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)

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)

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)

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.

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.

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)

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)