Saturday, July 26, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...For by now the night had taken on a magical aspect, neither of daylight nor of darkness, and the Sarapeion was a dream-building which dwelt always in this strange dimension of lamplight that dwarfed the earth and made all-embracing the home of the god. The centre cell was particularly frightening; the lights, the warmth, the unexplained movements of everyone, the awe of the colossal Sarapis with his curly ambrosial locks and beard, all seemed to direct attention towards - or rather to divert it too obviously from - the closed cell before which the fountain clashed its lithe belly-dance, like a bejewelled naked harem-girl, and within which surely lurked some god-ogre for whom the temple with its flame and ritual was the oven steaming the flesh of the chosen victims.'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (First Part, Chapter VI)

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Commonplace Book

'What was she thinking?

He despaired of ever knowing, forgetful how little he knew his own thoughts, how in the failing moments before sleep he glimpsed the enormous silence of dream, wherein all the world's words were only the frenzied life of a colony of insects from under a single turned-over stone, compared with the spaces of ocean and burning desert and windy mountain-crest and night of stars.'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (First Part, Chapter IV)

Monday, July 14, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"...I admit, of course, the necessity of the existence of woman, since the perpetuation of the race appears at present desirable. It would be childish to argue the matter. She must be kept and cared for by qualified persons, as are the other higher domestic animals..."'

from The Gateless Barrier by Lucas Malet (Chapter V)

Sunday, July 13, 2014

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (1771)

The author's last novel is as much of a joy as his others. I suppose it updates his previous style in one way, which is nowhere near as important or revolutionary as some have claimed. The 'picaresque' style is retained, but is now epistolary. Where the other four are in some places seriously rumbustious, this one is a little more mildly so. This one covers a peregrination around many parts of Britain by a ageing man of means, Mat Bramble, who is Robert Hardyesque in terms of phlegm and good sense. Accompanying him is his waspish sister Tabitha, who is savage head of his household back home, and desperate for 'matrimony'; she throws herself at many an oncomer here! With them are their niece and nephew, tender young Liddy and splendid young Jerry; Liddy is struggling with an amour which has collapsed, while Jerry is our neutral ground with no great dramas attached. Along for the ride are various servants, retainers and such who provide glorious comic asides. One of them only is a correspondent - Tabitha's maid Win Jenkins, whose malapropisms, misapprehensions and misspellings are magnificent to behold. This motley journeys from their estate in Wales to Bath, to London, to the north, to Scotland, to the west country, collecting misadventures and excoriating society in their own selves or in those they meet, some of which are collected into their retinue. The drama which skeins through these carryings-on is the irruption into their journey of one Humphry Clinker, a poor man whom they save from a life of indigence to become Mat's servant. Vastly grateful and very endearing, he gets into all sorts of scrapes which require a rescue. He is also an inspiring preacher and his newfound Methodism pulls Tabitha and Win further into his remit. The story wavers between travelogue and comedy for a while up in Scotland, which is a place obviously dear to the author's heart. The climax comes with the overthrow of a coach in a swollen river in the west country, the taking up of the family by a local gentleman, and revelations of chequered past history and by-blow paternity which connect Humphry Clinker to the family much more completely. In a combination of happy circumstances, many misunderstandings are cleared up, leaving the path clear for no less than three weddings and much promise of living happily after. Smollett was only 50 when he died. On the basis of this, I would have wished him many more years, and us many more novels.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...It was good to be alive; it was fine to rush around, and hand lights or liqueurs to these brown clear-cut faces, with their bright eyes, and hair of every colour; it would be no less fine to hurl them out of the way with a kick or a rifle-butt, and send them to crack their bones and smash their skulls against the wall like eggs; and then to run home free as a naked savage. They were keeping him shut up - him, Grischa - they had nailed him fast, and that vast murder, that maddening hail of shells, ten thousand in an hour, had begun again, from Dvinsk down to the country through which he had marched in the early days when the Austrians had driven them back. There was no place in the world fit to live in; but he would notice all these things and later take a red-hot awl and one of his smooth coffin-planks, and burn into it all that he had seen. But he must wait till then: now, at any rate, all was bright and happy....Grischa enjoyed the sight of them, his heart went out to them all, young, and old, and close-cropped gentlemen with monocles, that made them look like caricatures. He felt that something must be going out from him to them, there was so much love and so much hatred seething in his breast.'

from The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig (Book Four, Chapter II)

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Grey Roses by Henry Harland (1895)

Finally Henry Harland goes to the bigger place. His stories to date have been pleasantly amusing, occasionally clever, but have left little in the memory, touched nothing of the heart. I think this may be the 'crossover volume,' where this appeal to the emotions takes weight in his work. Four stories of these nine are richer in impact: A Broken Looking-Glass with a heartfelt stab of lonely regret over lost love; The Reward of Virtue with regret over the vicissitudes of politics crushing a life, denying the liver a reasonable modest chance; When I am King with regret over unfulfilled promise, a friend discovering years later a friend who had hidden himself in shame over not making the name which had once promised; and A Responsibility, with its appalling regret over not having responded to the shy, disturbed overtures of someone who later succumbed to their loneliness. That's a 'yes' to the notion that I think this volume, slimmed down to its best, could have been called Regret, and could have held a significant minor place in literature under that banner. The remaining five are quite enjoyable. Castles Near Spain is a stylish frippery of a novella in limpid notes. The rest are in Harland's earlier mode of fun ideas but little impact. Now to see whether he maintained this more searching style in subsequent volumes. Patience has paid off.

Friday, July 4, 2014

Grimms' Fairy Tales by JLC and WC Grimm (2004)

This is an archaeological dig, and that surprised me. I had assumed that editing work would have been done with 'popular' editions of the Grimms' scholarly work. But no, an extraordinary thing has happened - our culture has embraced in its mainstream of literature a profoundly academic work of investigation. Folk tales, it seems to me, at their best, become annealed or distilled in the telling. That appears to be borne out here with the tales we all know - Rapunzel or Hansel and Gretel or Rumpelstiltskin or others. But yet others here show clearly that the Grimms probably only heard one version of an obscure tale, or heard a couple of versions clearly emanating from the same original source, but very different, and sandwiched them together awkwardly. So there are lesser-known tales here which frankly read like surrealistic crazedness, or have the oddest elements in them like lumps of foreign rock in a glacier moraine. The thing about these examples is that they are not annealed or distilled. They read badly. They haven't been put through the mill of telling. In the end, they're unsatisfying, and that's why they have remained "unknown". The primary audience, children, are notorious for their love of explanation and detail; these tales would raise questions in their extraordinary partialness, for which storytellers would invent answers: the tale would grow and silken-up with use. None of this bittyness is that objectionable in scholarship, though the cobbling together that I think I can sense in a couple of them is a bit suspect without annotation; the strange thing is that our tradition has absorbed these unsatisfying things inside a canonical populist version. So we're left with a book which contains a few things we all know and many which we've never heard, in a zillion different editions.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"...One must never state things baldly. One must qualify. It's the difference between Truth and mere Fact. Truth is Fact qualified..."'

from Castles Near Spain (Chapter IX), a piece in Grey Roses by Henry Harland