing children and shopping bags stuffed with food, gawky couples digging each other in the side with their elbows, girls in beach pyjamas, already making the farthest use of their smiles and great, effulgent eyes. At each station, they were met by the battered Fords and wagons that serviced the farms which would accommodate them, where for a week or two they would litter the tight Catskill towns with their swooping gaiety and their weary, rapacious hope.'

from Old Stock, a piece in In the Absence of Angels by Hortense Calisher

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Memoirs, I see now, aren't formal compositions of what you remember - and what you care to say of it. A memoir is your own trembling review of what you did and do - what you can bear to say of it. In so much of my life, as here and now, the saying is the act. In varying shades of distinctness, it is my public life. No matter how private it seems.'

from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part III)

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (1927)

Many people were eagerly awating this book on first publication. Arlen's previous novel The Green Hat had been the best selling novel of 1924, and there had been only short stories between. I think it caused disappointment in some circles, celebration in others - certainly it garnered attention as the 'long-awaited follow-up'. One of the main criticisms was his tendency to repetition of phrases for emphasis - always the case, but very markedly so here. Often I find it quite charming, and it lends the emphasis it claims. But there are some times where he does overdo it, or where the phrase is constructed less rhythmically, and the result is irritation. This is the story of a threesome of powerful men, their children, and the lovers the children take. It has the trademark Arlen charm and swing, with a Monopoly-board zeitgeist of twenties zing and brilliance. The critical response has clouded the fact that this book is, in many instances, an intelligent one. The author has a strong grip on the power of passion, the swings and roundabouts of motivation in relationships, and graces them with a sure sense of style. Something which had come out in the stories between his last novel and this one was a feeling of writer's block - they were redolent of a struggling imagination. There is very little of that here - it steams along, issuing a confident slipstream. Only in the ending is there a sense of quandary - it sums up in two pages a little too flatly. Savile, the writer lover of the daughter of one of the powerful men; Venetia, that reticent and yet ultimately open-hearted daughter; Raphael, the traumatised war-survivor son of one of the others; Ysabel, his gregarious American actress lover - these are the four whose elegance and sadness are at the centre, with the power and influence of the older generation invading and twisting their lives and loves.

Friday, August 31, 2012

The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves by Tobias Smollett (1762)

Smollett's shortest and least known book is brilliant. This story of a latter-day knight errant, really a gentleman who has been saddened by the loss of his sweetheart, wandering the English countryside and getting lost in farces and scrapes mainly brought about by the shenanigans of his cohort or the people they knock into along the way, is likenable to a long ribbon of varying colour. Many of Smollett's pet subjects are there - the verbosity of the legal profession, the quackery of doctors, the scheisterhood of astrologers and fortunetellers and, more broadly, the venality of humankind at its worst! But his other pets make it a very rounded meal - the soft deliciousness of love, the delight of a good human heart when rarely one is come across, the glorious silliness of obsessed humans too. In every one of his novels there is a character who could be played by no-one other than Brian Blessed. In this case it's Sam Crowe, a sea captain, whose language is as colourful as his curses are fulminous. He takes a liking to Greaves, and in an almost childlike way seeks to emulate him, his fancy completely taken by his idea of chivalry. In bilgewashed seagoing language he coruscates his way through adventure and misadventure - perplexed behind it all with why he doesn't quite cut the same dashing figure as our hero, and clothed ad hoc in jerkin and tinpot for helmet, where Launcelot has elegant armour and spurs. The plot revolves around Greaves' search for his Aurelia, who has been spirited away by a disobliging uncle, and who lands up in secret hiding places and cast into bedlam. The supporting cast of the mad, the self-aggrandizing, the sneaky, the perpetually complaining, and the few good souls who represent hope, keep this liveliness bubbling, colourful and very joyous.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"...In fact, we are all in the same circus created by Nature to amuse itself --"

"Nature!" said Raphael passionately. "Nature is a bloody fool! It begins by arousing in us all a need to love and be loved - and in nine cases out of ten it can't satisfy it."'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Four)

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...never daring the banal, the stark word, it is our reticences that trap us after all. It happened everywhere: behind the tidy doors of marriage, in the dark bed of adventure, or in the social bumpings against one another in the crowded rooms where people massed together protectively in frenetic gaiety, hiding stubbornly - "I am alone" - using liquor, music, sex, to say - "You too?" It happened, sometimes, in rooms at the end of the day, after the scratch of gossip, the long political sighs, were done, and there was a lull, with people staring reflectively into their glasses, twirling the stems, that the lull deepened, a sentence died on the air, and it was as if everyone had plunged his arm into a deep well, searching, seeking - but no hands met and clasped.'

from Point of Departure, a piece in In the Absence of Angels by Hortense Calisher

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Men will not really see themselves until they have conquered the unconscious habit of regarding their fellow-men as blind.'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Four)

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (1956)

Charteris' second novel feels much less rooted in his own life than the first, but who knows whether or not this is true. It occupies a strange matrix-point - triangulated between Evelyn Waugh, Compton Mackenzie and Hortense Calisher. It's set in Scotland, at an estate just inherited by Lionel Spote, the main character. He is typical Charteris (I say cheekily on the basis of two novels and a cursory glance at his others), with Jungian preoccupations, deeply conflicted self, put-uponness and bewilderedness, and a sour tone. This part is autobiographical I think - Lionel has too much in common with John Grant, the lead in his first novel, for this not to be the case. This one also takes us into dour territory, but unlike the first, it isn't especially strangulated and melancholy. Lionel is stymied in many ways, but this is drawn out with humour and absurdity. A pushy local dignitary wants to provide some employment in tough times by building an enormous machine which can, through technologically revolutionary means, make rope out of bracken, which the surrounding estates have in plenty. What follows is a comedy of shifting intentions, political vying, and bracing force of personality. The relish with which this is portrayed is the Mackenzie trig-point (along, of course, with its Scots setting). The Waugh influence is in the fine-point revelation of the upper class, climbing right through the mindset and giving it in superbly able detail. This mixture is then fed through Charteris' spare, unredundant, densely allusive prose, which is the Calisher likening. This is fascinating, and very occasionally mystifying, but always alive. Also included, as there was in the last one, is an at-odds love, in this instance with the bemused daughter of one of Lionel's nearest neighbours, the April of the title, with whose property his own 'marches' (borders). This element seems the least developed - I'll be intrigued to see whether he covers love more centrally again in future.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Swiftly, steadily, she walked to the door. Mice, mice. All of them, always, mice trying to be pirates. Lechers, financiers, statesmen, great men, fathers, lovers...mice, full of craft, scampering away if you just looked at them, stinking with fear and wonder...'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Three)

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...She knew Lionel like the inside of her bag - and when he read those articles in the Economist he was just the same as he used to be on his pot - couldn't bear to be disturbed. Yet if you had the courage to face his screams when you moved him - and potted him in a different place[,] then he was often happier than ever. And so it would be here when he got settled in. The smallest novelty made him feel insecure. That's why he liked all this psychology: by inviting these weird monkey-gods into his garden - he could pat them on their polysyllabic heads and feel secure from them. Id indeed - three letters were missing if you asked her.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 23)

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...Peter had a Vauxhall car, a short sharp thing that stood out indignantly from the scrupulous traffic, like a full-stop in a page by Henry James...'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Two)

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Commonplace Book

'It was dark now and the curtains were undrawn.

"What's that glow in the sky[?]" he said. "I've often noticed it from Rossiemurchat. Is it the Northern Lights?"

She laughed peacefully. "My mother's batteries."

"Her batteries...?"

For a single instant the possibility of her mother being powered by batteries found reality in Lionel's suggestible eyes.

"Hens."'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 21)

Commonplace Book

'...Through the corner of his eye he got a close-up of the Minister. "God" he then murmured. "My God" - like a soldier whose match, which he had been about to strike - had been lit by a sniper's bullet.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 21)

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"...yours is the sort of tolerance that would make intolerance in others punishable by law."'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Two)

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Commonplace Book

'There were sharp, short, firm steps ranting up the passage. The wrenching wrongly of the handle gave his face time to solidify in quite incredulous indignation - then in came April.

She came straight up to him, stopped short of his carpet slippers, mirrored him as a turd on a cushion - and rapped out one word, like spitting.

"CAD!"

"I beg your..."

But she had gone. The door had banged. Another door had banged - and this time Lionel was ready for the glimpse of the great swerving saloon - and the swoosh of gravel.

As though his senses, not April, had taken leave down the drive[,] he rose in some haste to catch a last sight of them. No. There she went.

And slowly - slowly his face[,] taking it in, became corrugated - the laugh was not natural. She had been sick on him, actually left something on him. An archaism - and vomit.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 18)

Commonplace Book

'...In the lingo of democracy, America has always been a classless nation. Yet writer after writer, from James to Faulkner, from Dreiser to Fitzgerald, has proclaimed the opposite. A work that does so here, or a writer, is always in danger, at least at first. For Americans, to go back in time is to be a recidivist, a snob, unless, like Lowell, you are already in the national mind very clearly defined. (Then it is patriotism.) Class difference, when finally admitted in the United States, was thrown to the sociologists. Who have treated it as such a stinkbomb of a subject should be - without humor and without human coloration. So that none of us skunks would smell of the results.'

from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part I)

Friday, July 20, 2012

The Piccinino by George Sand (1847)

This is Sand's Sicilian romance, and is classically her, with a rich landscape, young love, a political/philosophical battle, a mystery and the threat of violence. Its overwhelming colours are black and green, and its landscape a tortuous one. The black is the lava, spewed up from Aetna, which underlays the landscape in the area around Catania where the main action is set. The green is all of the intense bright verdure which grows on this super-fertile mix. The landscape is tortuous because of the gullies and peaks all around, through which the characters climb and slip, into which their houses and palaces are built, accessible often by staircases in the rock and staring down chasms. It's a steamy feeling. The main man, Michel (that's short for Michelangelo, so Mee-kell, rather than the Mee-shell) Lavoratori, is taken with a local princess on his return to Sicily from Rome where he has been trying his way into art. She seems strangely connected to his mason-decorator father. Meanwhile the rumoured brigand of the hills, the Piccinino, campaigning furtively against Sicily's Neapolitan rulers of the time, also taken with the princess, slips in and out of a political intrigue surrounding the coming death of Sicily's invalid ruler, the princess' uncle. Michel discovers at a crucial point that all in his life is not what it has hitherto seemed, and the scene is set for he, the princess (the revealer of the mystery) and the Piccinino to play their important parts in the struggle for possible Sicilian freedom. Those who want tough concision, rather than expansive largesse, might find it frustrating. But as a typical example of Sandian high romance, this is full of rich colours and highly entertaining.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...even a virtue can be carried too far. Drake, for instance, carried patriotism as far as to be indistinguishable from piracy. Venetia carried resignation, which is conscious of grave faults in mankind, so far as to be indistinguishable from absent-mindedness, which is conscious of nothing...'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book One)

Commonplace Book

'...Her feet were very small. Her feet were too small. Unable to keep up with Venetia's growth, they turned against her. Like Mexico, they were a disorder unto themselves...'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book One)

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...From the first, when it begins to be said that I have a style, am a "stylist," I chafe. Doesn't this mean I have nothing to say comparable to the way I say it - or else that anything I say will all sound the same? I do have in mind an image of sentences I would like to read: long lean branches of them, with buddings here and there or at the end - of fruit, or short stoppages, in sudden calm. And a prose, centrally aural-visual, which would make one hear-see. The "disappearing" style once so vaunted by Maugham and so fondled by the hacks - that seems to me merely a "showing," with no room or vision left for "telling" - and done in an understatement which never dares overdescribe. The best style seems to me so much the fused sense of all its elements that it cannot be uncompounded - how-you-say-what-you-say, so forever married that no man can put it asunder. Its elements may be anything; the expression may be as elaborate or violent as the meaning is. (No one ever raises the point, if it is as mild as the meaning is.)  The word "prose" itself is what should all but disappear in the mind as one reads; just as in poetry, one accepts the marriage of idea and word, but does not too dividingly congratulate. The marriage of meaning and manner is then its own lawful issue, a new object or presence, made accessible. What words make at their best is an open fortress of meaning.'

from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part I)

Monday, July 16, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...modern young men are too easily deluded. For one thing, they have swelled heads, and ask for trouble. They are so sceptical, they believe nothing that they are told. They are so credulous, they believe everything that they tell themselves.'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book One)

Sunday, July 15, 2012

The Carissima by Lucas Malet (1896)

This is the first time I've heard a stutter in the smoothly-humming engines of Lucas Malet. It is her fifth novel, and confirms the theory that her odd-numbered ones seem to be smaller, more unusual, particular pieces. This is the story of a seemingly ingenuous young woman, Charlotte Perry, contracting an engagement but not seeing her betrothed for some time while he pursues business in South Africa. Malet's archetypal worldly aesthete character, Anthony Hammond, is introduced to her on holiday at Lake Geneva; her betrothed, Constantine Leversedge, is Hammond's friend. But Hammond knows Leversedge's secret - he has had some tough experiences in South Africa. The most tough was coming across a camp on the veldt where some people had been viciously murdered quite some time before - the stench and the horrifying scene are what he calls "the Thing-too-much," and the sight of a demon-like dog there, presumably feasting on the corpses, has caught him like a constantly recurrent bad dream. Leversedge is haunted, and often nervously unstrung, thinking he sees his hound dogging him elusively and threateningly at times of stress. A terrible tragedy of inconstancy then plays out on Lake Geneva, with social vying playing at cross-purposes to emotional uncertainties. This novel feels a little too uncertain at times, with Malet seemingly not sure if she'll have Charlotte be misunderstood or manipulative. The result is a feeling of not-quite-thereness, despite a potentially fascinating mixture, and a delving into the supernatural that holds promise.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Commonplace Book

'She got out, swearing once with drab, staccato effect.

Then Lionel came twisted out of the murk - radiating pleasure.

"Elizabeth - you got here."

"Yes, I'm here, hun," she said. "It would be swell if you took this case - it's got books in it."

"You don't know what your coming means to me."

"I can guess. Does the train just go on and on? I mean after one gets out - does it still just go on and on? It would be interesting to stay on it and see. Or does it come back? I got so I didn't care. You look older."

After a time in the car she said, "It's extraordinary to think that people live here, isn't it? Is there much rape?"

This was better. He smiled at her with private welcome, instead of answering.

"Just of sheep after church," she added[,] beginning her trick of screwing her hair round one index finger, and looking truly like a dead cod with the pathos of yet being a human being...'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 15)

Friday, July 13, 2012

Wacvie by Faith Bandler (1977)

This is a novel of quiet spirit. It impresses with its simple strength. It also has less compulsive elements where simplicity and quietness don't adequately serve the material. This fictionalisation of the story of Bandler's father begins on Ambrym, an island now in Vanuatu, then the New Hebrides, in the late Victorian or very early 20th century period. Its illustration of the civilisation of the island, its main points of reference and cultural beliefs, is intensely felt, with colour and moods and tastes well depicted. Then, puzzlingly, white men come to the island and its neighbours. They steal people, taking them off on their huge white-sailed ships, never to be seen again. Wacvie is one of these. His time in Queensland as a labourer on a sugar plantation, a virtual slave, forms the main part of the narrative. His growing awareness of the injustice of his position, and his retention of his simple outlook, are the main grace-points. We also meet Weloa, his friend, and Weloa's wife Emcon, who provide a picture of domestic life and privations in these harsh circumstances. There are also the white plantation managers and owners, who are perhaps less well-depicted. There are unbelievable angles in the life of Maggie, the manager's wife, and small errors of historical detail and minor anachronisms which mar their story a little. Eventually Wacvie, Weloa and Emcon run away from the plantation to New South Wales, and start again with their own small farms among other Islander people. There is warmth in their freedom, and a sense of somewhat restored plenty. I think what this story lacks most is a sense of the rush of life, its pulse beating through its veins - almost as though, in searching for dignity for these characters, Bandler has disallowed them some level of reality. Very forgivable when the main character is your father, in one sense, but tale-telling not well served in another.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...The feeling returned upon me which had oppressed me earlier in the evening, as I worked my way out of the crowded hall, namely, that there was an abnormal, a malign element in my surroundings. It was absurd, of course, yet increasingly the Spirit of Fear - fear of I know not quite what - whether a perception of something supernatural, or merely a heightened perception of the ever-present possibility of tragedy in mortal existence, of "the Thing-too-much" - seemed to haunt the whispering trees and dusky garden, to diffuse itself through the blue-purple abyss of the lake and mountains, and the clear, impassive, starlit night.'

from The Carissima by Lucas Malet (Phase Fourth, Chapter VI)

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys (1915)

These seventeen enthusiasms are joyous things. Essays on beloved authors are a very specific art, and Powys has mastered it wonderfully. That is not to say that I agree with him in all instances either; a large part of the pleasure derives from enjoying his obvious enjoyment, registering his twistings to serve his points, and his partialities that cannot be dully, servilely supported. There is fallible human delectation to be gained from that, and imagination serves up what our own choices, and biases, might be in the same circumstances. His range of choice also elucidates, more specifically, his literary bearings. He includes Dante, which many wouldn't; he mentions D'Annunzio in passing, which almost no-one would do today; he devotes an entire essay to Walter Pater, towards whom very few venture any more. The pieces on some authors feel closer to his heart than others; so, his bulging, baroque prose pulsates even more soundingly in scoring their triumphs. Some of the essays here inspire a fresh perspective on hackneyed names: Charles Lamb needs new examination, as does Milton. One I'm pretty sure I can never join him in - Edgar Allan Poe will always be beyond my personal pale, when push comes to shove, I think. Though I can sense his cleverness, and the strange nervous twist of his lurching sensibility, I can never see him as a genius. Perhaps Powys' championing will finally convince me next time I read it. If anyone could, he could.

Commonplace Book

'An elephant, touched on leather hock with dandelions' puff of pistils, would be more put out than April teased.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 13)

Commonplace Book

'...Somebody must have the discrimination and the detachment necessary to do justice to our "creative minds." The worst of it is, everybody in these days rushes off to "create," and pauses not a moment to look round to see whether what is being created is worth creating...'

from Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys (Conclusion)

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...after all, what is taste? The hedge from behind which the feeble shoot at the strong; the refuge of the unproductive; the cloak under which the unsuccessful try to cover the blackness of their envy; the spangles with which talent tries so to dazzle the eyes of the commonplace multitude, that it shall fail to see the stars of true genius shining on quietly very far above its head...'

from The Carissima by Lucas Malet (Phase Fourth, Chapter IV)

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...what banalities! What ineptitudes! They make the mistake, our modern free-versifiers, of thinking that Art can be founded on the Negation of Form. Art can be founded on every other Negation. But not on that one - never on that one! Certainly they have a right to experiment; to invent - if they can - new forms. But they must invent them. They must not just arrange their lines to look like poetry, and leave it at that.'

from Visions and Revisions by John Copwer Powys (Walt Whitman chapter)

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Losing Timo by Linda Baxter (2004)

During my ten years in London, there were many senseless crimes committed and reported on in the media. For some reason, one in particular stayed in my mind. Something clicked, and I cut the story out of my copy of The Independent, and filed the cutting in with loads of other documents, looking at it from time to time and wondering what happened about it. There were a few news reports about it at the time, and then, from an outsider's point of view, someone who wouldn't be dedicatedly looking for coverage, all went quiet. I got it out again a couple of months ago, and googled the name of the victim, wondering if there was fuller information on the net. Up came this book. The victim's name was Tim Baxter. He and a friend were walking home in the middle of the night after a night out (something I did all the time when I was there), reached the Hungerford Bridge near Charing Cross station, and were mugged half way across it. They were atrociously beaten and then thrown over the side of the bridge into the Thames forty feet below. His friend survived, but Tim drowned and was found at Gabriel's Wharf the following day. This book is his mother's story of the time - her numbed and then outraged reactions, her connecting with Tim's friends, her emerging celebration of her son. She combines short, reasonably cool descriptive essays with much more searing poems to build up a picture of the crime and its aftermath. Having dealt with a few grieving people in my time, I can say that there's one thing that this book leaves me wishing for. It is the story of the first period in the main (the crime was committed in 1999 and this book's last entry is 2003); I'd like to have heard how things have developed since then; to watch a greater sense of healing prevail. But even so, I can imagine the writing of this book not only helped Baxter come to terms with what happened, but that it would also help others facing that unimaginable horror.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Now at last they were still. Foxed in the very kernel of consciousness. Like intrigued poultry they stared, all pupil, all doubt. Then they stirred uncomfortably in the vacuum where comprehension should have been.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 9)

Commonplace Book

'...The greedy, capricious "Uranian babyishness" of his pupil Oscar, with its peevish clutching at all soft and provocative and glimmering things, is mere child's play, compared with the deep, dark Vampirism with which this furtive Hermit drains the scarlet blood of the Vestals of every Sanctuary.'

from Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys (Walter Pater chapter)

Friday, June 22, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...there is no such thing as the history of the human race, but only of a few names rescued from oblivion, which are called illustrious names, heedless of the fact that at certain times whole nations became illustrious under the influence of the same deed and the same idea. Who can tell us the names of all the enthusiastic, noble hearts who have thrown aside the spade or hoe to go to fight the infidel?..'

from The Piccinino by George Sand (Chapter XXXVII)

Commonplace Book

'...I could write a pamphlet on the subject of boots - they are an awful revelation of personal character. Vulgarities otherwise skilfully concealed come out in the shape of a heel; sloth leaves indelible tracks across upper leathers. In moments of illumination I have detected gluttony in a lace and profligacy in a button...'

from The Carissima by Lucas Malet (Phase Three, Chapter III)

Monday, June 18, 2012

The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones (1993)

These 11 stories are full of heart. They're also full of sweat, drugs, puke and booze, but somehow those very real substances, and the real lives of struggle and venom and pity and shards of beauty they illumine, do not feel gratuitous. Jones is clear about his characters' vision of life. In the main, they are tough people, who battle demons and each other, and the vagaries of their bodies. They are not overly intellectual, gentle dreamers, or tortured emotional artists. I like his insistence on their point of view, and the fact that they are represented by him with a full weaponry of interests, angles and obsessions. They echo his own I'm suspecting, with the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche figuring large in several instances. Part I consists of full-fight war stories from the time of Vietnam; Part II involves what I would call an exploration of the lives of very physical 'hams' of both genders; Part III covers sadness and culpability in the back lots of life; and Part IV casts up two elegies to dreamers of different kinds. Jones' prose is taut and to the point and not poetic in any obvious way. Occasionally, as in the penultimate story A White Horse, he doesn't attend sufficiently to the all-vital ending. But I guess because this collection is a long way outside my usual comfort zone, and yet enmeshes me in the lives of its people completely, I find myself fascinated and claimed by it.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...The man was evidently happy, and when a man is happy I hold he may very safely be left to his own thoughts. For, next to slapping an infant to make it cease crying, or beating a cripple with his own crutches to make him hurry, I know no more brutal stupidity than awakening the happy from their dream of bliss by talking to them...'

from The Carissima by Lucas Malet (Phase Second, Chapter V)

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Fly-fishing is an artificial art which has been developed since the middle of the last century with perhaps particular regard to the psychological necessities of the tired professional classes. Whoever has watched for long the weaving cast, the winnowing hand-movement, the slightly bowed devotional attention of those isolated damp doctors and businessmen, and heard, close as they do - the gurgling, guggling impassivity, the monotonous but soothing variety of the passing surface will see the whole thing as a charging of batteries, and like all charging, a long business - one amp going in all the time, and nothing apparently happening.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 7)

Friday, June 15, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"Yes, yes," he said to himself, "sing on, happy birds of the South, pure as the sky that looked down upon your birth! This merriment is the indication of a perfectly clear conscience, and laughter well befits you, who have never had an idea of evil! Ah! My old father's dear old ballads, which have allayed the anxieties of his life and lessened the fatigue of his labour - I should listen to them with respect instead of smiling at their simplicity! And my young sister's merry laughter I should welcome with affectionate delight as a proof of her courage and her innocence! Away with my selfish dreams and my unfeeling curiosity! I will go through the storm with you, and will enjoy as you do a burst of sunlight between two clouds. My careworn brow is an insult to your candour - black ingratitude for your kindness. I propose to be your staff in distress, your comrade in toil, and your boon companion in joy!"'

from The Piccinino by George Sand (Chapter XXXII)

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...It seemed that he was always seeking to kindle his passions in order to test their intensity, but that he abstained from gratifying them most of the time, fearing lest his enjoyment might fall short of the idea he had conceived of it. Certain it is that on the few occasions on which he had given way, he had been profoundly depressed afterwards, and had reproached himself for having expended so much exertion for a pleasure so soon exhausted.'

from The Piccinino by George Sand (Chapter XXIX)

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Ever since Hilde[,] Lionel had remained a self-conscious sleeper, aware of many different grades of sleep. In the mornings, he often looked back with the self-critical distance-probing eye of a golfer after driving. Because life - even the descent of the stairs to breakfast - was an act of faith powered by sleep. To sleep badly was to wake up not believing. The libido hung back unsatisfied by the mysterious cookhouse door of the unconscious. Sometimes quite clearly the terrible skinny female hand of an unidentifiable dream could be seen withholding the day's ration...'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 4)

Dear Husband, by Joyce Carol Oates (2009)

Oates' output in short stories can be extremely variable in terms of quality. This is thankfully one of the good volumes. As will be familiar to any interested reader, her style is very firm, really quite surprisingly formal. This can sometimes weigh a little heavy in her novels. Her stories can be stunning when she gets it really right; the strength and wire of the formality makes the shorter form really punch. I'm glad to say that this happens several times in this volume. In her realist vein, the gritty Landfill catalogues a life almost as an amplification of yet-another-newspaper-statistic, most categorised by its death. The confusions and Ice Storm-like story of well-heeled eroticised family secrets in Cutty Sark marks the memory. Two tales of mothers, The Heart Sutra and Dear Husband,, detail desperation, loneliness, need and abandonment in the lives of women who put too much faith in their men, and the arms' length avoidance tactics of alpha males in situations in which they find themselves trapped. Both end horrifically. In one story in particular Oates goes for something different - and it's a pleasure to hear the alteration in that firm voice. The wry, sour-mouthed humour of Suicide by Fitness Center, put into the mouth of a fascinated, cynical and nervously vulnerable older woman is a joy. This one has a fault which two others also have: a slightly damp squib ending. Endings are always critical and a good amount of the time Oates "gets" their value. Not virtually perfect, as was her 2004 collection I Am No One You Know, but still a fine entry in the Oates canon.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"A scavenger of genius," I replied.

"A what?"

"The editor of an extremely successful weekly paper of the social variety. In his youth he produced a witty and improper novel, which everybody said it was impossible to read, and everybody read. It affected to be autobiographical. Now he has ceased to be immoral - at all events in print - having laid to heart the golden maxim that public confession of the sins of others is on the whole an even more paying speculation than public confession of sins of your own. I am afraid he has also ceased to be witty. That is a matter for regret."

from The Carissima by Lucas Malet (Phase First, Chapter III)

Thursday, May 31, 2012

My Uncle Florimond by Henry Harland (1888)

This is as close as 1888 got to a 'young adult' novel. We meet Gregory Brace at 12, living in Connecticut with his grandmother and nasty uncle, and learning about the illustrious history of his now reduced family back in France - the de la Bourbonnayes. This is where the fantasy of visiting his grandmother's brother Florimond, still in France, first takes hold, along with notions of his aristocratic grandeur. Then his beloved grandmother dies, and, left with his nasty uncle, life loses colour. He has an adventure saving a fisherman's pole which has been dropped in a river-flood. The eccentric Jewish gentleman up from New York, whose pole it was, swears allegiance to him in his gratefulness. When life becomes too miserable Gregory cuts ties with his uncle and heads off to the big smoke to find him. Harland has a really deft touch with the vocalisations and habits of Jewish New York as Gregory explores that world, and learns quite a few life lessons along the way. Finally, at 15, we see him meet his Uncle Florimond who, though he is not the admirable and wealthy man Gregory had imagined, emerges as a partner in life's journey, echoing Gregory's growing maturity and his sense of life's realities. This is Harland's most engaging book of those I've read - I imagined how it would sound read aloud to an upper primary class, and was surprised by its muscle and strength.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Changing at Inverness, he had tea at the Station Hotel, an experience which disturbed him.

*These people should be stuffed.

An elderly woman with soft red complexion and deerstalker matted with flies was talking to a man with a shepherd's crook half as high again as his high self. The large amount of floor space between them necessitated raised voices but not such shouts. They were discussing Geordie. Isobel had been over on Saturday and said he was much better.

"I heard he was worse," the man roared with moody aggression.

But the disagreement in no way marred the conversation which slid with ease into "Is Hughie taking Ardgower this year?" At one point the woman caught a hotel porter by the arm and whispered into his ear. He whispered back, cheerfully.

Lionel's distress deepened. Even domestic servants connived, it seemed, in the macabre.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 2)

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...he thought that not only was his job necessary, unlike that of a journalist, from an absolute point of view, but also few people could do it as well as he and nobody exactly as he did it. He had his own particular flavour. For instance Milosh and Elizabeth Craik and Lady Hindshead. How many men could tune in like a crystal to expatriate, ex-Marxist Viennese Jew under three psycho-analysts, spinster under thirty existential novelist of Mayfair extraction and gaiety girl widow of a peer, whose memoirs had to be pruned from three thousand libellous pages[?] Like an experienced gardener - he could move from medlar to cactus to hydrangea - and facilitate the growth of each, sympathising with the purposes of succulent decay, dessication and superabundant mauve fructivity.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 1)

Commonplace Book

'Finally the couch. Jungian, Female. With dermatitis.

In a word: Hilde.

Sometimes he just lay and didn't say anything for days. Often he would go to sleep while remembering his dreams which had a snowball effect on the agenda.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 1)

Commonplace Book

'The mistake our "aesthetes" made, these lovers of Egyptian dancers and Babylonian masks, is that they suppose the simplicity of Lamb's subjects debar him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He can take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of dead Comedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eaten folios, and the shadows of sun-dials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreaking evasions of such as "can never know love," and out of these things he can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is a curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish art-neophytes of our age that they should miss these things in Elia. One wonders if they have ever felt the remote translunar beauty that common faces and old, dim, pitiful things can wear sometimes. It would seem not...'

from Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys (Charles Lamb chapter)

Friday, May 25, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...Mr. Finkelstein smiled faintly, and said, as if to excuse himself, "Vail, I cain't help it. I must haif my shoke."

"The grandest thing about your wit, fader-in-law," Mr. Marx observed, "is dot you don't never laugh yourself."

"No, dot's so," agreed Mr. Finkelstein. "When you get off a vitticism, you don't want to laif yourself, for fear you might laif de cream off it."

from My Uncle Florimond by Henry Harland (Chapter III)

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (1953)

This novel has an outlook which should guarantee grimness. And miraculously somehow it doesn't. It's the story of aristocratic John Grant who has three days' worth of second world war in Italy where he is hounded by his doubts of himself, uncertain in his responses to his men and ends up in a horrific nervous funk which leads to an appalling accident and the death of one of the men. After the war his catalogue of uncertainty continues, with relationships a continuous source of teeth-clenching: bursts of bravado alternate with awful melancholy and searing nervous intensity. The most extraordinary thing is the feeling one gets that Charteris intended Grant in a substantial way as a self-portrait. He is thoroughly tough with most of his characters, examining their every last failing with a microscopic eye. He is the same with Grant, though - himself! This is a classic English mid-century novelised autobiography, revealing the dark truth within, completely unsparing of the author's own negative aspects. As such it is a brave book. Given that prognosis, it could have been a miserable read. The subject matter definitely is. But this is where the miracle occurs - Charteris' intense, complex, allusive prose has something special in it, something like the perfect mixture of mind, muscle and poetry; a heady, searching multi-facetedness which is not only pleasing to the gut, but ultimately even redemptive.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford (1951)

Grace ends up marrying dashing aristocratic Frenchman Charles-Edouard after being swept off her feet while her slightly drippy fiance was away at war. It proves to be a good step, on the whole. She is immediately completely taken with his house in the south of France, Bellandargues. They spend an idyllic period there with their new baby, a little boy, and of course his extraordinarily firm, calculating and slightly dour English nanny, who provides some fabulous comic moments. Then comes a move to the Paris house and reconnection with Grace's old schoolfriend Carolyn, who has married a wealthy American with a love of the sound of his own voice. Their boy, Sigi (short for Sigismond), now a little older, is consistently shunted to one side as they embrace a life of society and all its outre goings-on. Charles-Edouard's typically French roving eye finally undoes him, as Grace realises she can't be quite as easy as she'd originally hoped with his philandering. Thereafter, Sigi is spoilt rotten by his separated parents, one in France, one in England. He realises, little blessing that he is, that this is the way to keep things, and deliberately foils all attempts at a reconciliation. In the end, he is himself foiled, but not before several classic schemes have come to fruition. Mitford's prose is sparking with wit, full of wry-mouthed worldliness. All her novels thus far have been so, and the unnatural division pushed forth popularly between the 'bad' first four and 'brilliant' second four is a nonsense.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"Do you know something? It takes two to tell the truth. The alternative is silence. And do you know another thing - the hell of being with you was...being alone."

When she was some distance from him, collecting odds and ends to take upstairs and pack, she said, "Then you'll soon be out of hell."

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part Two, Chapter 23)

Commonplace Book

'The suggestive power of genius plays us, indeed, strange tricks. I have sometimes fancied that the famished craving in the eyes and nostrils of El Greco's saints was a queer survival of that tragic look which that earlier Greek, Scopas the sculptor, took such pains to throw upon the eyelids of his half-human amphibiums. It might even seem to us, dreaming over these pictures as the gusts of an English autumn blow the fir branches against the window, as though all that weird population of Domenico's brain were tossing their wild, white arms out there and emitting thin, bat-like cries under the drifting moon.'

from Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys (El Greco chapter)

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"...That's why Badger-Skeffington always wins everything - Daddy says he's literally full of food, like a French racehorse. They're nouveaux riches, you know."

"Now hold on, Miles, that is not true. I often see Bobby Badger at my club, he's frightfully poor, it was a fearful effort to send the boy here at all, I believe."

"Yes, I know, Uncle Hughie, the point is that they are nouveaux riches and frightfully poor as well. There are lots like that here. Their fathers and mothers give up literally everything to send them."

"Oh dear, how poor everybody seems to be, in England," said Grace. "It's too terrible when even the nouveaux riches are poor."

from The Blessing by Nancy Mitford (Part II, Chapter Nine)

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Commonplace Book

'A Da Vinci or a Goethe accepts religion and uses it, but between it and the depths of his own mind remains forever an inviolable film of sceptical "white light." This "qualified assent" is precisely what excites the fury of such individualistic thinkers as Tolstoi and Bernard Shaw. It were amusing to note the difference between the "humour" of this latter and the "humour" of Shakespeare. Shaw's humour consists in emphasizing the absurdity of human Custom, compared with the good sense of the philosopher. Shakespeare's humour consists in emphasizing the absurdity of philosophers, compared with the good sense of Custom. The one is the humour of the Puritan, directed against the ordinary man, on behalf of the Universe. The other is the humour of the Artist, directed against the Universe, on behalf of the ordinary man.'

from Visons and Revisions by John Cowper Powys (Shakespeare chapter)

Monday, May 14, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"...Her virtue arouses my admiration, and the dumb despair which seems to be crushing her inspires in my heart profound and affectionate compassion. To admire and to pity - is not that to adore?"

from The Piccinino by George Sand (Chapter XVII)

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Did, at this prognostication of achievement, a great Hallelujah fill John's heart? No. The satirical mood of the station platform lingered, and now the face which often seemed to say, "How could she possibly say 'No' to me?" Elaborately concealed even alone in that empty room, the thought, "If she takes me it must mean she had no one else." And from there to proceed to wonder if she were so very "wonderful" and if he were in love. Emotionally, his character was a house built of cards, the full pack.'

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part Two, Chapter 21)

Commonplace Book

'...Through the mists and mephitic smoke of our confused age - our age that cries out to be beyond the good, when it is beneath the beautiful - through the thick air of indolence masquerading as toleration and indifference posing as sympathy, flashes the scorching sword of the Florentine's Disdain, dividing the just from the unjust, the true from the false, and the heroic from the commonplace. What matter if his "division" is not our "division," his "formula" our "formula"? It is good for us to be confronted with such Disdain. It brings us back once more to "Values"; and whether our "Values" are values of taste or values of devotion what matter? Life becomes once more arresting. The everlasting drama recovers its "tone"; and the high liturgy of the last illusion rolls forward to its own music.'

from Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys (Dante chapter)

Friday, May 11, 2012

Commonplace Book

'A pair of young mothers now became the centre of interest. They had risen from their lying-in much sooner than the doctors would otherwise have allowed. (French doctors are always very good about recognizing the importance of social events, and certainly in this case had the parents been forbidden the ball they might easily have fretted themselves to death.) One came as the Duchesse be Berri with l'Enfant du Miracle, and the other as Madame de Montespan and the Duc de Maine. The two husbands, the ghost of the Duc de Berri, a dagger sticking out of his evening dress, and Louis XIV, were rather embarrassed really by the horrible screams of their so very young heirs, and hurried to the bar together. The noise was indeed terrific, and Albertine said crossly that had she been consulted she would, in this case, have permitted and even encouraged the substitution of dolls. The infants were then dumped down to cry themselves to sleep among the coats on her bed, whence they were presently collected by their mothers' monthly nurses. Nobody thereafter could feel quite sure that the noble families of Bregendir and Belestat were not hopelessly and for ever interchanged. As their initials and coronets were, unfortunately, the same, and their baby linen came from the same shop, it was impossible to identify the children for certain. The mothers were sent for, but the pleasures of society rediscovered having greatly befogged their maternal instincts, they were obliged to admit that they had no idea which was which. With a tremendous amount of guilty giggling they spun a coin for the prettier of the two babies and left it at that.'

from The Blessing by Nancy Mitford (Part II, Chapter Six)

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"...I should like to see a bottle of Coca Cola on every table in England, on every table in France, on every -"

"But isn't it terribly nasty?" said Grace.

"No, ma'am, it most certainly is not. It tastes good. But that, if I may say so, is entirely beside the point which I am trying, if I can, to make. When I say a bottle of Coca Cola I mean it metaphorically speaking, I mean it as an outward and visible sign of something inward and spiritual, I mean it as if each Coca Cola bottle contained a djinn, and as if that djinn was our great American civilization ready to spring out of each bottle and cover the whole global universe with its great wide wings. That is what I mean."

"Goodness!" said Hughie.

from The Blessing by Nancy Mitford (Part II, Chapter Four)

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Commonplace Book

'We are all of us only too familiar with the popular phrase "Ivory Tower." It is a phrase used very literally by certain rough-and-tumble hail-fellow-well-met rufflers and bullies and rodomontaders of the ordinary critical world, whose academic position and prestige would be seriously impaired the moment any kind of especially penetrating scholarship or particularly daring metaphysical speculation or unusually subtle aesthetic appreciation began to be demanded by public opinion. As a matter of fact, in spite of these artistic rowdies it is a sign of stupidity in us, not a sign of strength, when we resist the offer made to us by Fate or Chance or Providence to build what these swashbucklers call an Ivory Tower in some secret back-garden in the private half of the double life which we have to lead if our existence is to be at all happy or satisfactory.'

from Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys (Introduction)

Monday, May 7, 2012

Plumbum by David Foster (1983)

I'm going to come at this from four angles:

The first cornerstone is - YARB, YARB, YARB.

The second cornerstone is - hyperbole.

The third cornerstone is - intelligence.

The fourth cornerstone is - "intelligence".

How those four elements merge ought to give the picture. This novel is essentially about a rock band - thank heavens, you think, Foster in the contemporary period will at least obviate the need for the really poor historical vision of previous efforts (not that he would have regarded that as important). But of course this is the greatest rock band in the world, called heavy metal but somehow not feeling so. Inherent in the setting of the piece just after New Wave, and in the tone of his describing of them, is something a bit like the Divinyls with a bit of the Plasmatics curdling through. Some of his mooching around the live band world of the time is accurate - contrasts between band members, the political angles of members' approaches to life defining them and their annoyances with others, the secret and not so secret jibing based on those kinds of facts. Brothers in a band, too, is rich territory for comic contrast, and sexual tension with female lead singers is grist to that mill.

His tone reminds me of a drug addict, crossed-legged on the floor, circa 1978, bent over, hugging themselves, eyes closed tight and wrinkling, rocking back and forth, muttering and laughing insanely at something which has amused them. SHAKING with laughter, and lost in themselves entirely. I can't get that picture out of my head.

The hyperbole most define this thing. Early on they are kept within some sort of bounds as the catalogue goes on of the most amazing player, the hugest number of lovers, the wildest amount of money, the shabbiest possible gig, the most unscrupulous behaviour. All decorated with bursts of scabrous humour taken to the nth degree. And it's entertaining on the short scale, it passes time, though the reader is aware even then that the 'addict' is really just talking to themselves. The love of the tall story can transmit.

The wild career of the band reaches South East Asia, that typical late 70s transmutation-point, and after a little while it happens. The sense comes that Foster's painted himself into a corner or got bored. Along comes a fantastical 'manager' down the tiny Bangkok street in a giant prime-mover who whisks up the band at a particularly low ebb, and the whole opus flies off into comic-book territory, exponentialising the wild elements. Transferred to Calcutta to record the album which will break them, very quickly the musical talk falls away, and, for a while, this enters its most interesting territory. A mad life on those dirty streets for these Australian musos with gigantic personalities, and those of the Indian poor who surround them. Experiments in living everywhere, and shot through with comic-book exaggeration and impossible flights.

There is no question that this author, cross-legged and hugging himself, giggling madly, is not intelligent. The capacity for making connections, pulling them through one another backwards, and then making them resound humorously, is evident and is something. Too much of it is, though, arrived at and discarded like so much flotsam. It's a jumble with shards of beauty. Given that he has access to such beauty, I want it to add up to a damn sight more than this. It's a world where all is eventually in service of the hyperbolic - where the necessary softening of reflexivity, of emotion, of genuine gentleness is regarded as dismissable stupidity. So, intelligence, only so much in itself, put to the service of what?

Then follows an ill-defined period of world domination as the band achieve all that their hyperbolic talents would predicate. We see them last on their worldwide tour, personalities crumbling and reforming with all the extremity going on within them and all that they have access to. There is a gruesome section of Joycean-Ginsbergian blah-speak (presumably meant satirically, but it's hard to fathom the reasoning - that's probably asking too much) which 'elucidates' a mind-blowing performance near the end of the tour. Then some wandering in post-performance fuzz, still determined by its rad-extremity, its genuine sparks of cleverness, and its strangely monotone quality, its comic-book hardness.

There are also simple errors here - language such gutsy characters wouldn't use, for example. Are they rubbed away by the conflation of colour - politics, spirituality, ethics, the self, the world: all treated with irreverence and gaminess? This crazed mosaic of little snapped-off bits of observation, riffing with one another on occasion very impressively? Not utterly, but a lot can be said for this novel's gusto and brain-popping bravura, in their limited striation.

To bring it into full focus, mention will need to be made of that thing we do when reading a book which we may not often own up to. We get an impression of the writer in the words on the page, yes, but, reading behind that, we also get an impression of who it might be who is doing the writing. We come to some personal conclusions about the trembling soul which is trying to entertain us. And that's where my picture of this rocking, mad-laughing, closed-eyed, lost-to-all-but-himself addict comes in. Right or wrong, THAT's the impression this collection of words ultimately gives me. And almost all I can hear from them is YARB, YARB, YARB.

There must be a point in Foster's career where this hard shell of yell finally breaks and some soft goo oozes out. Roll on the ooze!

Saturday, May 5, 2012

The Woman in the Case and other stories by Anton Chekhov (1953)

This collection almost all comes from a particular group of years in the 1880s when the author was following a vein of satirical sketchmaking. Their consistent characteristics are the enormous fallibility of many a human being, their capability of being gripped by things, large or small, which have impacted them in an emotional way, and have led to delusional, or obsessional, or melancholic behaviour. And then there are those who either suddenly come upon them, or have to put up with them, or are affected by them in some usually negative way. Occasionally he will broaden into more political territory, where the fallen ones are on the make, or manipulating selfishly a hopelessly moribund system. The picture made is a pretty grim one, and has that quality which one would normally associate with 'minor' authors in translation in reprints from university presses, to put it too generally. There is nothing especially 'classic' about these, which presumably is the reason they weren't translated until much later. The exception is A Visit to Friends, which is more personal and tragic. This is what I imagine the famed Chekhov to be about. Now to find out.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"...The man who aims true at the ring with his lance is drunk with joy. He carries off the prize, and congratulates himself on having had the courage to compete. But he who has broken several lances with no result goes away saying: "My luck is bad; I will not try again." And he too is pleased that he has profited by experience and has had the courage to read himself a salutary lesson..."'

from The Piccinino by George Sand (Chapter VIII)

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"Come on," she said gently - with two melted drops sliding to the fore of the teaspoon.

The drying bubbles of the last fit stayed on the cat's whiskers and the tip of its tongue looked trapped in its own teeth. Jane's little finger could not get in.

Life in it seemed centred only in the lungs and trying, heaving, to get out.

She put away the spoon, finally, and stood up. She moved the paraffin lamp nearer the wood. She looked down and it is, in a sense, no exaggeration to say she looked down, not at the cat dying, but at herself dying - and at that instant the character of her eyes assumed for a tranced moment[,] the character of the sea.'

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part Two, Chapter 17)

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Commonplace Book

'The stricken scream of the jive trumpet and belated wail of the jet engine coinciding with the welfare state professing progress is a conflict which will have its consummation, John thought, because there is only one harmony, the original harmony of the body with the coarse earth and the mind with that infinity, now a Divine vacuum, the sky...'

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part Two, Chapter 16)

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...Nothing can be more dismal than the stiff and regular decorations produced by machinery. The beauty of Chinese vases, and, indeed, of Chinese work in general, is attributable to that capricious air of spontaneity which the human hand alone can impart to its work. Grace, freedom, boldness, the unexpected, and even ingenuous awkwardness are, in decoration, elements of charm which we are losing day by day, as we depend more and more upon the resources of machinery and looms.'

from The Piccinino by George Sand (Chapter I)

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Evan Harrington by George Meredith (1861)

This novel is both graced and encumbered by its complexity. Meredith's famous curlicued style is an intriguing mixture. It wafts and drifts around the plot and can't help but fascinate. His plotting in this one is particularly intricate also, and this is where he comes a little unstuck. There is a strong feeling that much of the toing-and-froing of the piece is simply manoeuvring. Whether this was because he wanted to communicate a complex reality (the good excuse) or whether perhaps he was wandering, trying to find a way out of his tangle he was happy with (the bad excuse) is difficult to decide, though I must admit I tend to the latter idea. This is the story of class, seen from the point of view of an individualist. The Harringtons have significant notions of grandeur; father Mel (known as The Great Mel), a tailor, who dies at the beginning, has schooled his children to think highly of themselves, and has himself hobnobbed with the nobility, slightly audaciously. His wife is tougher and more practical, with a no-nonsense dignity. Evan, their son, is well-educated and dreamy after bigger things than his inheritance of his father's tailoring business would predicate. Just back from Portugal, where he stayed with his sister Louisa, who has married well and become a countess, he reconnects with a young aristocrat he fell in love with there who has also returned. He has neglected to mention his humble background! In her country house, with his sister engineering for all she is worth, the scene is set for a comedy of matchmaking and class-deception. Under the comedy is some autobiography I think, which is oblique in its referencing of Meredith's own tailoring family. The story is also ballasted with some fine writing about love. A novel which teems with characters and situations in what seems an endless intricate web.

Commonplace Book

'"...Of course the English are very eccentric, you don't know that, Sosthene, you have never crossed the Channel, but you can take it from me that they are all half mad, a country of enormous, fair, mad atheists..."'

from The Blessing by Nancy Mitford (Part I, Chapter Five)

Monday, April 16, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"There grows the wealth of the Valhubert family."

"D'you mean that vegetable? But what is it? I was wondering."

"Vegetable indeed! Have you never been in the country in France before? How strange. These are vineyards."

"No!" said Grace. She had supposed all her life that vineyards were covered with pergolas, such as, in Surrey gardens, support Miss Dorothy Perkins, heavy with bunches of hot-house grapes, black for red wine, white for champagne. Naboth's vineyard, in the imagination of Grace, was Naboth's pergola, complete with crazy paving underfoot.'

from The Blessing by Nancy Mitford (Part I, Chapter Four)

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...you can't just pull love out, like a hair of your head.'

from The Diplomat, a piece in The Woman in the Case and other stories by Anton Chekhov

Friday, April 13, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...misery is wanton, and will pull all down to it.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XLV)

Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (1898)

I'm torn by this book, as I am in general by Gallienne's style. His contradiction is built around appearing quite erudite and rich on the page and yet incurring an overwhelming feeling of thinness and insubstantiality in the memory. This novel ostensibly covers the irruption into a depressed neighbourhood of a charismatic young preacher at its local chapel, his falling in love with a sweet and humble local girl, and his being subsequently overcome romantically by a visiting reciter. He and the reciter realise that their love is of the deepest kind, but decide, through their mutual love and respect for the local girl, that their ways will part. Theophilus the preacher and Isabel the reciter embrace in the chapel before her last performance as a last goodbye, but unfortunately they are seen by the girl, Jenny. Isabel leaves, Theophilus is none the wiser, but Jenny begins to decline. Eventually she tells him what she saw. The last third of the book is concerned with death. Jenny's first, with all its implications of guilt. Then Theophilus himself starts to droop. In his last hours he calls out to his great love, Isabel. She rushes to him, and we hear for the first time of their pact of dying together, which duly comes to pass with a mutual suicide. All this is finely written, and its classical tones are heightened discursively and given Aesthetic period richness. So why does Gallienne feel so thin in retrospect? The answer is in fullness of prose, rather than rounding out of character. No wonder, then, that his reputation is far stronger as an essayist.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Rather to his surprise, Rose took the letter. Study her eyes if you wish to gauge the potency of one strong dose of ridicule on an ingenuous young heart. She read that Mr. George Uploft had met "our friend Mr. Snip" riding, by moonlight, on the road to Beckley. That great orbed night of their deep tender love flashed luminously through her frame, storming at the base epithet by which her lover was mentioned, flooding grandly over the ignominies cast on him by the world. She met the world, as it were, in a death-grapple; she matched the living heroic youth she felt him to be, with that dead wooden image of him which it thrust before her. Her heart stood up singing like a craven who sees the tide of victory setting toward him. But this passed beneath her eyelids. When her eyes were lifted, Ferdinand could have discovered nothing in them to complain of, had his suspicions been light to raise: nor could Mrs. Shorne perceive that there was the opening for a shrewd bodkin-thrust. Rose had got a mask at last: her colour, voice, expression, were perfectly at command. She knew it to be a cowardice to wear any mask: but she had been burnt, horribly burnt: how much so you may guess from the supple dissimulation of such a bold clear-visaged girl. She conquered the sneers of the world in her soul: but her sensitive skin was yet alive to the pangs of the scorching it had been subjected to when weak, helpless, and betrayed by Evan, she stood with no philosophic parent to cry fair play for her, among the skilful torturers of Elburne House.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XLIII)

Monday, April 9, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...Two sentences had been passed on Juliana: one on her heart: one on her body: "Thou art not loved"; and "Thou must die." The frail passion of her struggle against her destiny was over with her. Quiet as that quiet which Nature was taking her to, her body reposed. Calm as the solitary night-light before her open eyes, her spirit was wasting away. "If I am not loved, then let me die!" In such a sense she bowed to her fate.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XLII)

Commonplace Book

'She knew nothing of books, this quaint old woman, and had a very antiquated taste in wall-papers; yet there would seem to be other ways of being wise, and it may indeed be held that books act too much as insulators between us and the earth, to the mysterious currents of which gnarled shapes of unlettered old men and women may be the more sensitive as lying closer to the Mother.

At all events, old Mrs Talbot did seem to have won certain confidences from life and death refused to more consciously alert ears. Hers had been that hearing beyond listening to which secrets are sometimes revealed.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVIII)

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Commonplace Book

'There are excuses that we owe to ourselves, and we have a right to expect justice even from our own consciences. A sentimental conscience is the most tiresome of all altruists, and wilfully to indulge in remorse that we have not justly incurred is to blunt our consciences for real offences. The best repentance for our sins is a clear-eyed recognition of their nature, and the temptation in some flurry of feeling to take on our shoulders the mistakes of destiny with which we chance to have been involuntarily associated, is one to be resisted in the interests of that self-knowledge which is the beginning of self-development. Before we take the scourge in hand for our own shoulders let us be quite sure that we have sinned.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVII)

Friday, April 6, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...Happiness is such a materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, a bourgeois who has not yet attained the rank of a soul. The influence of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity has been upon the world. Christianity, no doubt, has robbed us of much - but then it has given us sorrow; it has taken away the sun, but it has brought us the stars. It is only in the starlight of sorrow that we become conscious of other worlds. The sun flatters our own little world with the illusion of a transitory importance; the stars show it its place in the universe, and teach it a nobler meaning for itself.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVI)

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...Now that he was awake, and could feel his self-inflicted pain, he marvelled at his rashness and foolishness, as perhaps numerous mangled warriors have done for a time, when the battle-field was cool, and they were weak, and the uproar of their jarred nerves has beset them, lying uncherished.'

from Evan Harrington by George Meredith (Chapter XXXVI)

Commonplace Book

'When two have lost each other in a crowd, it is best that one should stand still and await the other. Perhaps it were best for him to stand still here in life. Jenny would know where to seek him then - and maybe the dead had mysterious ways of bringing news to the living. He could wait a little while and see. For a little he could live - and listen.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXII)

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Waking, John saw Bright drawing the curtains on a garden he had never seen before. Memory made an effort, a conscious tracing of association dragging all the way an anchor of incredulity.

Deep sleep had only come late in the night after dreams so near the surface that he had exercised in them an element of control and tiring responsibility. He disentangled the real from the enormous claims of the unreal, put reason back in its usurped saddle and listened with loathing to the studied quietness of Bright's steps.'

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part Two, Chapter 9)

Friday, March 30, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Only twenty-one years - she thought of those who would perhaps some day stand and read those words and think "What a sad little life!" - and yet all that mattered of life had been lived in those short years, aye, in two of them, and the violet breath of young love would come up to those who read from her young grave, as it would never breathe from the earth of long-wed, late-dying lovers.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXI)

Monday, March 26, 2012

Commonplace Book

'If you would safely renounce a joy, you had best enjoy something of it first. Renunciation must have something to live on. You can "take up the whole of love and utter it," and then "say adieu for ever," but not before.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XVIII)

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...They all realise that they are winessing a horrible disaster and they all shiver; but were the fire suddenly to stop they would have a feeling of dissatisfaction. Such a contradictory attitude is natural, and man - a selfish creature - should not be reproached with it. Beauty, however sinister, is beauty none the less, and human sentiment cannot refrain from paying tribute to it.'

from Sinister Night, a piece in The Woman in the Case and other stories by Anton Chekhov

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...Doubt is too terrible a toy for true love to play with...'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XIII)

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Prayer was one of his hobby-horses over long glasses of coffee until two.

He would ask his listeners to notice the surge of the old prayers, how they contained the double emphasis of diminution and expansion, humility and eternity for each self, "We thine unworthy servants..." on the one hand, and "for ever and ever, amen," on the other. Didn't we all want to unload the burden of pretence about ourselves, be dust now, but also didn't we also want to feel "for ever and ever," feel we belong more than momentarily to an elusive essence which can never be dust[?]

And on war, in which he had played such a striking role, he would say, "It destroys life prematurely, but it puts in the way of millions a chance to show love as they might never otherwise have done. Those that volunteer to do jobs in which they may die may experience a feeling of sublime generosity which elevates life and differs them from Christ only in degree. Not all who were brave were in search of the bubble reputation. There are other struggles," he said, with his eyes glowing in his pale face, "which are the only important ones. And they are not international - they are internal. And now it is the curse of the atom bomb that it has promoted war to a false position, promoted it to the place of the greatest collective evil imaginable. It is not that. Indeed it may soon prove a device of nature to restore harmony which we have lost because we can analyse more than we can love. You must never, never analyse more than you can love."'

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part Two, Chapter 5)

Friday, March 16, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...the poet's heart, that is, all the combustible portion of it, was already burnt to a cinder. Poets' hearts, however, are used to burning. The inflammable air of sighs about them is ever in a perpetual state of ignition; so it has come, no doubt, from long custom, that nature has made them at their centre as fireproof as the phoenix. Otherwise, indeed, the poetic life would be impossible to live; poets could not go on maintaining the deadly fire of love, to which it is one of the conditions of their precarious art that they must daily expose themselves. Sometimes, indeed, as we know, even these firemen of the emotions dare the burning house once too often, and we hear their death-song amid the flames.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XII)