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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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.