Friday, September 30, 2016

Commonplace Book

'Certainly one day, but that is far in the unimaginable future, I shall be forced to bear the ultimate in unsupportable reality; and also, strange but true, the voice of a bird will draw me through the moment of transition into the moment of release from action and suffering: into being; into a reality I, somehow, must have earned, although it was too bright to bear for long - or I too dark to bear it.'

from The Swan in the Evening by Rosamond Lehmann (Part Two, Section 2)

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Commonplace Book

'...In an age of great biologists and electricians, he came upon children prettily talking about fairies and the philosopher's stone. In one of the greatest ages of English poetry, he came to London to find young English poets falling on their knees to the metrical mathematicians of France. In the great age of democracy, a fool had come and asked him if he were not a supporter of the house of Stuart, a Jacobite of charades.[...] and never once had he heard the voice of simple human feeling, nor heard one speak of beauty, simply, passionately, with his heart in his mouth; nor of love with his heart upon his sleeve. Much cleverness, much learning, much charm, there had been, but he had missed the generous human impulse. No one seemed to be doing anything because he must. These were pleasant eddies, dainty with lilies and curiously starred water-grasses, but the great warm stream of English literature was not flowing here.'

from Young Lives by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XXXIV)

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Afoot in England by WH Hudson (1909)

Hudson here details a number of walks and a couple of bicycle rides he took, mainly in the south west, a couple elsewhere. They speak of a greener England, and a quieter one, by such an amount as to seem almost fantastical. To think of those parts of the country unencumbered by anything remotely resembling a motorway is to feel like one is dreaming. Of greater interest again is the obvious plenty in terms of creatures round about; flitting in the hedgerows, in the sky, tucked into a countryside teeming with variety and activity are innumerable species of animals, insects and birds, many of which are now rare or even gone, I'm sure. As always, this leaves me with vying sentiments: a terrible feeling of loss, particularly of peace and beauty, and a contrasting self-suspicion that I'm partaking of little Englanderness and too much interest in golden ages. In the end, the loss is more definable and undoubted. Hudson documents in a gentle style the stories of those he meets, from disgruntled and frightening cottage wives in lonely corners of moors, to warmly vocal vicars, to houses tucked away in villages where he knows he can get a meal, to dogs who adopt him because of his wandering ways. He also speaks of the changing landscape with even-handed concern, except where motor-cars are concerned; they are messengers of evil in every way. And he was right according to his lights; his England of lanes and slowness was the one they were in the process of doing away with. He also voices much more seemingly modern concerns: he's right against the dead-spirited depredations of hunting and very aware in general of species loss through human activity. His main concern though is with birds; their lives, seasons, mating habits, communication and interreactions form the most part of the animal portion of these chapters. He also occasionally refers back to his time in early life in South America, the contrasts of which gently ballast these musings. The softness of much of this book could be construed as 'chocolate-box' by the needlessly cynical. It does very occasionally leave one wanting more, but by far the greater impression is of a tenderness and simplicity which are honest in intent and creative of answering echoes in the reader.

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Commonplace Book

'O that unbedding of the lark! The world that was so still before now all at once had a sound; not a single song and not in one place, but a sound composed of a thousand individual sounds, rising out of the dark earth at a distance on my right hand and up into the dusky sky, spreading far and wide even as the light was spreading on the opposite side of the heavens - a sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not like the voices of earthly beings. They were not human nor angelic, but passionless, and it was as if the whole visible world, the dim grassy plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled with paling stars, moonlit and dawnlit, had found a voice to express the mystery and glory of the morning.'

from Afoot in England by WH Hudson (Chapter XXI)

Friday, September 2, 2016

I Speak of Africa by William Plomer (1927)

This was Plomer's second book, coming after the critically applauded excoriation of South African society Turbott Wolfe. Both are now very much eclipsed in popular terms; this one was arguably never really in the spotlight. This fate is not deserved, though I think I can put forward a theory as to why the quiescence may have occurred. His later books appear to be a lot 'softer' in their approach, quite a bit more middling. I say that having only dipped into them; this is a prognostic which I will gladly revise on fuller reading, and equally am interested to see how it happened if it did. There are included in this book 'three short novels', 'seven short stories' and 'two plays for puppets'. What binds them together is fierceness - an intensely realised dislike of limited, racist, domineering, white South Africa. The three novellas, Portraits in the Nude, Ula Masondo and Black Peril, as well as the first of the 'short' stories (actually longer and more involved than Black Peril, so no idea why it is so denominated) called Saturday, Sunday, Monday, all deal at sour length with limitation-blighted white or black lives, or poisonous relations between the races. The whites are usually locked into defensive patterns of prejudice and the blacks usually provide them with reality checks, which must have been quite liberating / shocking in those days. White women often use rape-allegations as a weapon against black men who don't oblige them in whatever way, or whom they want to be rid of. Whether Plomer had personal experience of this method being used during his time growing up there, or had his own prejudgments, is another issue to be grappled with. Portraits in the Nude also has a place in the history of modern gothic I think, with its tale of a white farmer whose mind has gradually curdled into religious fanaticism, around whom his whole family have built a frightened and yet protective barrier. His strange outbursts at times of tension, and peculiar behaviours and beliefs (taking all his clothes off and running the gamut of the town after church) are redolent of TF Powys' mad obsessed figures, and of the later monomaniacs of Flannery O'Connor. The short stories and playlets bring the same subject matter of stymied people into very bright focus, where all hinges on a single situation, or conversation. A couple of them are sketchlike slices of life, and attempt a slightly lighter tone, but there is no escaping Plomer's frustration and bitterness with what he clearly regards as a shower of foolishness and race-hate. The anger accords this its backbone - I hope I'm wrong about what seems to be his later diminution.

Commonplace Book

'We are all pretty familiar from experience with the limitations of the sense of smell and the fact that agreeable odours please us only fitfully; the sensation comes as a pleasing shock, a surprise, and is quickly gone. If we attempt to keep it for some time by deliberately smelling a fragrant flower or any perfume, we begin to have a sense of failure as if we had exhausted the sense, keen as it was a moment ago. There must be an interval of rest for the nerve before the sensation can be renewed in its first freshness. Now it is the same, though in a less degree, with the more important sense of sight. We look long and steadily at a thing to know it, and the longer and more fixedly we look the better, if it engages the reasoning faculties; but an aesthetic pleasure cannot be increased or retained in that way. We must look, merely glancing as it were, and look again, and then again, with intervals, receiving the image in the brain even as we receive the 'nimble emanations' of a flower, and the image is all the brighter for coming intermittently. In a large prospect we are not conscious of this limitation because of the wideness of the field and the number and variety of objects or points of interest in it; the vision roams hither and thither over it and receives a continuous stream or series of pleasing impressions; but to gaze fixedly at the most beautiful object in nature or art does but diminish the pleasure. Practically it ceases to be beautiful and only recovers the first effect after we have given the mind an interval of rest.'

from Afoot in England by WH Hudson (Chapter XX)