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)

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)

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!

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)

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

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)

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.