Commonplace Book

'Some of these subtler terrors of death survive in a few unfortunate minds to this day. The last has yet to be heard of the flavourless heaven of tireless limbs and sexless souls, tearless eyes and choirs of effortless and infallible intonation. Imagine eternal youth with no impulse to walk in the ways of its heart, and in the sight of its eyes, and deposed for ever from its august and precarious stewardship of the clean blood of a race! Conceive the light that never was on sea or land, no longer caught in broken gleams through visionary forests, but blazing away like the lamps on common lodging-house stairs; and the peace that passeth all understanding explored and explained, to the last letter, inside and out! Think, if you can bear to do it, what your existence would be without wonder, or any need of valiant hope, or for resolution unassisted by hope, a life no longer salt with savoursome vicissitudes; all the hardy, astringent conditions of joy, and the purchase-money of rapture, abolished for ever. No, better not think of it. "It is too horrible."'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter I, Part II)

The Letters of Lord Byron (1936)

What a lovely revelation. So much is revealed that all I can really say is that these are essential reading. There is the necessity of countering the received notion of Byron that comes down through popular culture, which this definitely does, but of course that notion has come from somewhere, and this also elucidates that genesis. There are 232 letters or letter-excerpts here which range from early childhood epistles to his mother to a letter written on the day that he caught his fatal fever. The primal strength and determination of the man is evident throughout, but, as he says himself, if one was expecting someone roaring in a wolf's pelt one would be sorely disappointed. An absolute fascination in these is the progress of the works; the letters have been chosen carefully enough to give a remarkable picture of the to and fro of the development of many of them, and also to give voice to his responses to their critical reception. It's a fiery portrait, and an exciting one. They also naturally provide a vision of the vicissitudes of his life; matrimonial wars, deep analyses of society and culture, his love for his daughters, opinions of literary effort, political machinations, memories of lost friends - whatever really mattered. A vital book.

Commonplace Book

'It is not true that I ever did, will, would, could or should write a satire against Gifford, or a hair of his head. I always considered him as my literary father, and myself as his 'prodigal son'; and if I have allowed his 'fatted calf' to grow to an ox before he kills it on my return, it is only because I prefer beef to veal.'

from a letter to Douglas Kinnaird, dated February 21, 1824, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Commonplace Book

'...I have known Walter Scott long and well, and in occasional situations which call forth the real character - and I can assure you that his character is worthy of admiration - that of all men he is the most open, the most honourable, the most amiable. With his politics I have nothing to do: they differ from mine, which renders it difficult for me to speak of them. But he is perfectly sincere in them: and Sincerity may be humble, but she cannot be servile. I pray you, therefore, to correct or soften that passage. You may, perhaps, attribute this officiousness of mine to a false affectation of candour, as I happen to be a writer also. Attribute it to what motive you please, but believe the truth. I say that Walter Scott is as nearly a thorough good man as man can be, because I know it by experience to be the case.'

from a letter to Henri Beyle (Stendhal), dated May 29, 1823, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (2009)

The power and compulsion of this novel are undeniable, I think. Its subject matter is 'standard Oates' - that is, the dark underside of everyday America. Not in a louche or particularly sexy way, but in a grimy or ordinary way. The best likening would be to talk about the difference between the colour of fresh grass in the countryside, and the colour of the grass in that rarely-touched area at the middle of a big motorway junction. Essentially it's the same micro-landscape, but at the motorway junction there's an unmistakable greyness, an ashy quality has been introduced. One imagines the soil a lot more burdened and yet leached. It's that post-industrial, commuter-era, grey, compromised world that Oates delineates, compulsively. This one is about a murder in 1983, and the consequences that echo down through the ensuing twenty years. The first part is seen through the eyes of Krista Diehl, a young teenage girl whose father is suspected of the murder of his lover, Zoe Kruller. It moves through the horrors and the bewilderment of the family explosion, and all the ripples which circle out through a small New York state city on the Black River. The second part is seen through the eyes of Zoe's son, Aaron, who found her murdered body, and who copes with an already dysfunctional family imploding still further. Their parents' lives are typical of their times, and Krista and Aaron are exemplars of their era also. The lameness emotionally, the disconnects and profoundly compromised coping strategies, the psychological burden are all realised with convincing ordinariness, against the sooty and snowy backdrop of a dreary long-past-its-best town. I think that one of the major achievements of Oates in this book, and those like it in her catalogue, is in the matter of proportion. She manages to so direct her material that the unmissable impression is that it could have happened in quite this way, that there is something in the feel of the story and her commitment to it which lend it an almost symbolic uber-truth. The structure of the picture left in the mind is compelling. Her awareness of this is perhaps on a not quite conscious (or perhaps it's a super-conscious?) level, and has the odd 'purity' of such things. She's known for her notion of 'channelling' a story, which makes all the more strange the fact that there's one area where her subconscious power doesn't rip through to its target. Speech is that area. Too many times her characters sound a little similar to one another. Certain words are used by slangy characters that only the uptight ones would utter. It's like her own inner voice somehow wins out over those her characters ought to have. However, it's a tribute to her that this failing comes across ultimately as minor, eclipsed by the extraordinary power of her visionary ordinariness.

Commonplace Book

'...Once, he'd been younger and more hopeful and thus disappointed, wounded in his hope. To hope is to risk too much, like baring your throat to a stranger.'

from Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (Part Three, Chapter 1)

Commonplace Book

'...But I suspect that he did not take quite so much to me, from his having expected to meet a misanthropical gentleman, in wolf-skin breeches, and answering in fierce mono-syllables, instead of a man of this world. I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever...'

from a letter to Thomas Moore, dated July 5, 1821, in The Letters of Lord Byron