Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Commonplace Book

'Societies do not like hermits and do not forgive them for their flight. They disapprove of the solitary figure throwing his "Go on without me" in everyone else's face. To withdraw is to take leave of one's fellows. The hermit denies the vocation of civilization and becomes a living reproach to it. He is a blot on the social contract..."

from The Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson (February 27)

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...When crowds enter the forests, it's to chop them down. Life in the woods is no solution to ecological problems. The phenomenon contains its own counter-principle: the masses, taking to the woods, would bring along the evils they'd hoped to flee by leaving the city. No exit.'

from The Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson (February 22)

Saturday, December 19, 2015

White Man by Shusaku Endo (1955)

This is the story of a psychopath and his war with God. The main character is a young Frenchman of Lyon, who is established at the beginning as a collaborator with the Nazis, and is in fear of the coming invading Allies, though what puzzles me is the date given. It is supposedly 1942. Through a bit of research I see that French North Africa was invaded in 1942, but not mainland France I think. Not sure whether this is an error, or a slice of history of which I'm not aware. As he sits in his little flat contemplating this, he retraces the steps which brought him here. It very quickly becomes obvious that this is also a study in perversion. As an ugly, cross-eyed boy, he witnessed the family's maid, Yvonne, savagely beating a dog in the street, and the sight of her milky white legs enclosing the dog and the violence of the attack pleased him to the extent of beginning the awakening of his sluggish sexuality. How much his psychopathy is the result of parental lack of love (they almost taunt him with his ugliness) and how much of it is innate is I suppose the classic question. It soon develops that he is secretly obsessed with violence, and is also sourly dismissive of any article of faith, regarding it as a stupid delusion. At the same time he is extra-aware of people's notions of God, setting himself up in opposition - "I'll show you, and become an impersonation of Evil to do so" is almost how it seems, giving himself away as an unknowing believer in forms of external agency. On holiday in Aden with his father, he takes the opportunity of being left alone one day to inveigle an Arab boy to a lonely spot and beat him atrociously. Back in Lyon, he becomes entangled with a young student seminarian, who witnesses him in a rage of frustration tearing up the underwear of a female fellow student while she is on the sporting field. There is also a hint that the seminarian either also fancies him, or fancies saving his soul; it's a grey area. Either way, the seminarian soon recognises that he is dangerous and unhinged. He attempts to protect Marie-Therese, the young female student, from his interest, but our fellow is too wily, and manages to get her to succumb with a sob story. He regards it simply as an effort to be made to persuade the seminarian that evil will triumph: "I [evil] will always exist; your goody-goody beliefs can't win!" is the way it goes. We next come across him in the present, in witnessing him as a slowly emerging confederate of the Nazis, taking part in his first torture-sessions at a lonely chateau just outside Lyon; the seminarian and Marie-Therese are the subjects, as they have been assisting the Resistance. The torture is bloody, protracted, but not egregious. The writing in this last part, pulling poetically together all the strands of his character and obsession, is outstanding, even in translation, which is saying something. All in, a stunning novella about vileness, which is completely lacking for me in terms of identification and empathy, and yet, through a cool, intensely well-modulated style, it grips and satisfies.

Monday, December 14, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...Romances, it has been justly observed, are Histories which we do not believe to be true, whilst Histories are Romances which we do believe to be true...'

from Some Account of My Cousin Nicholas by Thomas Ingoldsby (Richard Barham) (Second Volume, Chapter III)

Friday, December 11, 2015

Commonplace Book

'The roundup I witnessed was most deliberate. Those innocent men became victims simply because they happened to be in town that day, simply because they chanced to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The idea that a mere whim might bring on death spreads terror better than anything else. If there were only some law, or some rule, that determined who was to die, we could protect ourselves by adhering to it, but there was nothing we could do to thwart chance. After the incident, the people of Lyon could no longer leave their houses. Going out just might mean death.'

from White Man by Shusaku Endo (Chapter VII)

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Commonplace Book

'Once more the inexplicable frozen look struck over him from her opened eyes, as if one of the minutes of Time had yawned to show him its deep, mute, tragic abyss, and was extinguished.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XXX)

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Commonplace Book

'And now, farewell, my worthy ass! You have been thinking me one through a fair half of this my letter, so I hasten to be in advance of you, by calling you one. You are one: I likewise am one. We are all one. The universal language is hee-haw, done in a grievous yawn.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XXVIII)

Commonplace Book

'...I wonder whether you will ever perceive the comedy of life. I doubt whether a man is happier when he does perceive it. Perhaps the fact is, that he has by that time lost his power of laughter; except in the case of here and there a very tremendous philosopher.

I believe that we comic creatures suffer more than your tragic personages. We, do you see, are always looking to be happy and comfortable; but in a tragedy, the doomed wretches are liver-complexioned from the opening act. Their laughter is the owl: their broadest smile is twilight. All the menacing horrors of an eclipse are ours, for we have a sun over us; but they are born in shades, with the tuck of a curtain showing light, and little can be taken from them; so that they find scarce any terrors in the inevitable final stroke. No; the comedy is painfullest...'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XXVIII)

Monday, November 30, 2015

Commonplace Book

'It was a countryman's letter, ill-spelt, involved, and of a character to give Algernon a fine scholarly sense of superiority altogether novel. Everybody abused Algernon for his abuse of common Queen's English in his epistles: but here was a letter in comparison with which his own were doctorial, and accordingly he fell upon it with an acrimonious rapture of pedantry known to dull wits that have by extraordinary hazard pounced on a duller.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XXVII)

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Commonplace Book

'It became a question with him now, whether Wit and Ambition may dwell together harmoniously in a young man: whether they will not give such manifestation of their social habits as two robins shut in a cage will do: of which pretty birds one will presently be discovered with a slightly ruffled bosom amid the feathers of his defunct associate.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XXVI)

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...From his very first intercourse with men he had felt, and then had seen, himself repulsed, branded, despised. Human speech had never been to him aught but mockery and curses. As he grew up, he had found around him nothing but hatred. What wonder that he should have caught it! He had contracted it - he had but picked up the weapon that had wounded him.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 18)

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

The Buried Day by C Day Lewis (1960)

This autobiography of the author's earlier years confirms what I'd already felt about him, something which he also admits in a tangential way: he is a mixed phenomenon. He calls it 'the divided mind', which is a too-easy seeing of both sides which can amount to indecisiveness, or, presumably, to a fatal energy-slide in terms of the primary pointedness of his work. I see it more in terms of being really quite enamoured of his self-pricking honesty in discussing the pressures in his life and poetry, quickly followed by a slipping-sliding of confidence as he takes an angle which seems too superficial, or as he seems to covert himself away in a too-comfy turn of phrase. I'm not sure whether this was intended to be his only autobiographical work. It turned out so. We have much more of him as a child and young man in the period leading up to the Second World War; his life beyond that is sketchy in the extreme - the story was to be filled in by his son, Sean, in his admirable insider's biography from 1980. This book is marked with passages of great insight, alongside lesser stretches.

Commonplace Book

'...everyone, through the inner monologue that is his reflective commentary on experience, selects and subtly distorts the facts so as to make him more interesting or more tolerable to himself, in doing so he creates a personal mythology which, because it modifies him, does become representative truth. Such modifications to the basic model built by one's genes and early environment are no doubt extremely limited. The individual cannot be re-made. But he is not, I believe, condemned to an unalterable pattern: there remains a certain "play" within the microcosm, as there is within the laws of the physical universe: inner and outer necessity, bearing upon a man now at this point, now at that, may call forth latent characteristics, or relegate dominant ones to comparative inactivity, so that the balance of his powers and preoccupations is changed a little. Time and again, he "reverts to pattern"; but the pattern is not precisely the same after each shake-up.'

from The Buried Day by C Day Lewis (Postscript)

Monday, November 16, 2015

Commonplace Book

'Silence is commonly the slow poison used by those who mean to murder love. There is nothing violent about it; no shock is given; Hope is not abruptly strangled, but merely dreams of evil, and fights with gradually stifling shadows. When the last convulsions come they are not terrific; the frame has been weakened for dissolution; love dies like natural decay...'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XXII)

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...That magnificent art which the Vandals had produced, the academies have murdered. To the work of centuries and of revolutions, which, at least, devastate with impartiality and grandeur, has been added that cloud of school-trained architects licensed, privileged and patented, degrading with all the discernment and selection of bad taste - substituting the gingerbread-work of Louis XV for the Gothic tracery, to the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the kick of the ass at the dying lion. 'Tis the old oak, in the last stage of decay, stung and gnawed by caterpillars.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 14)

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Commonplace Book

'Major Stafford was, as I have already hinted, of high unblemished lineage; but Fortune, in bestowing this mark of her good-will upon him, had exhausted all her favours, and denied him that portion of the good things of this world so necessary to secure to rank the respect it claims. He was what is commonly called "a soldier of fortune," that is to say, a soldier of no fortune, - but John Bull is peculiarly felicitous in misnomers of this kind. The man who demands payment under a threat of arrest he terms a "Solicitor," names a cinder-heap in the suburbs "Mount Pleasant," and calls a well-known piece of water the "Serpentine River," because it is not a river, and because it is not serpentine.'

from Some Account of My Cousin Nicholas by Thomas Ingoldsby (Richard Barham) (Volume I, Chapter I)

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Christine by Alice Cholmondeley (1917)

Alice Cholmondeley is the pseudonym of 'Elizabeth' of German Garden fame, now known as Elizabeth von Arnim. There had been quite a hiatus between her previous novel and this one. That novel had seemed almost like a final statement of the theme that had made her famous; young English woman journeys to north-eastern Germany to marry a titled German, and discovers herself in the process, as well as revealing the extraordinary differences between the two cultures, almost invariably to Germany's disadvantage, using humour edged with savage wit. She returns to Germany as a subject in this, but of course all pre-war "sweetening" is gone. Christine is a young ingenue who has travelled to Berlin to follow her musical studies - she is a prodigious violinist. The novel is built of her letters back to her mother in England. There are only the two of them, her father is dead, so their attachment is significant. The time of Christine's travel to Berlin is an important one, though she doesn't know it to begin with; it is the summer of 1914. As she grows accustomed to her new studying life there, she reveals in letters home what can be regarded as the usual 'Elizabeth' subject matter: how silly and pompous and ludicrous the Germans are. But this period marks itself as the weeks go along by the souring which occurs. Conversations become focussed around the Servian duke who has been assassinated and around the friends and enemies of Germany in the ensuing jockeying for points. These ludicrous Germans begin to reveal a more sinister import; their faces become redder, conversations become more strangulated, the tension rises. In the midst of this Christine has been taken up by a Junker family, going on summer break with them, and also falling head over heels for a young soldier friend of theirs. Finally war breaks out, the English come in on the 'wrong' side, and Christine is very quickly persona non grata. She makes her escape using trains toward Switzerland where her mother is staying. The original pseudonymous publication of this, with an introduction by 'Cholmondeley' posing as a grief-stricken mother, which included the information that Christine never made it alive out of Germany, was intended I think as an attempt at 'literary faking' and meant to be understood, initially, as genuine. It was certainly taken as such in some quarters, though the slightly obvious and plotted quality should have rung alarm bells. It has charm, and brightness, but feels a little like a return to overfamiliar territory. It's a good thing that this territory is still entertaining, and mapped by as fine a writer.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...I have seen enough examples of this egotism in parents who, themselves emotionally or morally immature, vent their own insecurity upon their children in sulks or rages or less unsubtle manifestations of the craving for power, to feel amazed that the young ever emerge unwarped from the family circle which too often, beneath its surface, is a vicious one.'

from The Buried Day by C. Day Lewis (Part Two, Chapter 7)

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Commonplace Book

'The farmer dropped into his fireside chair, dumb and spiritless. A shadow was over the house, and the inhabitants moved about their domestic occupations silent as things that feel the thunder-cloud. Before sunset Robert was gone on his long walk to the station, and Rhoda felt a woman's great envy of the liberty of a man, who has not, if it pleases him not, to sit and eat grief among familiar images, in a home that furnishes its altar-flame.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XV)

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...throughout the life of the wisest man his destiny keeps his philosophy in a state of siege.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 9)

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...Though it was practically annoying that she should be sad, the hue and spirit of sadness came home to her aspect. Sorrow visited her tenderly falling eyelids like a sister.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter XI)

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...While she was hearing from her sister almost weekly, her confidence was buoyed on a summer sea. In the silence it fell upon a dread. She had no answer in her mind for her father's unspoken dissatisfaction, and she had to conceal her cruel anxiety. There was an interval of two months: a blank fell charged with apprehension that was like the humming of a toneless wind before storm; worse than the storm, for any human thing to bear.'

from Rhoda Fleming by George Meredith (Chapter IX)

Commonplace Book

'I don't know what I played. It was the violin that played while I held it and listened. I forgot everybody, - forgot Kloster critically noting what I did wrong, and forgot, so completely that I might have been unconscious, myself. I was listening; and what I heard were secrets, secrets strange and exquisite; noble, and so courageous that suffering didn't matter, didn't touch, - all the secrets of life. I can't explain. It wasn't like anything one knows really. It was like something very important, very beautiful that one used to know, but has forgotten.'

from a letter dated July 19, 1914, in Christine by Alice Cholmondeley (Elizabeth von Arnim)

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Commonplace Book

'"...It was that marvellous French and Russian stuff. I must play it to you, and play it to you, till you love it. It's like nothing there has ever been. It is of an exquisite youth, - untouched, fearless, quite heedless of tradition, going its own way straight through and over difficulties and prohibitions that for centuries have been supposed final. People like Wagner and Strauss and the rest seem so much sticky and insanitary mud next to these exquisite young ones, and so very old; and not old and wonderful like the great men, Beethoven and Bach and Mozart, but uglily old like a noisy old lady in a yellow wig."'

from a letter dated June 21, 1914 in Christine by Alice Cholmondeley (Elizabeth von Arnim)

Saturday, October 10, 2015

In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (2014)

I'll admit that I had what is possibly a peculiar fantasy concerning this one. It was slated for publication in 1971 and then withdrawn, after which its author remained silent, so it has long been one of those 'lost' novels which may never have seen the light of day. Harrower had arguably been Australia's premier female writer of the 50s and 60s, alongside Patrick White as the main male. So it has been anticipated at a somewhat higher pitch. My odd fantasy concerns the likening I can feel between Harrower's style and that of many mid-century proponents from other Anglo cultures - writers like Elizabeth Taylor and Hortense Calisher. They have a spare poetic density which is a superb vehicle for insight and guarded emotional effect. And of course I feel the debt that style owes to vanguard authors like Virginia Woolf; my fantasy involved the fact that Woolf was not successful in her 1941 suicide attempt, that she continued to work alongside her husband Leonard at the Hogarth Press, that she mentored younger English writers like Taylor. And then, a year after Leonard's death in 1969, when she was 88, she took up the fifth novel of a fine Australian as her first commission after the grief had laid her off for a few months, and the rest was history, both in terms of that author's reputation being expanded, and of Woolf's becoming a pioneering sole female proprietor of a publishing house. Silly really, but fun to think about. The main characters here don't go through a huge plot-arc, though the story is more eventful than might first be anticipated. Mid-century, a well-off brother and sister, he back from the war and tender, she wide-eyed and just setting out in the world, take up a less fortunate pair and find that the friendship lasts. Their circles are very well-heeled, and all sorts of possibilities come to them with ease, but Harrower is at pains to point out the fact that this is not dehumanising, it simply creates its own topography in terms of the emotions and tensions that resonate through their lives - such challenges as we all have in common, but differently expressed. Agonies and triumphs, marriages, collapses, punctuate the picture as it progresses, magnified by Harrower's intense insight. By the time we reach the late 60s and early 70s, at the end of the book, the four are all more or less dissatisfied, and wrangling each other, along with partners and children, in tangled streams of stultified intent and misunderstanding. A slightly unbelievable accidental mistake by one of them blows apart these problems; the sediments really kick up in their pool. The end shows those murks redescending in a new arrangement - not a sense of immature release, but rather a wiseing-up, an understanding breaking through some, but not all, blockages. It is not the plot though that marks this book out - like those aforementioned contemporaries, it is the writing of these humanities that proves Harrower a great exponent of the modern mind.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...Though I was the only child there, the household did not at all revolve around me, and so the adult world pressed only lightly upon me. My aunts and uncle had, I imagine, no theories about child upbringing, and therefore little anxiety over it. Indulgent they certainly were; but since they themselves had been brought up in a large family, they knew instinctively the steadying effect upon a child of having its own status within the group, of "knowing its place" and living by a natural system of degree under which the demands of the younger are not given automatic priority over the rights of the older; and so their indulgence to me was neither capricious nor enervating.'

from The Buried Day by C Day Lewis (Part One, Chapter 2)

Commonplace Book

'"...It's only that, when you're close to death, everything wears a look of eternity. Ephemeral expressions of bad feeling felt to me" - she clapped a hand to her chest - "like a last message from the human race. The terrible urgency, and the way no one could hear. You're like a wireless receiver turned to finer and finer degrees of receptivity, so that you receive messages other people aren't really aware of sending."'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)

Commonplace Book

'"...I've always been convinced that if you're of sound mind you have no real right to - lower the confidence of the world. Something like that. By deserting it. Letting it be known that you reject what makes everyone else cling to life..."'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Agostino by Alberto Moravia (1944)

This is a short novel of growing up. There are many of those, but this is special, for one main reason: the author's capacity for seeing into, and representing, emotional states. We start with thirteen year old Agostino on the beach in Italy with his mother, to whom he is very attached. His father is dead. His mother is still young and attractive, and she garners the attention of a young man who wants to take her out on his raft. She uses Agostino as an insurance policy, requiring that he come along too. The reader feels the hot Italian sun baking down on them and somehow sees the historical epoch easily as well; the thirties' era of burgeoning fascism, emerging public sensuality and painted stylishness is present without being overtly delineated. Agostino's mind is changing, and he becomes fascinated by his mother's difference of behaviour with this young man, and senses the heat and excitement under her politeness. But he also resents the young man for his intrusion. Eventually, more and more disturbed by it, he invents excuses not to be around them and wanders off down the beach to a more populated area where boats are hired out. He falls in with a gang of young ruffians who help with the boats, and it becomes clear for the first time that he is a wealthy boy who is somewhat sheltered, someone the gang can rib mercilessly. Their knowledge of the sexual parts of life and their references to his mother and the young man in relation to them leave Agostino nonplussed. They act out the act for him in explanation! Agostino tries hard to fit in with this new group, feeling left out and low, and way behind the eight ball. Over several days his eyes are opened; he comes again to the beach - they're all away playing at a nearby estuary, so the older fellow who seems vaguely in charge offers to sail Agostino round the bay to join them. On the way there he makes Agostino lie in the bottom of the boat with him, holding him tight, asking him to recite poetry, which is presumably a kind of clumsy beginning to sexual advances. When the gang see the two of them arrive, they're awake immediately to the implications of spending time with Saro in his boat, and again Agostino learns something about the world he never knew before, in muted and uncertain tones, with their incessant ribbing which he only partly understands. On the last day one of the older boys points out a brothel. Agostino, feeling that he must prove himself to himself and to the gang, and also put a stop to his disturbed relationship with his mother (he has been looking at her with new eyes and not liking what he sees), decides that he must take the opportunity the brothel offers to sever himself from his old life altogether. Wangling money from his mother, he presents the eldest boy with it, saying that he can pay for them both. As the two of them enter the brothel the eldest boy is allowed in but Agostino is treated like a child and chased out. We leave him at that point, disgusted, upset, and still blindly wondering how he'll put up with what seems like years of frustration ahead. Moravia has an unerring ear for the stages of emotional attachment and psychological development and their circuitous courses, and makes this slim piece ring with truth.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

The Pimlico Murder by Kate Clarke (2011)

Ever had a friend or workplace colleague who didn't quite fit? Perhaps they spoke another language or had another culture as their first, or responded coolly when others would be warm? Then imagine how that difference works when they're associated with a murder, particularly how people who know them less well than you do might react to their unexpected reactions. I guess someone who will know well what I'm talking about is Joanne Lees, the cool-minded girlfriend of Peter Falconio, who went missing in the Australian outback. Simply by being a cool-tempered one, and admitting they were possibly going to break up, whole extra oceans of suspicion were cast upon her. I think the subject of this book might well have known the same feeling. The case is a celebrated one, whereby a youngish woman, Adelaide Bartlett, was accused of the chloroform murder of her husband in 1886. There were loads of elements against a clear vision of them from the start: she was partly French and spoke with a strong accent; they were devotees of "unusual practices" seen from the Victorian standpoint, and owned books covering abortion, birth control and advanced (some might say cultish) marital psychology; these advanced ideas had led to advanced practices - she was entertaining another man with her husband's blessing; he was a secretly intense, hypochondriacal and overemotional man with a suave and ordinary outer self; and, critically, she had a very cool manner. Seeing this crux of circumstances, one would have to hope and pray that nothing untoward happened, because all hell could break loose! And of course, that's exactly what happened. This case, though, to do the author of this book justice, has more to it than that. Adelaide was aware to some extent of how things looked, and tried in some ways to cover up some of the more outre aspects of the case. There was definitely cause, at the very least, to investigate her thoroughly, as things looked bad from some angles. But the interesting thing to do is to apply psychology to all the facts, particularly as presented not in this book, which has made its mind up from the start, given the title, but in Sir John Hall's excellent trial edit from 1927, Trial of Adelaide Bartlett. If the reader of that keeps all the facts ticking over in their head, and then figuratively throws them up into the air to see where they naturally land, and has a modicum of what might be called psychological acuity, some very interesting conclusions can be reached. So many things that Adelaide said herself, and admitted to when questioned, she needn't have - they served to further incriminate her. If she was a criminal mastermind, it must have been a very intermittent quality. And, unfortunately, that is exactly what the author of this book contends - and is forced to some quite strange comments by the weight of that contention. A number of times she is puzzled as to why Adelaide would have mentioned such-and-such, and is forced back onto the criminal genius conclusion, or to speculate wildly about her motivations. I am with Clarke in a few of her musings - looking at the case without a preordained conclusion about Adelaide's guilt or innocence, I feel a number of scenarios are possible, including some level of involvement by Adelaide in her husband's 'assisted' suicide, or some accident of administration of the chloroform, either by Adelaide or Edwin himself, her husband. The ramifications and inherent interest of this case had me when I first read Hall's book a few years ago and remain strong with me; this doesn't add a lot to them, and is hampered by its conclusion-in-advance, though I respect Clarke for putting her cards on the table if that's how she sees it. Adelaide was found not guilty, but the jury made a point of saying that grave suspicion attached itself to her. I don't think the suspicion is so much grave, as circumstantial, and, at this distance in time, unsolvable.

The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (1901)

What a lovely thing. This book is your classic Christmas confection, or two-part BBC number on consecutive Sunday nights. I had it cast within the first few chapters and it played out brilliantly. Harry Vail starts out as a serious young man, in his early twenties, and newly master of Vail, his sizeable country house somewhere between Marlborough and Bath by the way Benson describes it. His only other near blood relative is his aged Uncle Francis, who is living there in some reclusion, as much earlier in the century he was involved in an accidental shooting, from any culpability in which he was absolved, but socially suspicion has lingered. Harry also has his very good friend Geoffrey, his own age and a schoolchum of long standing, who knocks around with him. As Harry is deciding what he'll do with Vail, he comes up to London on occasion and sees an old family friend, Lady Oxted. Soon from overseas she also welcomes Evie, the young and just out daughter of a good friend, to stay. The problem is that Evie's mother is the sister of the young man who was shot in Uncle Francis' accident all those years ago, and her mother is one of those who believes insistently in Uncle Francis' guilt. Needless to say, at Lady Oxted's Harry and Evie meet and fall in love. But the idea of anyone in Evie's family being even friendly to a Vail is horrifying. However, the worldly Lady Oxted manages very carefully and strategically to calm the waters, and, with reservations by Evie's mother, their marriage date is set. Meanwhile, in organising and tidying at Vail, Harry discovers, tucked away in an attic in a disused part of the house, an extraordinary kind of large jewelled cup. His Uncle Francis perks up enormously and takes him to a portrait of a forebear, explaining that he has found The Luck, as it has been known, which had been assumed lost. There is a legend that goes with it, which gives the warning that the owner shall go through three ordeals, by fire, rain and frost. They clean up the piece, and are amazed by its beauty - it is made of glowing gold, and elegantly encrusted with jewels of extraordinary value. Their attention is grasped by it and it begins to sit on the table every time they dine. To cut a long story short, Harry goes through three accidents at Vail very soon after, associated with those three same elements, but he and Geoffrey scoff at the idea of the legend and regard it firmly as a coincidence, or at least Geoffrey does. After this, Harry and Evie's marriage is announced, and she and Lady Oxted come down to Vail for a visit. While out on a walk with Uncle Francis, Evie thinks she sees Harry canoodling with a local lass, and Uncle Francis, instead of pooh-poohing the idea, asks her to be forgiving toward Harry. It turns out that it isn't Harry, but a groom who looks a lot like him, and it is our first proper uneasiness about Uncle Francis, who seems, despite all his wide-eyed bonhomie, to be angling for the marriage not to take place. Soon all are swept up into a melee of suspicion and disbelief, involving the visits of a suspicious doctor and the possible truth of the old accusations against Uncle Francis, who would inherit the estate and, very importantly, The Luck, if Harry were out of the way. Other 'accidents' take place, each more worrying than the last, in each of which Uncle Francis is obliquely involved, or, as Geoffrey soon believes, not so obliquely. Finally, after much manoeuvring, the scene is set with the sun setting and a heavy mist drifting over the estate all round the house; our fingers are crossed that the now co-opted and believed doctor is who he says he is, and will do what he says he'll do, to prevent Uncle Francis, whom he claims is mad and trying to kill Harry and secrete away The Luck. Will he be successful in his complicated plan, with the help of Geoffrey and the groom? Well, I can say the payoff is good. This is a classically managed tale of great entertainment value, and Benson, when he's on form, is the equal of many a writer with a better reputation.

Monday, September 14, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...two of them said: "We'll show him what they do," and gave a demonstration on the hot sand, jerking and writhing in each other's arms. Sandro, satisfied with his success, went off alone to finish his cigar.

"Do you understand now?" asked Saro, as soon as the din had died down.

Agostino nodded. In reality he hadn't so much understood as absorbed the notion, rather as one absorbs a medicine or poison, the effect of which is not immediately felt but will be sure to manifest itself later on. The idea was not in his empty, bewildered and anguished mind, but in some other part of his being; in his embittered heart, or deep in his breast, which received it with amazement. It was like some bright, dazzling object, which one cannot look at for the radiance it emits, so that one can only guess its real shape. He felt it was something he had always possessed but only now experienced in his blood.'

from Agostino by Alberto Moravia (second section)

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

The Red Lily by Anatole France (1894)

I started out wondering if this was a very elaborate joke - the 'typical' France would have been likely to tell one of this nature, and many of his subsidiary characters here have comic undersides and satiric overtones. But it turns out that this is a tragedy told from within this nest of humour. Countess Therese Martin-Belleme is a standard privileged Parisienne of her period, married to a politician, interested in the arts, with a lover in tow. And France has her be a very beautiful coquette: the moment her lover doesn't quite come up to the mark in terms of minute attention, she ditches him capriciously and seeks another. This other is sculptor Jacques Dechartres, and he's smitten. Her former lover, Le Menil, is lost and nonplussed at being so unceremoniously thrown over and dips into depression. Around all this secretive angling, their world swings on. Their immediate set is constructed of largely subtle comic personalities: Choulette, a big, blowzy, original thinker, who feels all sorts of brotherhood toward the poor and yet is a confirmed monarchist; Madame Marmet, a nervous, ferret-like woman who talks too much; Vivian Bell, an Englishwoman of great exclamative energy, who is in love with Tuscany and the mood of Italy as a panacea for the world's ills, based on the writer Vernon Lee I think, and likened to her openly by France; and her friend Prince Albertinelli, a slightly bitchy and effeminate type who is apparently in love with Miss Bell (a sideglancing reference to Vernon Lee's lesbianism and the possibility of a mariage de convenance?). To get away from the reawakening attempts at reconciliation by Le Menil, Therese decides to go to Florence to stay with Miss Bell and the others, and Dechartres 'just happens' to head there too. It is here that things change for Therese: her feelings grow more and more intense for Jacques as they meet in a hired room which they decorate themselves to create their idyll. He is overwhelmed by her, and this feeds his jealousy. He sees her send a letter to Le Menil; Le Menil then turns up in Florence and he catches Therese talking to him at the station. Therese has not been completely honest with him about her relation to Le Menil, but doesn't think it matters as her attention is fully taken now by the growing realisation of her love for Dechartres; she is simply dismissing Le Menil insistently from her life. Jacques is troubled by jealousy but she manages to 'convince' him that all is as it seems. Back in Paris, at the opera, Le Menil corners her in her box, saying that he will wait for her in their old trysting place, still gamely hoping. Unfortunately Jacques is just behind the inner door, hears the exchange, and is devastated at her dishonesty. She seeks him out, and desperately tries to reassure him one more time, this time by telling the truth, emphasising how much his love has changed things for her since her time with Le Menil, but it's too late: all he can say is 'I don't believe you!' in agonized and agitated tones. The trust in their connection is gone. This reads almost like it was France's attempt to emulate the more typical French novelists of his day, like Flaubert, Daudet and Maupassant, in a wide sweep of fateful tragic love. He's a fine enough writer that it's sadly convincing, and he retains enough counterbalancing humour in the supporting cast to ballast the portrait.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Commonplace Book

'There were times when she felt like someone who had chosen to pander to the whims of a despotic interior decorator. The propriety of taking part in the performance struck her as dubious. Minds operate on so many levels at once: there was a limit beyond which he might not go without destroying her feelings for him. Since she had somehow placed her life in him, the danger was great indeed. He approached her at night, but the essential grievance, he himself, remained under lock and key. She might have been a handsome woman whose geography he had grown used to in a brothel.

Across the table she glanced at him. Where had he gone, that lover, that loved one? She sat with Stephen's effigy. He was the tomb of them both. Like a wraith, she visited the stone images. Eating, they continued to skirmish, silently sustaining thorny scratches, haemorrhages, and blows of extreme subtlety and variety. Last night - reconciliation, now these calculating looks, and in each chest Zoe saw the grinding stones turn again, and the sharpening-up proceed. The stakes were so high, although occasionally they both forgot what they were, as generals in the midst of battle must have trouble recalling the philosophy on which the carnage rests.'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Commonplace Book

'"...I know you think Lily's no judge of character. But it isn't the only capacity worth anything in life."

But Zoe looked down dully. "She's not alone in that. But it is the only capacity worth anything." Almost desperately, she looked up. "It is. It is. It's sanity. It's being sane. There may be better things than seeing dead straight, but not many from where I stand. Because if you don't, you're dangerous."

"Or in danger, or both."'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)

Monday, August 31, 2015

Commonplace Book

'The threatening of a storm grew every moment more imminent, and the two young men, who had intended to ride over the downs, decided to postpone their expedition. They stood together at the window of the smoking-room watching the awful and mysterious mobilization of cloud, the hard, black edges of thunder, ragged, as if bitten off some immense pall, coming up against what wind there was, and rising higher every moment towards the zenith, ready to topple and break. Once a scribble of light, some illegible, gigantic autograph, was traced against the blackness, and the gongs of thunder, as yet remote, testified its authenticity. Before long a few large drops of rain jumped like frogs on the gravel path below the windows, and a hot local eddy of unaccountable wind, like a grappling-iron let down from the moving vapours above, scoured across the lawn, stirring and rattling the dry-leaved laurels in the shrubbery, and expunging, as it passed, the reflections on the lake. It died away; the little breeze there had been dropped like a broken wing; the willows by the water were motionless as in a picture; a candle on the lawn would have burned with as steady a flame as in a glass shade within a sealed room. The fast-fading light was coppery in colour, and the darkness came on apace as the great bank of congested cloud shouldered its way over the sky, but, despite the gloom, there was a great precision of outline in hill and tree.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part IV, Chapter XV)

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Commonplace Book

'"Elephantine wit," sighed the lady. "When Harry is so kind as to make a joke, which is, unfortunately, not so rare as one might wish, I always feel as if heavy feet were tramping about directly overhead."

"And when Lady Oxted makes a joke," said the lad, "which is not so often as her enemies would wish, she always reminds me of a sucking spring directly underfoot. I give one waterlogged cry, and am swallowed up. Do pour out tea for us, Lady Oxted. You are such an excellent tea-maker."

"The score is fifteen all," remarked Evie.

"When did Harry score?" demanded Lady Oxted, seating herself at the urn.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part III, Chapter XII)

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Commonplace Book

'Evie laughed.

"Dear Aunt, have you been very honourable lately?" she asked, "or has Uncle Bob been doubting your first qualities?"

"Cynicism always ends in disappointment," remarked Lady Oxted, leaping a conversational chasm, "but since it is cynical, I suppose it expects it."
[...]
"I will never waste an ounce of resolution again in determining to abide by my word," she announced.

Evie laughed again, with a great ring of happiness in the note.

"Then you will confirm Uncle Bob in his cynicism," she replied, "and disappoint him of all his pleasant little disappointments."'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part III, Chapter VIII)

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...It was not only what they said and did that threatened her: in their presence, she saw with their eyes, felt with their disordered feelings, suffered their anger and panic. If she could have seen no more than their skin, she might have sustained her own life in their company. But she experienced the deadly movements of impulses that were not even conscious in them. It was as though some barrier other people possessed for their own protection was lacking in her.'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part One)

Monday, August 3, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...a long box hedge, once cut into tall and fantastic shapes. But it seems long to have lacked the shears and pruning hand, for all precision of outline has been lost, and what were once the formal figures of bird and beast have swelled into monstrous masses of deformed shape, wrought, you would think, by the imagination of a night-hag into things inhuman. Here, as seen in the dim light, a thin neck would bulge into some ghastliness of a head, hydrocephalous or tumoured with long-standing disease; here a bird with dwindled body and scarecrow wings stood on the legs of a colossus; here conjecture would vainly seek for a reconstruction.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part I, Chapter I)

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Hope Against Hope and other stories by Stella Benson (1931)

This was published as a limited edition of 670 copies, all signed by the author, by Macmillan. It contains six stories, which all have in common either a holiday feel, an island location, or a setting outside the Anglo usual, enmeshed in the natural world. But, of course, being Benson, they deal with a firm contrast to this background: her characters are "characters" in casual parlance. Odd, whimsical, slightly offkey people. Often with obsessed minds, or ludicrous flaws of character, and pushed to an unexpected breaking point by exposure to testing realities. Looking small in their silliness, and yet representing us all in their peculiarity, foregrounded and looming large. Hope Against Hope pits a needy, dithering nurse against a hard-mouthed, unforgiving patient in a coastal nursing home. Her unwanted false jollying of him belies a passionate nature which is grimly revealed in an inept suicide attempt. Submarine has a wealthy couple diving in the Caribbean, where, in a spasm of underwater panic and dislocation, the wife betrays a long-subdued sense of guilt over the sacking of a thieving servant. Her crazed imagining that their guide and oxygen-supplier is the long-gone servant's son intent on cutting off their supply in revenge for his mother's dismissal, is revealed as nonsense, but reveals her perfectly. Hairy Carey's Son has the son of a presumed Caribbean pirate who barely knew his aged father visiting for the first time the scene of his father's supposed outrages, with an idea in the back of his mind that he has the clue to the discovery of a lost treasure. His utterly inept journey through the island on a wild goose chase very nearly costs him his life. An Out-Islander Comes In sketches the story of Rose from Liver Island in the Caribbean who has done the unimaginable in that inbred spot - she's married an outsider, an American no less. On her first foray off the island with her new husband she gets fuzzily lost in the capital of the island group. Everyone looks the same to her; her mind is so untutored in worldliness that even her husband fades into the crowd. On the Contrary is set on a cruise in the Red Sea. Leonard Lumley is a classic example of the winning out of delivery over content. He has the commanding manner. He has an answer and a homily to promote in every situation. The problem is, his actual understanding and capacity draggle on far behind his advertising. He perfunctorily leads an excursion party of the well-to-do passengers to the baking sands of Arabia, with hilarious unintended consequences. Finally, by far the most impressive piece is The Desert Islander. A young Russian Foreign Legionnaire, dirty and flea-infested, with a badly injured leg, turns up at the remote home of a British official deep in warring southern China. He is a 'desert islander' by nature - an extreme individualist, dogmatic and well in need of flattery for his unusual ideas. Mr White is a typical empire Brit of his era: neat, unemotional, effortlessly superior - almost guaranteed to be Constantine's nemesis. He quickly realises that Constantine must be got to hospital as his leg is dangerously gangrenous. Their manic car ride on bullock tracks through pouring monsoon is truncated at the first town as brigands have taken out all the bridges further on. The only way for Constantine to carry on is by river. By now he and White are wrapped in a terrible unspoken fight for supremacy; the tension, the war, Constantine's fear for his life, and, mostly, their ineffable difference of character, approach, everything, taking its toll. As Constantine is pushed off in his hired sampan amid a hail of gunshot from the forest-covered hills, White seems to fall forward in prayer at seeing him off successfully. But then he falls forward a bit more, and finally his neat, tidy body slumps down awkwardly, his hair draggling in the water - he's been hit. Constantine, having seemed, to his own irritation, the loser in their contest, has now 'won', though in this awful context. It's a moving piece. All of these, perhaps with the exception of An Out-Islander Comes In, which is a little sketchy and not so satisfying, are original, striking work in what can be understood to be the later Benson style. This is where her originality is still in play, but the fantasy and wide-eyedness of earlier works have been significantly tamed and replaced with a more worldly cynicism.

Commonplace Book

'...Everything despairing seemed a fact beyond dispute; everything hopeful, a mere dream...'

from The Desert Islander, a piece in Hope Against Hope and other stories by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'"Do you speak, Mademoiselle, of the solemn union between man and woman? In this sense marriage is a sacrament. Hence it is nearly always sacrilege. As for civil marriage, that is a mere formality. The importance attached to it by present day society is a folly which would have appeared laughable to women of the old regime. We owe this prejudice with many others to that bourgeois movement, to the rise of financiers and lawyers, which is termed the Revolution and which seems admirable to those who profit by it. It is the fruitful mother of all foolishness. Every day for a century she has been bringing forth new absurdities. Civil marriage is nothing but one of many registrations, instituted by the state in order that it may be informed concerning the condition of its citizens: for in a civilised state every one must have his label..."'

from The Red Lily by Anatole France (Chapter XIII)

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Juha by Juhani Aho (1911)

The temptation would be to call this a love-triangle, but I don't really think it is. It seems to me to represent a state which can be seen as prior to that of the civilised notion of love. It depicts nineteenth century pioneer Finland in the wilds, with scattered villages and trading posts and a smattering of clergy. The ground on which everything about life is based is elemental, as is the struggle to survive and prosper in an environment both full of possibilities and enormously lonely and limiting in a personal sense. It is particularly limiting for women; they appear in this book as appendages in the main, though the mothers of the two male protagonists are tough frontier matriarchs, having survived through their appendagehood to some form of independence; although they are still very much living through their sons, they are also despotic family rulers in the domestic sphere. Juha is an ageing individual, with his own home apart from the family stead, who, years ago, took on a young wife, an ethnic Karelian who had been orphaned into his family. He looked after her from young girlhood and it seemed 'natural' that she would become his wife in time. Marja is established in his home, which to some extent they have built up together, both working physically hard. She is pretty tired, and pretty tired of him. He seems old and very uninviting, and she's worn out in the way that must have been very common for pioneer women of that time. Into their lives erupts a wandering trader: the young, fit, lanky, ultra-masculine scion of the most famous Karelian trading family. Shemeikka sweeps Marja off her feet, and she's still young and pretty enough to grab his attention. When Juha's hellish mother arrives for a visit, criticizing everything Marja does in minute detail in her well-established manner, driving Marja mad for the millionth time, the attractions which Shemeikka holds out finally become too alluring. After some indecision, she hops into his boat as he's leaving and heads off with him. Juha is devastated. His mother says, in effect, 'I told you so'. Juha battles between thinking that perhaps Marja was forcibly removed by Shemeikka, and the distinct possibility that she went willingly. He slips into terrible depression. Meanwhile Marja, after a few largely happy weeks alone, discovers on their arrival at Shemeikka's family compound that he has a tribe of young women lodged there who have been procured in a similar manner to hers. She is simply this year's model. She also slips into a depression as her dreams of young love are murdered. Having been there for some time, and now with a child of the liaison, she decides that she hates Shemeikka more than Juha, and feels sorry for what she has done to him. She escapes, leaving the child behind, and heads home. Juha accepts her with open arms, having in the meantime conveniently convinced himself that she was taken against her will. She does not relieve him of this delusion, not being able to bear the results of what the knowledge of her willingness would do to him. But fate soon overshadows Marja's mind; she simply can't get past the fact that Juha is incredibly unappealing to her, even though she feels for him on some emotional levels. She needs her child also; they decide to go back to Karelia together to retrieve him. While they are trying to achieve a slipping in and out with minimal attention, Shemeikka walks in. In the ensuing confrontation, Juha fights Shemeikka, flooring him before he is ready to retaliate. But in the confrontation Shemeikka reveals that Marja came willingly, and that she once told him that she wished Juha dead. Having injured Shemeikka, Juha and Marja escape in their boat. Juha, realising at last the true qualities of Marja's lack of feeling for him, confronts her. This time, exhausted, she does not deny how it actually was. With a bewildered dead look in his eyes, he casts himself over a waterfall to his death. This has the classically 'depressing' Scandinavian engulfing fated realism, I guess, but I don't find that unenjoyable when it's written this well. It's not about love, except on Juha's part, it's more about the 'wife-taking' process; though I suppose both Juha and Marja were seeking it, and not finding it in each other. It seems to me well ahead of its time in terms of its tough discussion of the human nitty gritty. Its themes of ownership, violence and elemental retribution in affairs of 'love' have one other striking likeness: I think people living with family and relationship violence would find the situations and reasoning here chillingly familiar.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (1934)

This is Mitchison's account in diary form of travelling to Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the civil war of early 1934. Social Democrats had been attempting an uprising against Dollfuss' increasingly right wing and authoritarian government. As far as I can understand, the fledgling Nazi party was as poorly thought of as the Social Democrats. There was a state of affairs where many cultural currents overlapped, either actually or notionally. The Nazis were still seen, as their name implied, as socialist. The Dollfuss government itself was anti-Jewish, seemingly 'owning' that standpoint; Nazi agreement with it being virtually a side issue. In this web of unclarity, the uprising had been crushed, initially by gun power, though to be fair the uprisers were armed and their socialist housing complexes, newly built post-war, became gun emplacements of their own. But subsequently, the crushing took a less obvious aspect. Known Social Democratic sympathisers were jailed without trial, some were 'quietly' shot in small altercations. Women and children, left behind in virtually mortar-bombed non-functioning flats and houses, were given no aid, no food, no medicine. Jobs, particularly in the government sector, were lost. Lawyers and solicitors were intimidated into not providing assistance in the few cases which actually came to court. There was an entire portion of the population left in a kind of non-belonging limbo, and struggling to get even the most basic necessaries for life. Into this desperately frightened and dangerous situation came a number of foreign activists and journalists, seeming to be simply travellers or harmlessly interested onlookers; Mitchison was one of them. As recorded in the diary she travels around surreptitiously examining conditions. The plan is to show solidarity with her fellow socialists and distribute assistance from Britain where it isn't forthcoming from anywhere else - the Quakers have a good operation already in place, but it's missing people it doesn't know about. Because this activity is necessarily on the quiet, the diary must be quite carefully written, just in case it is ever confiscated. So names are replaced, or become simple initials, or even just dashes. Lists of names needing help are passed from one activist to another in various forms - sewn into knickers for safekeeping, for example! The main thrust is quite clear; this diary is meant as a revelation of desperation. But she also allows it to be subjectively humanised - gives herself time out to record happy alcohol-soaked dinners at one or another of the journalists' hotels, or shows the picture of herself staring lovingly into shop windows at clothes she likes. The best way to explain the effect this book has is I think to call it a muddy mosaic - it has an impressionistic feel in many instances of particular knife-edge situations being represented, with travel or lighter feeling following, and then another heartbreak looked forcefully into. The writing is typically toughly straightforward, with contrarily redolent belief in a brighter future punctuating the darkness. So, between the passion and the straightness, the misery and the inconsequential lightness, a shifting picture appears of life and death in frightening times.

Commonplace Book

'Now, and it may be for another generation or fifty years, the old savage morality and the old forces of greed and possession and violence are trying to kill the new morality and the new idea of brotherhood and equality. Do not let us delude ourselves; the old forces still have the power; they are not any longer dressed up as kings and barons with gold on their necks and swords in their hands; they are dressed respectably, and their gold is in banks, and they pay other people to do the killing. And because, deep down, they have no faith in the future, and instead of loving mankind they despise and distrust it, they are becoming more and more vile and brutal. For cruelty is always caused by fear, and grows with it. More and more desperately they are trying to kill the idea of equality and love and freedom, more and more violently and forcibly they are trying to crush it out of the minds and spirits of men and women and children...'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 23rd)

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Commonplace Book

'What I want to explain, if I can, is that these people's basic ideas of the universe have been shattered. And, when an idea is broken, that's much worse for the people concerned than death or pain. You see, she believed in justice; it was an apparently practical ideal. It was the thing she and her husband had been working for since they were young - the basis of their marriage, and of their bringing children into the world. They had been good people. And now this had happened. It had happened to her husband who was a good man - that was what she couldn't understand. She stood there by her kitchen stove - and it didn't look as if she had much to cook on it. And she was going to be turned out of her house, and she had no money, and she could do nothing. Nothing at all. She had to stand there with her neck bowed. I don't think I've ever understood about oppression before. I've written about it, and imagined it, but here it was [...] And, for thousands and thousands of years, men and women have had to stand under the whip, not even answering back. And they've really been people, not a kind of animal, not something different, or romantic or picturesque. It's all real. The damned thing's been going on all this time. And now I've seen it, and I will not accept it in my world.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 21st)

Friday, July 24, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...It seemed to me then how simple and easily attainable the elements are that make up human happiness, the thing which makes our years of living valid. Bright sun, mountains in the distance, and in the foreground scrubby fields of vine-stocks, and here and there a willow coming into bud; going somewhere on a job - the pause and gathering up of the spirit before work starts; the rush of air; above all the Solidaritaet, the comradeship. It seemed to me that any civilisation which was worth the price of its existence ought to be able to give us that. We were travelling third, wearing oldish clothes; we had a couple of oranges, and a bit of chocolate - that was all in the way of amenities. But it was spring all right. I hope I shall die when I stop feeling the spring.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 21st)

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Commonplace Book

'"...Our citizenship is another occasion for pride! For the poor it consists in supporting and maintaining the rich in their power and their idleness. At this task they must labour in the face of the majestic equality of the laws, which forbid rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. This equality is one of the benefits of the Revolution. Why, that revolution was effected by madmen and idiots for the benefit of those who had acquired the wealth of the crown. It resulted in the enrichment of cunning peasants and money-lending bourgeois. In the name of equality it founded the empire of wealth. It delivered France to those moneyed classes who have been devouring her for a century. Now they are our lords and masters. The so-called government, composed of poor creatures, pitiable, miserable, impoverished, and complaining, is in the pay of financiers. Throughout the last hundred years any one caring for the poor in this plague-stricken country has been held a traitor to society. And you are considered dangerous if you assert that there are those who suffer poverty..."'

from The Red Lily by Anatole France (Chapter VII)

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...He gnawed his nails moodily as he lay staring at her. He felt justified in despising her, since he thought of himself as a reasonable-looking and still young man, in spite of the fact that he was older than she was, that his nose was a little crooked, and that baldness ran up like a boulevard to the crown of his head between two thinned thickets of fair curly hair. Still, he felt himself a man - what a man ought to be - and knew her to be absurdly faded and virgin - exactly what a woman ought not to be. Of course, he was an assiduous reader of Mr. Aldous Huxley.'

from Hope Against Hope, a piece in Hope Against Hope and other stories by Stella Benson

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Prancing Nigger by Ronald Firbank (1925)

The obvious first comment is about the title. This was originally called Sorrow in Sunlight in the UK, but when it came to be published in America the title was changed. And somehow this, I guess because it was seen as snappier, was the title which stuck, and which Duckworth used for their 'Rainbow edition' after Firbank died, and which has been used, more often than not, subsequently. The title is one thing, but the contents need examination from the point of view of racism, too. It's a complex question. Firbank uses the word authorially on a few occasions, and puts it into the mouths of his characters, too. His depictions are very much of the era in one sense; his central characters are rustic villagers from a Caribbean island, coming into contact with the more sophisticated scene of the capital, so they have an inbuilt and quite deliberate simplicity. This is Firbank, so they also have social-climbing at the core of their being. This novel is remembered, I guess mostly, as an emanation of that first popular emergence of the jazz era in the 1920s. Firbank was friendly with Carl Van Vechten, whose own Nigger Heaven is still in print under that title, I think honorifically, as he was such a supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, and Firbank is allowed perhaps a little leeway by association. Prancing Nigger is definitely aged and unacceptable via one angle, and yet it's also a delightful, complex portrait by a relatively sympathetic white writer via another. The Mouth family of the paradisial village of Mediavilla in the countryside of a mythical Caribbean island, are made up of a patient, concerned but relaxed father, an energetic, society-obsessed mother, an eldest sister, Miami (Mimi), who is very happy with her lover and the simple village life, a younger sister, Edna, who is much more excitable and loving of luxury, and can't wait to leave for higher places, and a young brother Charlie, who has a mutable, undetermined, slightly secretive character which hints, in typical Firbankian veiledness, at homosexuality. Mrs Mouth is absolutely determined that the family will move to the capital, Cuna-Cuna, and 'make their way' into far greater things. Mr Mouth is very concerned about his daughters particularly coming into contact with wild city ways, but is resigned to his wife's aspirations, so constantly expressed. (Prancing Nigger is her fond name for him). Miami is distressed to leave her local lover - they make plans that he will follow surreptitiously in time. The family rent a lovely villa in the capital from one of its greatest society hostesses, Mrs Ruiz, and immediately begin their halting progress into this golden world, alternatively shocked by things they weren't expecting, thrilled with the opportunities that are presented, and tasting the various options available. Mrs Ruiz's elegant wide-boy gentleman son Vittorio is smitten by Edna, and she by him; she agrees to become his mistress, outraging her family and causing a rift. Charlie explores the city, while Miami pines for her lover, who hasn't left Mediavilla yet. This is all set akimbo by an earthquake, which devastates great swathes of the island. All of society is gripped by the idea of penance, and parades and pilgrimages are all anyone can think about, in supplication. Miami hears that her lover has been killed, and is disconsolate. As Miami sets out on a pilgrimage parade, shunned Edna, kept by Vittorio in velvet languid comfort in a flat he owns, leans from her balcony over the moving file of citizens with banners, calling out to Miami to notice her and forgive, but is devastated when Miami doesn't even hear her and carries on. The story is related in classic Firbank prose, punctuated with short, poetically concise clauses, outrageous hints, surprised humour, and with an absolute economy of saucy description. It's an emissary of its age, but an awfully entertaining one.

Commonplace Book

'"Every false idea is dangerous. Dreamers are thought to be harmless; it is a mistake; they do a great deal of harm. Utopias, apparently the most inoffensive[,] are really injurious. They tend to make one disgusted with reality."

"But," said Paul Vence, "perhaps reality is not so perfect, after all."'

from The Red Lily by Anatole France (Chapter III)

Saturday, July 11, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...As for me, I have the Kirk a generation back - further back still, John Knox, beaten up in the galleys - and Glyndwr was Chapel till three years ago, and now neither of us are even vaguely deists. But the forms and the words are familiar to us. A century ago, in the dark times after the Napoleonic wars, the hungry 'forties, this man and I would have prayed together. As it was, we discussed Marxism ; but there's nothing in that but a difference of time. No, there is a difference. One way is looking out at a reflection of oneself in the empty skies ; the other way is looking inward at mankind, and the laws that govern the thoughts and action of men. But the intensity of looking, though not the same way, has the same effect on the soul.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 14th)

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Grey Wethers by V. Sackville-West (1923)

This is the author's third 'Hardyesque' novel, and is intriguing from another point of view also - it's the only piece of fiction I've read set in and around Avebury (the Grey Wethers are a random group of unfinished sarcen stones in a nature reserve nearby). In terms of Sackville-West's catalogue, it's an ignored book, and I'm trying to work out why, because it's a lot more successful on the whole than her previous efforts. It manages to largely avoid the traps that caught her earlier novels: the first, Heritage, was fine but stiff; the second, The Dragon in Shallow Waters, was very fine but overheated for a while at the culminating point of passion; the third, Challenge, was oddly mixed in its style and intentions and also overheated. But this manages, on the whole, to restrain the passion within sane bounds, and to richly tell a notable story. In other words, it's a more uniform, controlled effort, and also lively. Set in the 1860s in King's Avon, which is Avebury thinly disguised, and on the high downs between it and Marlborough, it tells the story of the passion of Clare Warrener and Nicholas Lovel. She is the daughter of the big house, quite level-headed but inexperienced, still a looker-on at life. He is of gypsy extraction, a jack of all trades who has no truck with the society of the village - he is a figure of respectful suspicion; very few have ever seen the inside of his cottage, where he lives with his harridan bedbound mother and his slightly mis-shapen, intellectually disabled, lanky brother, Olver. Nicholas has always spent as much of his life as he can up on the downs, shepherding if at all possible, but takes on other work in the winter. Clare and he slowly form a bond which has surprising strength given their difference of background. A problem soon arises via Daisy Morland, a frowzy village girl who has set her heart on Lovel. Pregnant with another man's child, and seeing that Clare is desired by Calladine, a friend of Clare's father, who is dithering, scholarly, much older and lives in a Wuthering Heights-ish barren farm up near the downs, Daisy decides to claim that Olver is her child's father and that Nicholas must marry her to save her from disrepute and to atone for his brother's sins. Nicholas can see no way out, and as well is troubled by what he sees as the 'bad blood' in his family which he thinks caused Olver's disability. He decides at that moment that he must have no more to do with Clare. She, momentarily frozen out from him, and still the victim of her own inexperience, accepts a proposal of marriage from Calladine. This has strong echoes of Middlemarch and the relationship between Dorothea Brooke and Edward Casaubon. The marriage is doomed to awkwardness and sniping contest. Nicholas' to Daisy is doomed to suspicion and frostiness. Both Calladine and Daisy are interrogative and frustratedly stymied, while Clare and Nicholas are quiet and determinedly self-sufficient. Of course, Clare and Nicholas, reconciled, eventually run away onto the downs together, and our last view of them is running off into the silent snow at night after a pursuing Calladine has surprised them at Nicholas' shepherd's hut. This one has a limited but strong colour-pallette and a concentration of controlled energy which mark it as a major signpost of progress in the author's development.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Commonplace Book

'The latest jazz, bewildering, glittering, exuberant as the soil, a jazz, throbbing, pulsating, with a zim, zim, zim, a jazz all abandon and verve that had drifted over the glowing savannah and the waving cane-fields from Cuna-Cuna by the Violet Sea, invited, irresistibly, to motion every boy and girl.'

from Prancing Nigger by Ronald Firbank (Chapter IV)

Saturday, June 27, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...So odd, this newspaper world - writers, and yet how unlike highbrow writers! Applied writing. But can writing be ever "pure", like "pure" science? Perhaps some of the experimenters. Gertrude Stein, Joyce - and at the moment I simply can't feel they matter two pins...'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 8th)

Monday, June 22, 2015

Commonplace Book

'A woman spending thirty, forty, wasted years in a forgotten corner of the Downs. What of it?

Her memory would not cling about the place after she should be dead, any more than the memory of victims clung about the sacrificial stones. "Here blood was shed," but that was a collective phrase; all individuality had long since, - almost immediately, - been telescoped into the clemency of perspective. So it would be with her, and she saw herself already as part of that anonymous crowd, whether of the victims of a savage creed, or of the women with the wasted lives, - no sublime and legendary sorrow, except in so far that all sorrow shared in the same great dignity, - women who had lost children or lovers, women who had trailed ill-health about their daily business, women who had borne the long, mute burden of uncertainty, all the grey, silent, muffled women that whispered round her, and that had taken to their graves unchronicled the blunt or poignant sorrow of their hearts.'

from Grey Wethers by V. Sackville-West (Part Two)

Sunday, June 21, 2015

The Serious Wooing by John Oliver Hobbes (1901)

I divide this author's works, to this point, into three groups. Her first four novels were brilliantly aphoristic slices of wit, very tart and concise. Her next two had still some overhang of this wit, but their plots had developed into tragedy and romance. The next two were serious novels about a trans-European political world and its social framework. This, her next, is a return to the second mode. It begins with delightful and sharp wit and then develops into the story of a fated love affair played out in late Victorian high society. Caroline, Rosabel and Susie Ragot are sisters. Carrie, not enormously original, has married conservatively. Her husband is the tremendously wealthy Odo Ceppel and she is happily ensconced in dripping comfort. Rosabel, much more imaginative and unpredictable, was forced to marry an unstable aristocrat at the age of sixteen. He is now in an asylum. Susie, very young and impressionable, is just about to become engaged to another member of the gentry. The 'problem' centres around Rosabel, who has fallen for an august but wild Socialist by the name of Jocelyn Luttrel. Their love is a true meeting of minds and hearts, the real thing, though Jocelyn is seen in their society as quite off colour. When Rosabel and Jocelyn decide that they can no longer remain apart, she goes to live at his house, calling herself Mrs Luttrel. Carrie is not thrilled at the fool Rosabel is making of herself (as she sees it), but, much more importantly, realises horrifiedly that Rosabel could well be dashing Susie's chance of a good marriage to Lord Beauleigh, whose family are capable of shying at such a jump. Awkwardly, just as this happens, news is received that Rosabel's husband has died in the asylum, so she was free after all. Jocelyn has given away almost all of his wealth to the Socialist cause, and he and Rosabel are quite happy to live in much reduced circumstances. He goes off to the south of France to aid in the cause as they planned, Rosabel irritated to be left alone in London. At this point, all the intrigue begins. By stopping letters, messages and telegrams between them, Carrie and her cohort manage to so influence the progress of events, with circumstances lending them a big hand, that both Rosabel and Jocelyn believe that the other has let them down, abandoning them. When Jocelyn finally reaches London, having been injured in a Marseilles street riot and out of action for a few months, he demands an audience with Rosabel, who, despondently, has married Lord Wroxall, an old admirer. It is only with this message to meet, slipped into her hand at a fashionable restaurant by a mutual friend, that contact between them is genuinely re-established. Jocelyn has a gun ready, thinking miserably that he will kill Rosabel and then himself. She is very ready, sunk in grimness, to give him a piece of her mind. But, of course, after a few spicy exchanges, the grand deception soon becomes clear; their ill-starred course can find its right path again, having almost been tossed to destruction. The thing that I most admire about Hobbes is her intelligent assurance. She had absolute confidence in her story, and knew, it seems instinctively, how to draw out streams of comment from it, both serious and satiric. It's great to witness such a strong performance.

Friday, June 19, 2015

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (1998)

I've been mulling over a notion for a while now which seems to fit this one. It is that poetry and prose have different 'signatures' i.e. poetry in some way resembles or recalls the beating of the heart, prose equally the pulses of the mind. Not sure if I fully subscribe, but there's certainly something to say about the fact that this book is presented as poetry when its main feel is definitely prosy. In fact, I'd push the boat out and say that this is a sheep in wolf's clothing. It doesn't need to be presented in the oh-so-cleancut, literary way it has been, with stark, elegant lines drawn onto the pages as though they rhymed. But this piece occupies a strange spot, where this possible overshowiness is confirmed by some extraordinary 'apparatus' before and after the main event. The main event itself, this sheep, is delightfully woolly and fuzzy, bleats well, and charms the reader. It's the story of a young chap who just happens to be a red, winged monster. His milieu is decidedly West Coast, can almost be pinpointed to San Francisco. Early on, as this staccato but entertaining picture was in the early stages of its drawing, I thought to myself "this guy ought to wear Converses" - lo and behold, later, he did. Geryon is youthfully serious, almost clinically so, and discovering himself in a Manga-cum-Boulevard-of-Broken-Dreams-cum-City-Lights kind of way, staring blankly, answering questions with others or off at tangents, his Beat monsterism presumably standing in for anything from autism to dislocation. His gets it together with a slightly older guy and goes through the discoveries of relationship. After they break up, he heads off to Buenos Aires to study, meets all sorts in bars, goes to funky university lectures, and then meets his old flame and his new young lover. They all three head off to Peru, the young lover's homeplace, in search of a mountain village and a volcano. The main thrust of this is charming and quietly insightful, with very occasional moments of hits-you-where-it-counts poetry, and lots of 'poetic' prose. It has a stylish lightness, and approaches one thing better than anything I've read for a long while - that feeling, when we're quite young, of heading out for the first times into an uncertain world, travelling to another city, family meaning loads still but coming into different focus, falling in love, twisting and writhing in life's raw emotions, discovering sex and the world's dark places, crying in heartbreak and exulting in the sulphurous air, everything bursting with significance - of spreading our wings in the modern era. Now to the wolf's clothing: the look of this book may perhaps have been affected by the publishers, the fact that it's been presented as high falutin' maybe too, but the apparatus - yowser, they cannot be set down to the account of anyone but Carson herself. They start with an overlong introduction explaining that the inspiration for this piece is a fragment of ancient Greek by Stesichoros, Geryon being a monster from a red island who guarded cattle, the killing of whom was one of Herakles' twelve famous labours. This has next to nothing to do with the main piece. Then comes a "free-adaptation" version of the few tiny snippets we have left of Stesichoros. This has nothing whatever to do with the main piece. The comes Appendix A - some extras about Stesichoros' treatment of Helen as a character. You've guessed it - nothing whatever. Then Appendix B - three lines at the bottom of a page, all of the rest of which is the title of the appendix. No comment required. Then Appendix C - a truly dreadful pseudo-logical set of therefores starting with Stesichoros' possible blinding by Helen. Not only not connected, but really grim. Thereafter comes the contrasting brightness of the piece itself. Unfortunately she can't resist and gives us, after it, an 'interview' with Stesichoros, where he babbles a few freeform nonsenses, which are nothing to do with the piece, and nothing to do even with Stesichoros, except as a lame Carson 'invention'. It may have been apposite to provide a short introduction to explain from where the author drew the first inspirations for her otherwise barely associated characters, but the rest of this gunk is just pretty damn awful, and spoils the memory and the immediate aftertaste of the simple light funk of Geryon's story, which has a haunted Cool which recommends itself to being a graphic novel I think. Why she felt the need to do it is the question - my temptation is always to psychoanalyse: she wasn't confident enough about the piece itself, and felt the need to 'dress it up' with classical references? Well, we'll be nice and leave it at that.

Monday, June 8, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...In his secret soul he would have preferred never to have been at all. But the Will of God: that Unquestionable Will. Here he was - whether he would or no - alive, called to a work, and called to give an account of himself at the Final day. He had a giant's frame, and people, as he went along, looked at him timidly. He appeared more than equal to the roughest blows the world could give. So he was - in physical strength and courage. But the secret, delicate soul within him shrank from every sight, sound, and touch - everything, to that mysterious and intimate sense, seemed too brutal, too harsh, too wearisome to be endured....He called it squeamishness and prayed against it, mortifying his exquisite taste at every opportunity.'

from The Serious Wooing by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter V)

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Commonplace Book

'"You know my theory," she said: "most of the world's sorrow is caused by the blindness of the unimaginative. They happen to be in the majority, and the rest have to spend their lives wincing..."'

from The Serious Wooing by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter IV)

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Commonplace Book

'...The spinster was spare, with a fine gaunt chest, plunging black eyes, and no nonsense discernible about the knees. These, on the contrary, jutted out (in a square manner) covered, with much decency, by black cashmere cut, as a skirt, not foolishly long below the ankles. These, however, were good to an incredible degree, and the resolute foot, small and slender, had something romantically aristocratic its sheer chaste elegance.'

from The Serious Wooing by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter II)

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Sonia by Stephen McKenna (1917)

I think two facts are pertinent to start with. One is that the running heads in this novel do not show the title, but the subtitle: Between Two Worlds. So my guess is that it was set as that, and the title was changed shortly before publication. There is a 1916 novel of that name listed in the British Library catalogue, by an American author, Philip Everett Curtiss. Perhaps either Curtiss himself objected to another of the same title so soon after, or McKenna or his publishers, Methuen, decided it wasn't wise. The other important fact is that, once published, this became by far McKenna's widest success, including the astonishing feat of being the 10th bestselling novel in the USA in 1918, and fifteen printings in its first year in the UK. It starts as the story of a group of well-heeled friends going to school in the midst of the frivolity of the late Victorian/Edwardian period. The school, Melton, seems to echo Winchester in terms of its location. The three main male characters are there together - our narrator, cool-pair-of-hands George Oakleigh, who is witty, upper middle class, destined for parliament; his personable but commanding Catholic aristo friend, Loring, destined for grand country house inheritance in the old order; and their rebellious ally, son of a lord, master of languages, kicker-around-the-world from childhood, O'Rane. The fourth main character is female, Sonia Dainton herself of the (new) title, who is the spirited daughter of a local family whose sons also attend the school, and to whom two of our three boys are 'attached' by familial connections of long standing. This school story is characterful, wise and entertaining, as Oakleigh and Loring try to tame O'Rane's exaggerated independence. They go through the wrench of leaving school a few years of massive development later, but this has been sweetened for O'Rane by his engagement to Sonia. As their careers progress, Oakleigh and Loring head into parliament, and O'Rane into business, but Sonia has grown headstrong and will have him no longer. Their young adult lives are coloured by this frosting between Sonia and O'Rane, and then her projected marriage to Loring which also goes haywire, and results in further awkwardness. Sonia through this period is a kind of talisman figure, constantly getting into more and more scrapes of loucheness and 'bad' behaviour. The whole acts as a portrait of the generation before the war and how its upper element coasted, not as an indictment necessarily - that was just how it was, and there were good and intelligent people everywhere, trying to make things work, and not just for themselves. Then comes 1914, and our team are placed all over, with much preoccupying them, serious and otherwise, and about to be taken up with a slide into disaster which will wipe most of that into insignificance. O'Rane loses all his money in a business catastrophe; Loring is in the House of Lords but dissatisfied; Oakleigh has lost his seat; Sonia is cavorting dangerously in, of all places, Germany. As war breaks out, O'Rane must go in commando-style and get her over the border to safety, but this does not result in any thawing of relations - they are both too proud. Two of our men enlist - Loring to his eventual death, O'Rane to horrific wounding ending in blindness. He heads back to Melton to take up a post as a master - his charisma and experience endear him very much to the boys. Sonia, much calmed, is living with her family nearby, and helping in the hospital which has been made of their home. She comes to see O'Rane in a very different frame of mind, devastated at his blindness. The piece finishes with their marriage and an ecstatic plea that the war may induce a society based on care rather than carelessness. I'm guessing that what made this so popular was the fact that it purported to be a picture of 'the way we live now'; it does seem a brave and very current attempt to see the society of before the war and to project what the assaulting cost of the war might create in the way of a better one. Naming the novel after Sonia is awkward because, although she is in many ways a catalyst in the book, she is not a good heroine, or even particularly likeable. And it did have moments where the engine-steam seemed to run a bit thin. So, a good McKenna, but, despite its success, a great one only in moments.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

A Family Failure by Renate Rasp (1967)

In wondering why this novel isn't better known in English-speaking circles I think the first thing to consider is the title. I'm guessing it was chosen by Eva Figes, the well-known experimental novelist who was its translator. She had a perfectly serviceable title already in the direct translation of the original German one - something along the lines of A Wayward Son. Instead, and unaccountably, she chose to change it to the frankly dreary one it now has. If this novel is ever republished I would vote for it to have its true title restored, now that Figes has passed on and can't complain - if she had been minded to. But otherwise, I'm struggling to see why it isn't more known. It is Kafkaesque, which in itself ought to be enough to guarantee an audience, let alone that it's a fascinating absurd dissection of the pressure brought to bear by the overbearing. In this instance there is an enigma of origin - the child main character, Kuno, is living with his mother and his uncle, who is somehow now his stepfather. We have no notion of how this happened. His uncle is an intimidatory planner, who wishes to fashion Kuno into some image that perhaps only he can see. Kuno's mother, Annemarie, is totally in his stepfather's grip, falling into doubt on occasion, mainly due to her love of Kuno, but then quickly 'realising' how wrong she has been, and how brilliant the stepfather's plans are. Kafkaism comes into play fully here, for the plan is no small one. Kuno will become.......a tree. There are books and books of notes and diagrams that Felix, the stepfather, has written up. There are stages to the conversion that must be obeyed : Kuno must of course learn to stand still for long periods in the corner of rooms; he must then learn to transfer all of his weight onto one leg, which will be his 'trunk'. He must be potted and left on the balcony and experiments must be made with watering him. Other experiments fail, and there are periods of disgust with Kuno, where all seems lost and his uncle fumes. He finally must be.......pruned. With his hands freshly sheared off, and having lost lots of blood, he bravely lingers on for some time in bewildered pain, eventually collapsing over the edge of his pot like a wilting monstera, to be discovered fearfully by his mother, who tries desperately to get him standing again so uncle won't be disappointed. But it can't be done; the big plan has come to nothing except hand stumps. Rasp details all this with quiet directness, the exact recipe required, with only occasional slipping back and forth in time interrupting complete clarity. Kuno is bemused at first and always feels that he really should try to please his stepfather. Annemarie is strangely erotic in his eyes; he's very aware of her not only as his mother, but also as his uncle's lover, and she looms near Kuno himself sometimes in this way, brushing against him. On a couple of occasions he hears/sees them making love. Annemarie is also nervous, conniving, biddable and very squashed (if there ever were a film, Lesley Manville would do her proud). Felix is convincingly a pocket dictator, with ever-changing moods which require to be fallen-in with, a spoiled spattiness which won't tolerate dissent, and an imperious pseudo-knowledgability which has all the answers. I wonder how much of this is Rasp's own history? Here's hoping not too much, or if so, that the writing of this was excellent therapy.

Friday, May 22, 2015

The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross by David Foster (1986)

When is an allegory only a partegory? Or even just a bitegory? This manages to be all three. The overt story is one of a young man of the Middle Ages searching for alchemical furtherance - becoming an initiate of an order, undertaking all sorts of mentorship, experimenting with mercurial and other combinations in the quest for gold. He travels east to Damascus via Venice and discovers something called the Vegetable Stone which leads to more questing fomentation. He gets caught up in a helix of political vying, spouts a great deal about wise ways, and finally is 'reformed', becoming an inquisitor and travelling back to Europe to flush out heretics and teach what he has learnt. The covert story can be seen as a drug parable, but it slips in and out of vision. Its main period of clarity occurs while Christian, the young man, is in Damascus and using the Vegetable Stone. It takes him to Damcar, a dream-version/enlightened-state chemical edition of the city. The Vegetable Stone is presumably hash. Those around Christian loom up out of the fug as potential covert characters, too - the Gatekeeper might be a common or garden drug dealer, or he might be a supplier cum experience-leader. The Viceroy and the master of the brotherhood Christian joins appear also to be contrasting pathways to experience, either personified or more notional. All of this is couched in Foster's predictably louche, modern terminology, slangy and comically immediate, nothing to do with the historical period. It is also melded and folded with his trademark intellectual swagger; philosophical points made every few lines, ideas traded generously. As usual with this author, clarity is the loser: to return to the terms at the start - this is rarely if ever an allegory, occasionally a partegory, most of the time a bitegory. The focus is dim. And, also as usual with this author, he's already realised that, and allowed himself an out in the introduction - apparently it's 'very ambiguity conforms to the Hermetic tradition'. That smacks to me of those knowing squeaks most first year literature students will remember from often drug-addled conversations at 3am: "Exactly! This book is boring! But it's supposed to be! Because the author is slyly commenting on exactly that subject! Boredom!" Yeah, sure. Well, nah. Though it may conform to the Hermetic tradition, it doesn't to the best allegorical one. But I still can't help feeling admiration for the ideas in this, as in most of Foster. They're in the cauldron with a lot of other stuff which needs refining out or distilling up, though.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

One of Cleopatra's Nights by Theophile Gautier (1839)

This originally appeared with other novellas in a collection called A Tear of the Devil. In it Gautier reveals himself as a voluptuary. It is a classic reaction to what he calls the 'long fast of Christianity'. A handsome but insignificant young man, Meiamoun, has taken an enormous fancy to his queen, Cleopatra, following her whenever he can, watching from the shadows and on the edge of crowds, as she presides over national celebrations and important events. He knows his passion for her is ridiculous and that he has no business with her at all - she's so far above him as to be of another plane entirely, but he can't help himself and sees no other path. He follows her cangia down the Nile on his small foot-craft after a panegyris in the temple of Hermonthis. Watching her disembark up gigantic steps into a palace from the waterside, he decides that nothing else matters - he must make contact somehow. Meantime, Cleopatra is bored, hankering after something more, some meaning to which she can attach herself. She becomes increasingly bad-tempered, seething with dulness. That night Meiamoun takes his crazy chance - he fires an arrow through her window with a note attached which simply says 'I love you'. The queen and her chief maid, Charmion (no doubt the origin of the character of the same name in Mankiewicz's Taylor-Burton 1963 epic), scan the waters below the window fascinatedly, and Cleopatra's boredom is temporarily alleviated. She sends a trusted slave to find the bowman - he searches all over the Nile without result as Meiamoun manages to evade him, much to the queen's irritation. Next morning he has entered an underwater vent which leads up into the baths of the queen. As she bathes naked (dribblingly described by Gautier) she spots Meiamoun hiding in a corner behind some trees and cries out, outraged. This is it. Meiamoun assumes that, as he has been caught, especially in these circumstances, he will be executed. Cleopatra, quickly over the surprise, confirms that this will be the case, but recognizes him from the background of recent celebrations, and clearly likes what she sees. Here is a perfect boredom-alleviator. She lets him know that she will spend the day and night with him before he will be required to die. Gautier, as he has done all through, takes us lovingly through the sensuous orgiasticism of a huge banquet and private celebration with choreographed fires, lights, foods and experiences mingling in a heady, drug-like miasma. Then Meiamoun, now a satiated votary, willingly slugs down his bubbling poison. This is sensualism, impure and simple, but elegantly limned.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Commonplace Book

'"According to the statistics I've got about another sixteen days of life," he observed, as we left the Admiralty and walked along the Mall to the Club. "Second Lieutenants seem to last as much as a fortnight sometimes."

"Then I hope you'll get rapid promotion," I said. "The sooner you cease to be a Second Lieutenant the better."

He laughed a little bitterly.'

from Sonia by Stephen McKenna (Chapter IX, Part II)

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Commonplace Book

'"Take no notice of what other people think" says Christian. "That's what the Gatekeeper says."

"Is that so? Well you tell the Gatekeeper I think he's greedy. Then tell him I've halved his salary. Mind you, he needn't take any notice of what other people think."'

from The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross by David Foster (Chapter 19)

Monday, May 4, 2015

A House and its Head by I. Compton-Burnett (1935)

This starts like many of her others. One is trapped under a too-tight bedspread, locked into a Victorian family's bitter, swiping atmosphere under a patriarch who is all-outdoing: "you may have an objection, or a comment; I know that you have no right to either, and don't know yourself sufficiently well to be able to make it. I know you far better, and understand that this attempting to comment or object is just a function of your needlessness" is how I'd put it, summing up Compton-Burnett's lead character here, Duncan Edgeworth. This feels surprisingly like a retread of previous efforts for the first half of this book - for the first time reading this author a slight sense of boredom overcame me. His daughters are struggling under him, as is his tired wife, and an orphaned male cousin who lives with the family. The people of their very tight village are similarly caught in the web of Duncan's all-requiring hyperattention (and a few other toxic webs of their own). But of course, the author, in her usual way, has them all react in ways in which they attempt to gain liberation - bitching, contesting, attempting to intimidate each other as well as him. Very few of these attempts succeed, because most of these people are extraordinarily hardy, necessarily so, in these super-accentuated circumstances. These stymied mutual harrowings, though now familiar, are still entertaining, and as usual expressed in terms of profound politeness on the whole, though occasionally they have a startling directness, just to mix things up. The veiled fight travels through a lot of plot: the wearing-down death of his wife; the surprise selection of a new young one; the birth of a son; the discovery of the new wife's mutiny with the orphaned cousin of which the son is the result; her banishment; the taking on of a third wife, an older woman who has lived with the family as governess and help for most of the daughters' lives; her pregnancy; the gas-death of the first son in sinister circumstances; the suspicion that Duncan and his third wife may have done away with the boy, who, after all, was not either of their child, in order to guarantee succession rights to their as yet unborn one; the marriage of the orphaned cousin and the youngest daughter; the extraordinary revelation, to us as readers, but otherwise only between a tough village matriarch and this youngest daughter, that the youngest daughter has conspired with a disaffected maid in the murder of the boy; Duncan is in the room when this revelation is embarked upon - has he heard?; the splitting of the youngest daughter and the orphaned cousin's marriage because of a lesser misdemeanour of hers; its eventual reconstitution for monetary reasons only with the family all coming together again under one roof. And everyone lived happily ever after! By the time this astonishing ground is traversed in the second half, Compton-Burnett has gripped the reader thoroughly, completely re-establishing her power of compulsion in the mind.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Commonplace Book

'"...You see, when ancient chemists decided to conceal their nomenclature, the favorite and natural butt for their spleen were their bitter antagonists, the mystics. Out of context, it's almost impossible for us to understand their satire. What was meant as parody is often taken for the Real Thing, and vice versa. That strike you as paradoxical?"

"Yes and no" says Christian.'

from The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross by David Foster (Chapter 10)

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Commonplace Book

'"...Yes, Almeric writes that all is well with them. To us it can only be well in a certain sense. We do not identify ourselves with their course."

"It is a pity you cannot have them to stay : I see it is hardly possible."

"I know you do feel it a pity. But it is not in the question in your father's lifetime."

"We could tell you when he is going away, to save you the tedium of waiting for his death."'

from A House and Its Head by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter XVI)