Thursday, December 28, 2017

She and He by George Sand (1859)

This is Sand dipping down from her usual bright heights to a level that could be described as the one which might be expected of French literature in the nineteenth century. In other words, it is an anatomy of a passion in Parisian society, so familiar from the works of Daudet, Maupassant, Flaubert and company. It's not boring, none of these writers are, because that territory is eminently human, though of a very particular marque. Sand, though, is one of the few French writers who outruns that cliche soundly in her best works. This is not among them. It is the story of an egotistical artist, Laurent de Fauvel, who becomes obsessed with a slightly mysterious woman artist on the fringes of the bohemian world, Therese Jacques. She has had a chequered past; tricked when very young by an importunate count into an affair, she has borne a dead child. She is subsequently protected by powerful friends and her own dignified wariness and self-criticism. She is determined to live at a slight remove from the hedonistic flow of the artistic life, though is drawn to many of its broader ideas. She and Laurent eventually fall for each other, but, as they do, one of the central tropes of this piece comes into play. This is the change of mood, once an ideal has been grasped. Laurent, a natural hedonist, becomes abusive and dismissive, something Therese cannot endure. They decide that the relationship needs air, and head off to Italy for a long tour. In the background has been a discreet older American, Richard Palmer, who knows Therese's past and is a family friend of long standing. Laurent has been jealous of him intermittently, but is reassured in the end by his good character and honour when they get to know each other. Therese is very happy with their first stop, Genoa, and she and Laurent decide to stay there for some months. Therese is quite productive, but Laurent is blocked. He quickly gets bored, and frustrated, and the misery begins again. Palmer, also travelling, comes to her aid. They decide between them that the relationship must end; Laurent is like a moody, difficult child, and clearly Therese does him no good despite his infatuation. They eventually organise, with his agreement, to send him back to Paris, as he is ill with dissipation and needs to recover. In the process of all this, Palmer has realised that he loves Therese, and through his noble actions and genuine care for Laurent, Therese sees him in a new light. They agree to marry, and after some time elapses, return to Paris. Laurent comes to see Therese, full of understanding that their deepest connection is over, and happy for her in Palmer. But as the marriage approaches, the central trope attacks again. She and Palmer begin to bicker and misunderstand one another, over Laurent, and over other issues. They part in bitterness, thinking they will never see each other again. Therese, depressed but determined to survive on her own, slowly falls under Laurent's spell once again, and his selfish darkness, combined with his obsession, work together to make her life a misery. The seeming change in Laurent that had encouraged her back into his arms has been proved to be a mirage; the story rolls round once again. Her life-energies sapped, with almost a blank dreariness in her heart, she is sinking into a locked abyss of sadness. A knock comes at the door; the young teenage boy tells her he has been sent to her. Shock and joy of an unknown calibre reverberates through her as, in waves, she recognises in him a look which she can't deny, as she has recently undertaken a self-portrait in the mirror. His bone structure and features are hers, to a large extent. It eventuates that her child was not born dead, but whisked away to his father. The count has now died, and his wife has unwillingly relinquished the child, who was her lifeline to her husband's estate. He has been brought to his mother, but by whom? She discovers Palmer outside on the street; he has, in realisation that neither himself nor Laurent is likely to make Therese happy, brought to her the only person he can imagine that could. He is right; she and her son immediately decamp to Germany, leaving Laurent. In a final letter she reassures Laurent that she forgives him his atrocious behaviour, making the point that it seems that his nature is that of the genius, but that there is a price to pay for his endless dissatisfied curiosity - singular love is the sacrifice he must make, and understand in himself, despite his romanticising of it. This is of the general make of its times, but it is made a superior example by the force of Sand's imagination working subtleties through it.

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...She had known that exaltation of suffering which shows one the miseries of life on a large scale, and which hovers on the boundaries between the real and the imaginary; but, by virtue of a natural reaction, her mind aspired henceforth to the true, which is neither one nor the other, neither prosaic fact nor the uncurbed ideal. She felt that there the beautiful was to be found, and that, in order to resume the logical life of the soul, she must seek to live a simple and dignified material life...'

from She and He by George Sand (Chapter XIII)

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

This Water by Beverley Farmer (2017)

What joy. Firstly, to read fiction from Farmer again after a twenty-two year wait. She was always good, but this is different in many senses, in ways which inspire and threaten. Those firings to the brain are a second joy. One of the least regarded of modern classic Australian writers, I assume she is seen as a 'writer's writer', which is code for a kind of connoisseurship of the delicacies of wordsmithing, a snifting of the salty airs of delved places not often revealed which, if "we" educated people more broadly, could cease to be some sort of torrid zone of perceived limited access. This comprises three novellas, interspersed with two long stories. The first novella, A Ring of Gold, occupies the most traditional Farmer territory, and has a woman walking the beaches of a country town in Victoria, musing over textures and colours of nature and the life it symbolises, identifying herself with not only people but creatures, and her ways with those of the rhythms that surround her. She is everyday and peculiar in a trove of ways, where those aspects form a contrapuntal sway that delineates clearly and then undercuts itself with fascinating strangeness. The first story, which gives the book its title, is the first indication of the new territory to be encountered here. We accompany a young woman, daughter of an unnamed king (never called a princess presumably because of the bedraggled state of that word in its current Disneyfication) who is promised to an old man for whom she doesn't care. She notices one of his young kinsmen when he arrives at the castle for the betrothal, and intrigues to run away with him. They find, after covering a lot of miles and many revelations of self, sex, nature and symbolism, a place of safety in his foster father's castle. But her lover dies, and she discovers maturity and bitter poetry in a return to her former betrothed. This one's repleteness with the fabular, and the rich symbolism of female approaches which it shares with its predecessor, give it the quality of bridging the two territories of this book. The second novella, The Blood Red of Her Silks, is an astoundingly brilliant tale of four children, changed through the jealousy of a rival/stepmother into swans. They exist over an unspecified but extensive period of time, becoming a strange inspiration to a lonely monk on a distant island, and a semi-mythical emanation to be both feared and coveted over centuries; their world is full of the soft coastal imagery of reedbed and estuary, wind and sand. The second story, Tongue of Blood, is the most formally experimental of these pieces. In short poetic bursts, Farmer builds up a mythic picture of the resentment of a young woman whose daughter was sacrificed in a rite, probably raped and done away with, with the rite almost as excuse. The woman becomes the sworn enemy and attempted revenger on her daughter's assailants in a powerful tale, dripping with bile and gore. The last novella, The Ice Bride, takes the effort at image-making to yet another level. Set in a kind of labyrinthine ice-dome, mainly at night, with glimmerings of light, passages to unknown regions and places of the mind, its main character is a questioning woman, starting to find out about the world, but trapped in this snowy, stripped down, enchanted building in a restricted, dark landscape. She knows she is a bride, but her "Lord" visits only occasionally, giving her titbits of information about her world, allowing her to discover things only under his say-so. Also visiting is a "Fool", who is a servant to her betrothed, who also lets out information in a very controlled way. She discovers meaning and colour in brief bursts, through light from the stars and, at the end, the sun. She finds rooms in the labyrinth of the dome that weren't there before, with fossils on their shelves, for example, and not really knowing what these things are, questions her Lord and the Fool, on their occasional visits, about wings, or shells. Things turn more threatening toward the end as, in another level of the dome which has not been there before, she sees beneath the ice floor what appear to be the half-skeletal, red-fanged remains of previous brides locked in the freeze. The novella ends with her disposed of, and her Lord arriving in a largely melted landscape with a new bride at his feet in his skiff, and the waters just beginning to freeze again. The looming, disturbing otherworldliness of this piece is phenomenal. Recounting plot is not marginal to these works, but it does result in a very partial picture. The berserker, or setter-alight, of these pieces is Farmer's capacity in describing not only events, but also blazoning the way into worlds they inhabit, textures and exhalations of meaning that are inherent in small symbols and things that can be touched. Her career's prior worldliness and descriptive succulence, though, cannot quite prepare the reader for the delicacy of imagination in the last four of these five. Though it did not feel at all impossible then, to now discover the extraordinary stretch of these tales is to know that the author's mind is at its most powerful in this emanation; she reaches for the stars here, and grasps them. Exhilarating.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...fools and ambitious mortals are not the only imprudent wights whom destiny overwhelms.'

from She and He by George Sand (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'...To eat together is one of the greatest promoters of intimacy. It is the satisfaction in common of a material necessity of existence, and if you seek a loftier meaning in it, it is a communion...'

from She and He by George Sand (Chapter IV)

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Zella Sees Herself by EM Delafield (1917)

The comparison I inevitably make in looking at this first novel of a daughter is with the incredibly capable works of her mother. It is almost like the two orchestrated their careers, one terminating with Michael Ferrys in May 1913, the other commencing in March 1917 with this book. Elizabeth de la Pasture remarried and went off to Africa to live a second life of colonial officialhood, and lived on until 1945. Her daughter Edmee streamed from strength to strength, culminating in the Provinical Lady series, but predeceased her mother in 1943. Ostensibly, this book inhabits the world of her mother's books - the comfortable Edwardian scene of country houses, smart London, the necessity of marriage, and a good quotient of social humour. There seems on this evidence no doubt that she has inherited her mother's storyteller-gene - the whole thing flows effortlessly and with great colour. It does not, in those respects, exercise the mind particularly, but it definitely entertains. But there are differences, and they speak to the coming of the modern. We begin with Zella (short for Gisele) de Kervoyou losing her mother at the age of fourteen, and showing at the same time many signs of typical youthful self-concern. She is borne down upon by her mother's sister Marianne, a woman whose unthinking, small-minded respectability and blathering conventionality must be a portrait from the life of so many withering aunts of the period. She is superbly realised. Marianne's horror can well be imagined when, some time later, Zella, in another fit of self-storytelling, decides she would like to go to a Roman Catholic convent for schooling, and ends up converting in a small maelstrom of fervency. Marianne's ultra-Englishness and protestantism is supremely affronted by all this French nonsense (Zella's father is French and, in Marianne's condescending eyes, terribly dear and dreadfully lax at one and the same time) - she sees her role as surrogate mother being undermined at all eventualities. But in amongst all this fine humour there are hints of what might be to come in this author's career. Zella is lightly psychoanalysed in a way which would never have occured to Elizabeth de la Pasture, and has uncertainties in her character, and tendencies toward the lightest of philosophical thought, which betray her as being the product of a later generation. The story culminates in the typical scene of a country house stay, where Zella, whose latest self-embroidering scheme is one of Romance with a very handsome, slightly empty, wealthy young man, gets a dose of truth and reality from her cousin James, Marianne's son, with whom she's always got on. He begs her to disentangle herself from her web of self-mystification and not marry someone who'll ultimately make her unhappy. This is perhaps the only point in the novel where I would say inexperience has caused a slight tremor - her inamorato's inappropriateness is not quite cleanly forced upon us, though it is possible to see what she was getting at. In its ending, with Zella having acceded to James' urging and rejected him, causing not only heartbreak but anger, and in floods of tears and some (undeserved) social disgrace as a flirt, mulling to herself the fact that she never seems quite able to connect with the real, in place of the fancied and over-elaborated fiction of self to which she's a votary, Delafield delves more deeply than her mother would have done, and soundly satisfies.

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Vittoria by George Meredith (1867)

Meredith is here unexpectedly taking another holiday from comedy. Where last time we had a domestic tragedy, here is a revolutionary novel, set in the tumultuous Italy of 1848, placing it alongside A Tale of Two Cities and many another exploit in the turbulence which seemed to cross Europe over that long period. Like Rhoda Fleming, there is comedy in the sidelines of this one, mainly housed with operatic entrepreneur Antonio-Pericles and his very mildly talented amanuensis, Irma. The novel forms a complementary part, perhaps not a sequel overly, to his former novel Sandra Belloni, from 1864. The heroine of that comedy is transported back to her beloved homeland, and the beginnings of a career as a chanteuse. She has also undergone another transformation, becoming a fervent supporter of the troublings toward revolution and a unified Italy. To this end she takes a stage name, Vittoria, for obvious reasons. Her debut is planned for a particular day in Milan, where her talent is expected to be so arousing that she will single-handedly fire the starting gun for an insurrection in that city, simply by singing a particular song, which contains veiled patriotic references. From that point, we have a traditional Meredithian expansion into a multitude of threads, each supporting a character or group of characters, each of which have a complex viewpoint, either for or against a united Italy, or for or against continuing Austrian control, as well as innumerable personal biases, secret reasons, fallings in and out of love, changing receptions to others' actions, intrigues in the cause of personal and political goals, including misapprehension and rumour as well as fact. The action takes place on the quiet roads of northern Italy, in its mountain passes and in various staterooms and courtly houses at gatherings of the great and good. Austrian officers abound, as do Italian minor aristocracy. Vittoria's main idea is that Carlo Alberto will become king; her great love, Count Carlo Ammiani, is a plotter for a republican future. The tension caused by this difference of perspective is a major point of rub as the novel progresses, and the suspicions it creates among those around them cause a lot of confusion and misdirection. One of the most interesting things about this book is the primacy it gives to the opinions and agency of women in a period of both literature and history where it might not be expected. Vittoria's great friend Laura Piaveni is a strong urger of revolution and an indomitable arguer in favour of action. The countesses Lenkenstein are wilier equivalents on the Austrian side. Countess Viola d'Isorella is a mysterious intriguer who will stop at nothing to get her way, though no-one quite knows which side she's on. This interest in big female roles inhabiting usually male territory is an indication, I'm thinking, of why Virago were prepared to allow, as an exception, his later Diana of the Crossways into their modern classics years ago. To combine this tendency, along with extraordinarily intricate plotting, revelation of which occurs tangentially through veiled conversation and mysterious action in a circuitous gossamer of carefully teased psychology, is to reach splendid heights of reading pleasure yet again.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Commonplace Book

'"Long-worded, long-winded, obscure, affirmatizing by negatives, confessing by implication! - where's the beginning and the end of you, and what's your meaning?"'

from Vittoria by George Meredith (Chapter XLII)

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Dreamthorp by Alexander Smith (1863)

Smith is remembered (if it can really be called that) now as a 'Sporadic' poet, which, as far as I can tell, is a largely pejorative term used for a group of mid-nineteenth century poets who don't quite make the grade, in the wise noddles of the current literati. I've not read his poetry and can't comment upon it. But as an essayist there's a great deal more than the occasional about him. There are the things which one might expect: a species of largesse, and confidence, generated from the uber-believed-in superengine of Victorian supremity. This gives rise to a quality of love for his own train of thought which can exclude careful exceptions to his rules, or to what would be seen these days as echo-chamberedness. But these elements are, from my point of view, forgivable, if I have a writer of rich prose and investigative mind in my hands. Meaning that there are outweighing examples here where Smith follows an original train of thought fruitfully, or perhaps sets up an echo which rings with enough significance to satisfy. The place where he reaches his highest pitch is in personal and social philosophy, which often also sits as a looming background to the pieces here which aren't primarily concerned with it. I don't find him as perspicacious on literature - there are essays here - Dunbar, Men of Letters, A Shelf in My Bookcase and Geoffrey Chaucer - which are the weakest of a strong lot. But those which touch on the springs of his own writing more directly like On the Writing of Essays are really fine examples of their kind, and show up his love and fascination for Hazlitt, Macaulay and the other 'greats', particularly Charles Lamb. This is one of those books where the anticipation of re-opening is as enjoyable as the reading itself.

Friday, October 20, 2017

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer (1991)

The part of this book to which I respond most is its intensity, made real by Spanbauer's concentration on the point of view of the main character, Duivichi-un-Dua, a seemingly Native American young man living in the early years of the twentieth century in a small town in Idaho. His thoughts govern this book. His attitude of mind is poetic, slow-discovering, challenging and wonderingly perceptive. More broadly, the book is a hybrid, swinging between the low cloudy-grey realities of this voice, and a style which could most accurately be called best-little-whorehouse-in-Idaho-esque. Our young man is living in violent times. He is 'attached' via his mother, possibly a Bannock woman, to the establishment of Ida Richilieu, a bar- and brothel-owner of Excellent, Idaho. Jewish Ida is a typical renegade, spirited, challenging all comers. She has left the east to find a freer life which suits her more out west, as have most of her customers, which is indeed most of the town. Violence permeates their lives. Our hero is raped when young by a local crazy, and after recovering begins to 'work' for Ida out in a shed behind her place, servicing gentleman callers. This illustrates the lilt of this book; it tips and swings between horror-experiences and so-called 'life affirming' stuff, where the whores all have great hearts and those without are the religious loons. The seething reality of murder, medical operations without anaesthetic, deprivation and other such western straightforwardness is balanced by the fantasy of free sexuality and roistering, which is delivered in a way which runs desperately close sometimes to 50s to 80s Hollywood tropes. Certainly it is not historically viable. Which is perfectly OK as long as it's understood to be a fantasy: many of the male characters are thrilled and intrigued by male-male sexuality and explore it with one another almost proudly, and there's not a sign of shame, secrecy, and all the twistedness that goes with that, which would have been a hallmark of those times - the squashedness is missing, presumably deliberately. All sorts of philosophising is done by the main characters, which also has a strong whiff of much more modern times. But no matter how trumped up these elements feel, there is real power in the voice and perceptions of Duivichi much of the time, almost a sense of comfort in his sensitivity, openness and grounded poetry. He's discovered to not be Native American near the end, and lots of the perceptions that troubled the characters not true; they've all been through hell, are decimated, dead, de-limbed, drug-addled and depressed, and the Mormons have taken over the town. But, between some of the lines, and up front in the rest of them, there is a real spirit-story here which claims the heart.

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...Clouds were driving thick across the cold-gleaming sky when the storm-bells burst out with the wild Jubilee-music of insurrection - a carol, a jangle of all discord, savage as flame. Every church of the city lent its iron tongue to the peal; and now they joined and now rolled apart, now joined again and clanged like souls shrieking across the black gulfs of an earthquake; they swam aloft with mournful delirium, tumbled together, were scattered in spray, dissolved, renewed, died, as a last worn wave casts itself on an unfooted shore, and rang again as through rent doorways, became a clamorous host, an iron body, a pressure as of a down-drawn firmament, and once more a hollow vast, as if the abysses of the Circles were sounded through and through...'

from Vittoria by George Meredith (Chapter XXX)

Monday, October 9, 2017

Commonplace Book

'..."Here they come." (She spoke of tears.) "It's because I am joyful. The channel for them has grown so dry that they prick and sting. Oh, Sandra! it would be pleasant to me if we might both be buried for seven days, and have one long howl of weakness together. A little bite of satisfaction makes me so tired. I believe there's something very bad for us in our always being at war, and never, never gaining ground. Just one spark of triumph intoxicates us..."'

from Vittoria by George Meredith (Chapter XXVIII)

Saturday, October 7, 2017

The Man Who Lost Himself by Osbert Sitwell (1929)

There is a strong contrast between this second novel and his first, Before the Bombardment, published a few years earlier. Where that first one was a cracking satire, operating a high pitch of frustration-inspired, hypercoloured rage and tension, this piece lies in the outflow of that process, washed down with the tidal ebb of those currents. Its style is biographic and painstaking; it forms a psychological portrait of a formerly great writer, coasting in after years, having decided bitterly in the seized and blocked atmosphere of unrequited love that his prior dedication to Art, and its attendant penury, was not the life he wanted after all. There are moments of satire, particularly of American and British 'lady travellers' of the 1920s, but these are few and far between. Sitwell pushes the telling of the story from memory ahead in time, as he did in the title story of Triple Fugue, but this time the life is being looked back upon from forty years later, in the late 1960s. This allows him to attempt prescience, the main success of which is in the prediction of another world war, though he has it waged between 1953 and 1957, with the First World War known as the Little World War, while the subsequent one is the Great World War. Sitwell himself is the writer-narrator, and his subject is his fictional former best friend, Tristram Orlander. Tristram starts out the darling of the literary set, his poetry and early novels exploding upon the firmament of Art, but not selling more than adequately. His love for the husky-voiced, bright blue-eyed Ursula Rypton is obsessive and adoring. She, however fond she is of him, doesn't see him as marriage material, and his adoration probably gets in the way of seeing that she's worldly enough to want financial comfort in life. The stresses of the disappointment damage Tristram's nerves and health, and under his doctor's orders, Osbert and he set off for a rejuvenating tour of Europe in a time contemporaneous to the writing of the novel - mid to late 1920s. The boat-trip to Gibraltar provides Sitwell with his best opportunity to satirise, and he does so with gusty energy. Then they arrive in Spain and quickly find themselves in Granada, in the shadow of the Alhambra. It is here that the psychological action intensifies a great deal, and this novel gains strength and purpose beyond the slightly dilletante atmosphere it has hitherto maintained. The two of them, sometimes alone, sometimes with encountered associates, even sometimes with the aforementioned lady travellers, explore the exotic, sometimes disturbing locale and heal under the intensity of the heat. In the shadows of the empty galleries of the great building on the hill, and in some of the smaller ones that surround it, and in the dappled woods that lead up to the eminence, they tap the vein of self-reflection and a new understanding. Tristram's shattered nerves seem harmonized. Then comes the news from Britain that Ursula has married, and danger rears up again. But, seemingly to Osbert, Tristram survives the shock well. Osbert soon has to return to Britain, but Tristram decides to stay longer, almost addicted to this hot, foreign clime which has been so inspiring. Left on his own, things start to feel less sure, and no doubt the disappointment over Ursula is having an insidious effect. After a wild night of drinking, he stumbles into an elegant local hotel, which has an oily concierge he's always disliked. Having gone too far inside than is polite without asking to see a guest, faced with this disturbingly obsequious and yet challenging creature, and feeling decidedly exhausted and wobbly while trying to keep face, he stumblingly asks for.......himself, knowing that the concierge doesn't know his name, and it can simply seem like he has enquired in the wrong hotel for a friend. But, shocked, he receives the answer that yes, Mr Orlander is in, and will he step this way? His nerves jangling, he totters after the concierge, and is led to a room and left just inside the door having been admitted. In a chair facing away from him is a figure with grey hair. As he walks forward the figure turns, and reveals...an older version of himself, glaring at him soundlessly with rage in his eyes. At this point Tristram wakes up back in the lobby, trembling and disoriented, completely nonplussed by the experience, as though he has fainted and it was all a dream. He slowly reassembles himself over the ensuing days, glossing over the meeting with the initial notion of it being a nervous fantasy, and then dismissing it from his mind altogether. But events have taken their toll on his mind; back in London, he distances himself from his former friends, developing the slick style for which he later became known. His decision to follow what will pay is clear; though his literary reputation goes proverbially south, his public acceptance could not be greater. He becomes wealthy and garrulous. Finally, forty years having elapsed, he feels twinges of regret over the gap between himself and his old associates. In the late 1960s, he meets Osbert again for the first time in many years, and then sets up a dinner date with Ursula. The sight of Ursula as an old woman, and the feeling that she is only mildly interested in him, set the tone for what could be an awful encounter. But then, for a brief period, they manage to recapture the feeling of their youth, and spend an hour locked in fascination before the feeling fades again. Tristram is both disturbed and energised, and further develops a nascent scheme he has for a return to his old literary style in one last great novel. He decides he needs to return to Spain, the scene of his greatest successes (he has set a bestselling trilogy there). At the very same hotel in Granada, after an eerie long walk visiting old haunts which has exhausted him, he settles in his chair to relax and read before dinner. There is a knock at the door and he shouts admittance. He turns slowly around to see.......of course, his younger self. This time the younger man, lively, sinuous and wild and full of promise, appears to be glaring at him with hate in his eyes. Then the tale returns to the teller, Osbert, to say that Tristram was found dead in his room, and all attempts to discover the young man who visited him have been fruitless. As he gave the same name as Tristram, and looked so like him, it is assumed that the visitor may well have been an illegitimate son. Only Osbert knows the deeper story of the original experience back in the 20s, as Tristram told him as a curiosity before he put it out of his mind forever way back then. In the end, this novel is brilliantly entertaining, though it is a slow starter. There are quite a few candidates for who it might be who was an inspiration for Orlander: Arnold Bennett comes to mind, as does Robert Hichens, as does, most likely perhaps, John Galsworthy. In all likelihood, it is notional satire only; a portrait of a tendency. This one is a dilatory burner, its fires stoked by fine prose, with the stuff of intimate psychology for fuel.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...For the first few moments his strong excitement fronting the curtain, amid a great host of hearts thumping and quivering up in the smaller measures like his own, together with the predisposing belief that this was to be a night of events, stopped his consciousness that all had been thwarted; that there was nothing but plot, plot, counterplot and tangle, disunion, silly subtlety, jealousy, vanity, a direful congregation of antagonistic elements; threads all loose, tongues wagging, pressure here, pressure there, like an uncertain rage in the entrails of the undirected earth, and no master hand on the spot to fuse and point the intense distracted forces.'

from Vittoria by George Meredith (Chapter XVIII)

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...Outwardly the Italians conducted themselves with the air of ordinary heedless citizens, in whose bosoms the music set no hell-broth boiling. Patrician and plebeian, they were chiefly boys; though here and there a middle-aged workman cast a look of intelligence upon Carlo and Luciano, when these two passed along the crowd. A gloom of hoarded hatred was visible in the mass of faces, ready to spring fierily. Arms were in the city. With hatred to prompt the blow, with arms to strike, so much dishonour to avenge, we need not wonder that these youths beheld the bit of liberty in prospect magnified by their mighty obfuscating ardour, like a lantern in a fog...'

from Vittoria by George Meredith (Chapter XVII)

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...Her face was like a leaf torn from an antique volume; the hereditary features told the story of her days. The face was sallow and fireless; life had faded like a painted cloth upon the imperishable moulding. She had neither fire in her eyes nor colour on her skin. The thin close multitudinous wrinkles ran up accurately ruled from the chin to the forehead's centre, and touched faintly once or twice beyond, as you observe the ocean ripples run in threads confused to smoothness within a space of the grey horizon sky. But the chin was firm, the mouth and nose were firm, the forehead sat calmly above these shows of decay. It was a most noble face; a fortress face; strong and massive, and honourable in ruin, though stripped of every flower.'

from Vittoria by George Meredith (Chapter XVI)

Thursday, August 31, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...Was it too extravagant to wonder whether these rubiginous and crumbling walls - on which the cactus's pale jade spikes and angles, the light showing flatly through them, stood set for protection like the equivalent dazzling panes of glass on an English wall - these robust but ancient towers, these turbanned arches, and still more the golden soil itself, the stones, over which the lizards darted like green flames, did not perhaps resent the imposition of a heavy and alien hand; whether the place was not, even now, African and infidel at heart; and if an inborn and clandestine hatred did not still run - just as the old religion, it was said, had persisted, hidden away under the new for several centuries - beneath the astonishing beauty of this surface?'

from The Man Who Lost Himself by Osbert Sitwell

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Commonplace Book

'"...He has got your journalistic style, wherein words of six syllables form the relief to words of eight, and hardly one dares to stand by itself. They are like huge boulders across a brook. The meaning, do you see, would run of itself, but you give us these impedimenting big stones to help us over it, while we profess to understand you by implication. For my part, I own, that to me, your parliamentary, illegitimate academic, modern crocodile phraseology, which is formidable in the jaws, impenetrable on the back, can't circumvent a corner, and is enabled to enter a common understanding solely by having a special highway prepared for it, - in short, the writing in your journals is too much for me..."'

from Vittoria by George Meredith (Chapter V)

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...a gift for over-sharp sayings in any man is usually the sign that it has been forced upon him, a token of nervous exacerbation caused by constant, wilful and vituperative misunderstanding.'

from The Man Who Lost Himself by Osbert Sitwell

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell (1945)

I've read a Maxwell back in the mists of time, but now have no recollection of it, so this was like a first discovery. The experience was an intriguing one. The thing that most distinguishes his work is its emphasis on the reader as distanced observer. This happens, though, within a framework which feels quite close to the bone. These things are perhaps contradictory, but the fact that they work is undoubtable. The best way to illustrate this is to say that Maxwell allows the reader to see what happens before knowing why it does in most cases. Moments come when one says "Ah! That's how he was feeling..." in light of such and such an eventuation. At the same time one is kept quite close to a feeling of tension in the air, or some sort of sense of joy or conflict - so much so that the book feels imbued with unspecified emotion. There is much less psychological explication. This is a fascinating technique which mirrors, of course, life itself, where we often only find out what has been happening on an emotional level after events have attained their full pitch. Reverse explication might be a good term for it. I wonder if creative writing schools teach it? I fear it may be beyond their pale. Here, Lymie Peters and Spud Latham (who feel somehow very much modelled from real life, Maxwell himself possibly being Lymie) meet at school in the 1920s and connect. Spud is just moved to Chicago from country Wisconsin, has a pretty independent mind, is a little different. But he is also a good example of an alpha male; into boxing, not obviously communicative and not that self-aware. He is given to bouts of depression and anger, going out into the streets at night to pick fights, not at all clear as to why. Lymie is also different, but because he is skinny, bad at sports, and good at schoolwork in a kind of dreamy way. These two, who both seem slightly damaged, hit it off. But they are not ostracised or too separate, and share a lot of experiences with their more 'usual' classmates. As they move through school and then on into college, we follow as they have influences on each other's families and friends, and each other, coming to a place of easy relation where Lymie is Spud's helper. But there are always some things that would be awkward - and Lymie is quietly very devoted. So when Spud needs money to join a fraternity, Lymie borrows it and gets it to him anonymously, even though it will take Spud away from the rooming house where they board together. Slowly they draw apart. A mutual friend becomes Spud's girlfriend, but maintains her close connection to Lymie, which causes some frowning tension in Spud's cloudy mind. Spud begins to feel jealousy, and their growing apart widens until Spud confides in one of their friends that he has started to "hate" Lymie. The friend, Reinhart, who has often felt that Lymie ought to get out from under Spud's influence, and under this knowledge this becomes critical, finally decides to tell Lymie what Spud has said. Lymie's reaction is a classic example of Maxwell's technique. He looks a little glassy, and shrugs it off. The next thing we find out is that Lymie has tried to commit suicide. The book ends in hospital with Lymie's slow recovery, and a distressing contretemps with his father, who is a distant man who has never really tried to connect on a deeper level with his son. Mr Peters clumsily attempts a connection; Lymie, unused to reading him in any other way than the basic, misunderstands, and hurts him profoundly. There is also a moment where Spud comes to visit him, now aware of Lymie's borrowing the money to help, and, in a singular moment of revelation, kisses him. Whether this is meant as a signification of acknowledged homosexuality, or something quite a bit less sure, I myself am not sure. It feels readable either way, and as usual we don't really know. Another element which graces this book is atmosphere. The fact that all of this uncertainty and mirrored life happens within a context of limpidly depicted houses and flats and a compellingly directed quiet vision of the everyday 20s and 30s means that we have a brilliant combination of touchable reality and ineffable human spirit. A disarmingly potent book.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square by Mrs de la Pasture (1906)

Elizabeth de la Pasture is the Edwardian storyteller-novelist par excellence. Her conservative schematics are illuminated by extraordinarily clear plots and primary-coloured writing. This one has a young woman who has grown up with an uncle on a farm in Wales sent to a wealthy aunt in London as late-life companion. The aunt is dying, so Jeanne sees her very irregularly, and spends most of her time on her own rattling around the aunt's very quiet Grosvenor Square house, filled to the brim with intimidating servants, gilded furniture, Romney portraits and dated decoration. Jeanne is a timid type in most company but has a mind of her own with which to dream, particularly about how life will be when her beloved twin brother Louis arrives back from the post-Boer African campaigns. Their names are French because the family is the de Coursets, but their orphaned status has meant that details about their supposedly aristocratic origins are thin on the ground. After her aunt's death it is revealed to Jeanne that her brother has inherited her huge fortune. Louis writes from Africa that he will share the funds with her equally, so Jeanne will be a wealthy woman once the estate is arranged and the legalities settled. He is supposedly on his way back, until Jeanne receives a letter saying he has been deployed to British Somaliland to quell a disturbance there. More waiting, as nothing can be advanced on a legal level until he returns. In the meantime, Jeanne has tried to cure her loneliness by visiting in the immediate locale, but things don't run in smart London quite the way they do in country middle-class Wales. She is hopelessly out of her depth. Thankfully the family's purported distant connection to the aristocratic Monaghans saves the day. Her possible far cousin, the duke, who is in his twenties and a gentle soul, lame from a childhood accident, is enchanted by her simplicity and takes her up very quietly. His mother, the frighteningly intense duchess, seeing his preference, and discovering the story of Jeanne's coming wealth, is keen to see her son attached, given his lack of other obvious charms, and the fact that his portion of the family's wealth is tiny indeed. Their connection blossoms, through their sensitivity and quietness, whilst all around them tend to the banal. Then disaster strikes. Louis is killed in Somaliland. Jeanne is devastated. And then a further bombshell: Louis has married a few years ago an older French woman who had come to Africa to search out her father who was supposed to be gravely ill in a military hospital. Anne-Marie and her father are also de Coursets, which is how Louis has got to know them, fascinated by the idea of finding out what his heritage might be. Anne-Marie's father does die, but she and Louis grow mad for each other. She reveals their minor aristocracy and that there is a Chateau de Courset which she would love to purchase back for the family, but the funds are beyond her. After their hasty marriage she returns to France. Louis, knowing Jeanne's devotion and proprietary feeling about him, has put off telling her of all this until he got home. Now, in a huge shock, Anne-Marie turns up at Grosvenor Square to meet the still devastated Jeanne, and, in a further wrench, she has with her a little boy who is the image of Louis. After the shock fades, they become fast friends in their mutual love for Louis. Anne-Marie, much more worldly and commanding than Jeanne, sees the duke's devotion, and makes sure that the match is confirmed. Jeanne slowly comes back to her former self and marries him. Anne-Marie returns to France with Louis' share of the funds and buys back her beloved family chateau. All of this is confirmedly traditional, and nothing about it sets the brain cells stirring. But there is a kind of visceral enjoyment in how balanced and limpid the construction is. Pasture leaves one with the feeling of being in an extraordinarily safe pair of hands.

Saturday, July 22, 2017

How to Be Both by Ali Smith (2014)

The clear first thing to say is that Smith had an epithet for me from page one, which stayed all through the reading of this. She is a natty writer. Meaning that she has a readiness in her, a chatty companionability which contrasts well her occasional stirring qualities, her learning and flexibility. It makes for entertainment. On the other side of the coin, the critical response to this is puzzling to say the least. Is her nattiness also dazzling, mazing, masking? This is two novellas or short novels, which are strongly linked. The first is a young adult piece about a girl / young woman coming to terms with the loss of her mother and dealing, ruefully, with her family (with whom she still lives as she completes her schooling) and with her sexuality. It retails, particularly, a journey which the whole family, including the artist mother before her death, took to Italy to take a look at a fresco. The effect of this painting rains down through all that follows, in its significance for the mother and for the daughter in remembering her. Now, for some reason this has been marketed and published as an adult piece. Not sure why, and I won't set it at Smith's feet - her publishers may have insisted. I think the easiest way to illustrate the issue is to consider a hypothetical: imagine a researcher buys you two gifts from a bookshop, one from the adult section and one from the young adult. They tear the covers and the preliminary pages from each book, and we'll assume they both have no running heads for identification purposes. So you're left with just the two texts and nothing else. Could you tell which one was the adult and which the young adult book? I know I could, and would venture that most intensive readers could do the same. This first novella overwhelmingly has that young adult feeling. Difficult to put it exactly into words, but let's try: a sense of more of the described; a sense of life's full toughness and poetry looming, but not yet fully engaged; a sense of resulting lesser gravitas - a 'staged' quality, for lack of better terminology. And a firm reminder - this is not because the central character is of young adult age. Plenty of adult novels have been written about young characters. This is rather an analysis of tone in the writing. I don't know what the lack of recognition of this signifies. I hesitate to be a doom-monger and say that we're losing our literary critical acuity. But I also hesitate to say that we are just freeing ourselves up, letting our literary hair down, and 'letting everything mingle', in some sort of inane can't-tell-one-thing-from-anotherness, which would be enough to make Edith Sitwell spit chips (appealing though that image might be!). For one thing, that difference, and the gravitas on the adult side of its equation, is something I value. Anyway, this first novella is very enjoyable, and Smith's nattiness and experimental flexibility make it a really strong contender for younger young adults; it discusses grief well, and has playfulness and a certain wiry philosophic strength. The second novella takes us back to somewhere near the Renaissance and the painter of the painting much discussed in the prior novella. This is a strange piece in some senses. Smith has had a decision to make, given what she appears to want. She wants, I think, to make the story readably accessible with modern language, which I guess is fair enough. She also wants to incorporate into it quite a measure of selective experimentation, so as to be able to manipulate the text in an interesting way. There is of course a trade-off for that - and it comes by way of verisimilitude. The further one strays from 'the real' as can be historically understood in those circumstances, the less power one has. The contrast is that the play in it has more flexible warps and wefts. So we get situations that feel "wrong": the painter as a child has problems of understanding, and 'his' (we later find out that actually it's 'her') parents sit down with him and explain in a kind of 70s almost-hippie-helpful kind of way, reminiscent of Oxford-Children's-Library-1973-with-illustrations-by-Victor-Ambrus. We get language and forms of association that are very now. We also get huge selectivity, where, for example, our artist is experimentally transported to our era and watches the girl from the first novella at a gallery, and out in the streets, noticing all sorts of little things about her and things connected with her, and utterly fails to either notice cars, noise, or TV, for example, or to be even slightly frightened by them or anything else in this world of extreme difference. This is not necessarily wrong, because Smith's character can do and see what she wants. But it makes for lesser semblance of reality, and results in the fact that therefore we are funnelled toward Smith's playfulness alone as the reason for being here, reading this, almost like we are being asked 'will you please not expect this to be a realistically created world; will you please just listen to these few things about it?'. This sounds fine, until one considers that an author not asking the reader that has left them free in their imagination, and they're still listening. It's almost like the task wasn't fully compassed by Smith - that experimentation became the cause of the truncator rather than the expander, as one might find for example in the works of Gil Orlovitz, or Penelope Shuttle, or Ann Quin, or.............but, that being said, apart from its being a little overlong, this is again touched by her nattiness. There is plenty here to savour, especially Smith's feeling for colour and prehensile tucking in of philosophic references and art-historical titbits. In the end, I wish this could have been published expressly for young adults, and, in its experiments and liveliness, really impressed them. I hope they find it, despite its adult mask.

Monday, July 3, 2017

Babes in the Wood by Michael Arlen (1929)

This consists of five novellas, and sits well within the usual Arlen remit. They show all the hallmarks: sardonic wit, nervous positivity of an urbane kind, the romance of the twenties, tragic staginess, all blended together with a special skill in piquant detail which makes for enjoyable reading. Confessions of a Naturalized Englishman takes the author as character into a romance with the bored, vivacious wife of a blood. She does not fix readily on anyone, rather appealing to their brightest parts in a superior way and then moving on. The author makes a date, almost against his own good judgment, to see her at the Carlton Grill and is stood up. When she turns up later at his measly Chelsea flat the angel of unhappiness has lighted on his shoulders, and she gets a frosty welcome. They end up as friends. A Girl with a Future has three men, a chivalrous young Frenchman, a young swarthy Spanish millionaire and a stylish English drunk, competing for the charms of a beautiful young American staying in the south of France with a fearfully fierce mother. Angling, suspicion, fellow-feeling, rumours of others and confusion play their part in a round of events where all of their felicities and failures come home to roost. Portrait of a Gentleman places a severe middle-aged Englishman within the grasp of a young, wealthy and beautiful Swedish widow. He is fascinated by her despite himself and gets caught up in jealousy and self-loathing at his own weakness. But, having asked her to marry him, she hesitates. She has realised exactly who he is and what her free ways would do to him. The "Lost Generation" places an English mining engineer in the way of a free spirited bohemian socialite. He is gripped by her, even though there is plenty of evidence that she's anything but pure. At her holiday house in the south of France, surrounded by young people, he fixes on a youthful English soldier, who looks a little sad, but seems upright. Then the strike hits as he realises that this 'dangerous' woman has the soldier in her sights as a conquest. He aggravatedly interposes in the affair at her bedroom door in the middle of the night, and disillusions the soldier even more, who leaves in disgust (of a sort). She forgives the Englishman amusedly, and everything fizzles out. Nettles in Arcady has a romantic young Frenchman fall for the belittled and squashed wife of an English bully. It is the first time a woman has appealed to him as other than a conquest; there is some powerful attraction in trying to save her from her tormentor. But what he doesn't realise is that she has accommodated her place in life and no longer really wants 'saving' - she just needs a friend. Of course, his passion spoils what they might have had. The bright colours and contrasting post-war cynicism here zing with the usual style and witty flow, making for reader involvement beyond that which the material might have commanded in other hands.

Monday, June 26, 2017

The Well of Saint Clare by Anatole France (1895)

Sometimes France seems to be treading water. The first part of this book is fairly inoffensive and not particularly stirring. Most of these stories and sketches have a commonality in the Franciscan. These emanations from the author's antiquarian side, very well established in his early career, seem somehow to lack a little in the way of compulsion, though that may be my mood talking. They detail moral lessons learned or delivered by wandering monks, often quite eccentric fellows, or they are so purely spiritually aware that the worldly ones around them regard them as such. A couple deal with interactions with Lucifer as fallen angel and subtle doctor, and detail France's relatively enlightened approach to necessary unities between the great dark and the great light; organised modern religion and paganism. A couple of things in this collection are different - one a memorable retelling of the story of Maria d'Avalos, a late middle ages Neapolitan married to a harsh prince, who takes a lover. She and the Duke d'Andria have splendid trysts while her goatlike husband is off shooting and carousing, but they become spoken of round about. The prince hears these rumours, sets a trap, and they are soundly caught. The bloodiness of the time is fulfilled in a welter of stabbing and streaming red, and he leaves their bodies near the front door of the palace for the community to gawp at and learn their lesson. Another sketch deals with Napoleon stopping off in Italy mid-campaign to stay in the house of a Florentine distant relative, becoming importuned by him to assist in the belated canonisation of an ancestor. These pieces have interest, but perhaps not quite enough essentiality to truly whet the appetite.

Commonplace Book

'Now it is well known among novelists that novelists, like women of easy virtue, are utterly without scruple in their use of eyes. Novels in which the principal characters use their eyes to see with are exceedingly rare and are considered to be advanced, unpleasant, and on a doubtful plane of morality. The skilful novelist with a civilized regard for money can, on the other hand, do the deuce of a lot with a pair of blue eyes. Brown eyes can, of course, be used to express fidelity or pique, grey (rare) for modesty, while black eyes are in vogue for foreigners and pronounced cases of sex-repression. But a heroine's eyes should preferably be blue, since that colour lends itself to suitable treatment, inviting easy and moving comparisons with sea, sky, and fountain-pen ink...'

from Nettles in Arcady, in piece in Babes in the Wood by Michael Arlen

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...Well, he would soon have the nonsense knocked out of him. People said it was a good thing for a young fellow. "Being bullied at school did my son no harm," people said.

It was a good thing, was it, to have the nonsense knocked out of you? Was it, by God! It was a damned unholy thing. That way, the earth-bound way, lay mortal peril for the soul. Was it nonsense to dream of a better world, to live for a better world...'

from The "Lost Generation", a piece in Babes in the Wood by Michael Arlen

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Commonplace Book

'Maybe Hemingway was nothing but a snob at bottom. Well, maybe. But what a daft word that is, "snob," scratching at no more than the surface of the desires that move men and women to desperate humiliations. "He's a snob, she's a snob, they're snobs" - everyone goes round squealing forever, frothing at the mouth with the fruity word, snob, snob, snob - and actually it describes nothing, it describes nobody. But it's a nice fruity word, all the same.'

from The "Lost Generation", a piece in Babes in the Wood by Michael Arlen

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Testostero by David Foster (1987)

This crystallised a few things for me. This one is based on the twinned ideas of heredity and identity, with a whole superstructure of other satirical stuff hanging ganglingly off them. It is this quality of being a 'novel of ideas' which finally made itself fully felt - no idea why it took so long, apart from the obvious one of dimness! I looked back over Foster's career to date, and how different he was, especially from ultra-current notions of what constitutes good writing, and had the schlock realisation that I was venturing through the works of a novelist of ideas, in a period when that notion was highly questionable, in fact almost forgotten. It had occurred before, but not truly crystallised, and its contrast to 'creative writing school'-ism and lush descriptivism was accentuated. The idea also made itself felt visually. These books, from North South West in 1973 right through to this one fourteen years later, should not have been produced in their gaudy, colourful Macmillan and Penguin covers. What they needed was the 60s to 80s New Directions treatment - austere black and white covers like those that company gave to writers like John Hawkes and Raymond Queneau, with collagey or single magazine-cutout illustrations. Far from pigeonholing Foster, I think they'd have released him in many ways. The problem is also of course one of countered expectation - could Australia produce a novelist of that kind? Foster is proof that it could. Other than this shroud of painfully gained perspective, the story here is the same old thing. Revelling in his mindpower, and its capacity to mount idea upon idea, refracting them through one another, and have humour lace through the vertical and horizontal network. Irritation with what I can only describe as an overly indulgent attitude to Australianness - the belief that somehow the 'ocker'-ism, that he is no doubt satirising in part, also has some kind of mystical cut-through which lays waste all the silly puffed-upness of Europe and the old world. Though as the meat of this one is digested, that idea thankfully drops away quite a bit. It's the story of twins separated at birth by a dodgy psychologist wanting to study their differing development or not via nurture. One stays in Britain and becomes a cheerful gay aesthete professionally involved in daddy's psychological discipline. The other gets shipped to Sydney, to a job at the local pool at Marrickville, prevailing John Clarke-esque ockerism and an odd little bit of poetry on the side. This poetry gets him a visit to Venice on a Commonwealth Writer's Grant, where he encounters the astounding old world, stinky canals, dodgy officials and mafioso everywhere, and his brother, as yet unknown. Then follows endless permutation of identity (mistaken and otherwise), sex, politics, cultural satire - like a Bazza McKenzie odyssey updated to these terms. Interestingly, it ends with the slightly ludicrous (not that everyone isn't, of course) cultured English brother as an influential art critic in Sydney, which makes Robert Hughes come to mind. He always seemed to me to offer more than he delivered - I wonder if the satire of this is meant to the same end? The journey does get in the end so overlapped and underhinged that it almost falls into smithereens; the swaps, reswaps, upswaps and downswaps bundling through one another in chugging permutation. Yet another example of this author's supreme mental alacrity and resource, meshed into a design which veers dangerously close to collapsing, and still manages to cause the now expected niggle en route.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Commonplace Book

'Mr Hubert Byrrh was seldom seen in London. He was one of those long, grey, ageless, and sardonic-looking men with slightly projecting teeth who give you the impression that they know a thing or two - two at most - and would very much rather not know any more.'

from Confessions of a Naturalized Englishman, a piece in Babes in the Wood by Michael Arlen

Friday, May 26, 2017

The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (1901)

Now I can guess why Malet's last two novels were of her shorter, more pointed variety. This one was in the offing as the latest of her broad, sprawling pieces which alternated between the shorter ones, but it was so much longer, double the length of anything she had previously attempted. Presumably this took loads of her brainspace, and much more refining and working up led to the delay; it also has all the hallmarks of a magnum opus, where cumulation was intended to make her points sing at quite a significantly higher pitch. It was so long that it made two volumes in Britain. It is a singular and evocative piece. It starts as the story of a great love in exalted circles just as Victoria is ascending the throne. But the Calmadys are posited as a blighted race, where an ancient misdemeanour has brought ill-luck raining down in the form of early death in the main male line. Richard Calmady the elder is the hero-lover dream of his beautiful young wife, Katherine, herself a scion of an equivalent heritage, the Ormistons, whose main residence is in the north. She and Richard settle at Brockhurst, the family seat in the Calmady homelands, which appear to be concentrated around eastern Berkshire and northern Hampshire. Katherine becomes pregnant, and joy seems all-availing. Then the family curse is realised: Richard is fatally injured in a riding accident. Katherine is devastated and has the horse involved shot on the lawns of the house as a kind of emotional revenge on life. Her son is duly born, and it seems that the curse has visited again. He is severely physically disabled in the sense that his legs are very curtailed. This devastates Katherine a second time, and all of her extreme emotion and need for love is channelled into this younger Richard, who is our man, the eponymous hero. This is a significant fact in itself, a flag that this novel can wave to accord it a place in history. It must be one of the first treatments of disability in a modern sense in fiction, and Richard Calmady is almost definitely the first 'positive' main character to have these traits. We travel with him through an overprotected youth and his emergence into the full inheritance of the title. One of the key experiences of his childhood is a humiliation which comes at the hands of a young girl, friend to a cousin, who is very pretty, quite pert. Helen seems at first to be friendly, and Richard is taken with her, starts to trust her, only to find a little while later that she has none of the fellow-feeling that he was imagining. Her mocking laughter haunts him, and hurts him badly, but he can't help some residual fascination at her prettiness and bright strength, laced with fear though it may be. Later in life, on the verge of Richard's full adulthood, they meet again and achieve an adult rapprochement. Helen, now Madame de Vallorbes, married to a philandering Frenchman, becomes Richard's ideal of enticing womanhood, and she is also taken with him, loving the power she has over him. One night an overprotective Katherine discovers them with Helen draped over Richard, obviously about to consummate their desires. Katherine and Helen have a tough stand-off, and Helen leaves. This keeps Richard fascinated and starts for him a sense of frustration, only too easily encourageable given his physical limitations. Slowly he disengages from his mother, bleak-mindedly believing that he is made to suffer and has been deluding himself with any notion that the world is a good place. Eventually he leaves to pursue wine, women and song via extensive travels on his personal yacht. Four years later, Richard is in Naples, having enjoyed himself to the hilt courtesy of the family's great wealth. He and Helen have kept in touch by letter. She is blasted with boredom by her fatuous French writer lover, and escapes to Italy. She comes to the villa where Richard is staying, and decides that the time has finally come for them to pursue what has been in abeyance for so long. It finally happens, but Richard's response is unusual - I feel a little limitingly so. He turns from her, almost as though her sexual availability has disgusted him. Now, if he had caroused as Malet implies, I think the likelihood of this reaction is a great deal lessened. Yes, I guess she could be an ideal which couldn't survive reality. But, somehow, this plot bend doesn't seem to work. He shuns her, and a major crisis is precipitated in his life. The sensuous life he has lived is proved not to be the answer. He gets dangerously ill at the same time. At a night at the opera, a wildly ego-hurt Helen, now returned to her lover, makes sure that Richard receives a punch which sends him flying. This proves the turning point. His mother comes to Naples, having had word that he may not survive, to nurse him. With her is a fairly constant companion, a toughly independent young woman, a distant cousin or niece, who was Helen's friend in childhood (and into adulthood) and witness to Richard's humiliation. Honoria is a very vital character, 'not the marrying sort', who wants to be understood for her intelligence and capability. Proto-feminist indeed: another pennant added to this novel's flagpole. She has been consistently wary of Richard, fighting between a sense of shying away from his disability and a sense of irritation with his arrogance as an adult. Richard and she have never 'clicked', but, all the same, she has always been of sterling support to Katherine, her special favourite 'aunt', and her feelings are reciprocated. Against all odds, Richard survives. Back at Brockhurst, after years overseas, he locks himself away, completely uninvolved with the running of the estate, which used to be a specially loved skill. In his absence, Honoria has assited Katherine in running things, and now does so again when she can. Richard, led by the family chaplain, starts researching the family curse. The chaplain, Julius March, recognises that something he found in the library long ago, when he first came to the family, must now be revealed. A chap-book relates in medieval verse the 'vulgar story' of family shame, the resulting accursedness, and the prophecy of a 'Child of Promise' that will come to restore the family good. This development is perhaps the novel's weakest juncture; the vulgarity is not explicated, and the superstition somewhat ridiculous. We are clearly meant to understand that Richard, in all his imperfection, is the chosen one - in fact, I'm surprised that this piece wasn't named The Child of Promise; I wonder what led Malet away from that title? Anyway, somehow, we never really understand how, as it's not strictly possible, Richard's mind changes. He begins to think of emergence from his self-imposed exile, and having rejoined the family circle, much to Katherine's delight, begins to think of others, rejecting his former selfishness. A young local lad of the estate is maimed dreadfully by being dragged through a machine, and this terrible event inspires Richard to start a house near one of the villages for all the 'imperfect people' like himself, hoping that its first inhabitant will be this young fellow. The boy dies, but Richard's dream doesn't. In a moment of inspiration and unusual warmth and intensity he shares it with Honoria, who is staying for a few days before she goes off to chaperone a silly young relative who needs a steady hand to avoid disaster. Honoria is astonished that this man from whom she has shied in both disgust and annoyance now shows this unselfishness and human feeling. In a long penultimate chapter of great beauty and very well wound-up spiralling intensity, Malet shows a revolution come over Honoria as she realises that not only can she now respect this damaged, 'damaged' man, but that she can love him. Despite the brilliance of this chapter, and indeed several at heightened moments before it, where Malet is able to pull focus in and pinpoint storms of concentrated feeling in waves of recognisable force, this conclusion finally feels unsupported psychologically. I can't find the place in my mind where Richard and Honoria's personalities could easily meet, and that sense of mutual satisfaction arise which would make this real. So, ultimately I think this is an extraordinary reading experience, mainly as a result of the power of the wordsmithing, though this is a little Jamesian and wordily cluttered sometimes. But this greater power is put to the use of a plot and psychology of character which is not quite so deeply efficacious, and which has occasional strong faultlines; a heady admixture.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Commonplace Book

'..."It seems to me the radical weakness of all human institutions, of all systems of thought, resides in exactly that effort to select and reject, to exalt one part as against another part, and so build not upon the rock of unity and completeness, but upon the sand of partiality and division. And sooner or later the Whole revenges itself, and the fine-fanciful fabric crumbles to ruin, just for lack of that which in our short-sighted over-niceness we have taken such mighty great pains to miss out. This has happened times out of number in respect of religions, and philosophies, and the constitution of kingdoms, and in that of fair romances which promised to stand firm to all eternity..."'

from The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (Book V, Chapter XI)

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Seducers in Ecuador by V. Sackville-West (1924)

This was much more than expected, in a few ways. It's rather an ignored piece of her repertoire. The key thing about it is that it was her attempt to 'get modern', after having been in some senses dismissed as a conservative writer. Coming in the middle of the twenties, it was published (by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press) at the right time, too, when more sparely, bitterly stark works were beginning to gain full traction. I think what has held it back is the fact that there is a neat peg on which to hang objections: it doesn't quite work psychologically. But that, interestingly, is its only problem - in pretty well every other respect it's by far her best work to date. Arthur Lomax, the main character, is a dour, inexpressive man who sidles through life in a civilised way. He has an unknowable quality. At his club he speaks for the first time in depth (at least, as much depth as a dour man can manage) to another regular member, Bellamy. Bellamy is wealthy, a little cynical, and equally as difficult to know. Bellamy invites Lomax, as a last minute stopgap, to Egypt on his small boat. On board, Lomax meets Evelyn Whitaker, who seems likeable and perhaps a little romantic, but is somehow very difficult to get to the bottom of. You see a theme emerging. Also on board is Artivale, a scientist, who acts as a kind of occasional chorus. In moments with each of Lomax, Bellamy and Whitaker we see fragmentary glimpses of their truths; odd things which secretly motivate them, little revelations of their inner worlds, before returning to the general vacancy. This spareness is new to Sackville-West, and it has a strange effect. In all of her previous novels her conservative, filled-out style, we now discover, has hidden and misted-over the true weight of her piercing intelligence. It is here, in these choppy, stripped-down waters that her thought gains enormously in perspective. This feels vital, concise and pointed. In Cairo, Whitaker speaks a little more honestly with Lomax and reveals that her lover is away in Ecuador, has treated her badly and hints that he has left her pregnant. In a way which characters repeat several times in this novella, Lomax has a moment of strange chivalry, a frisson of impulse, and asks her to marry him. They secretly marry at the Cairo registry office. All this while, he has been subject to another act of the moment - he has purchased several sets of coloured spectacles, and experiments with the impressions they bring. The blue ones are his choice for Egypt, almost as though he is welcoming the alteration of reality, choosing the emotional mood that results. He sticks with various colours at various times, seeming to find some sort of security that he needs in not seeing things in their standard colours. This idea of subjective truths seems to be one the author is investigating. Out at sea in the Mediterranean, off the Illyrian coast, during a storm, a soaked and invigorated Bellamy, who has been managing the boat frantically but well, reveals to Lomax in his room that he is dying - this is his last trip. Another strange grip of impulse intervenes, and before we know it Lomax has agreed to administer the veronal that will finish him off. This is accomplished back in London, but Lomax soon discovers that he has been named in Bellamy's will as his inheritor. He is quietly thrilled with the wealth, but somehow still disturbed that if anyone found out that Bellamy had not literally committed suicide, rather been helped along by him, that all would be at stake. Is the fact that he has pretty continually been wearing the black pair of spectacles more recently to blame? They seem to have a kind of sedating gloom which protects and mollifies. He continues to see Whitaker, and expands a notion he has had for a while that her seducer in Ecuador is a figment, and that she has trapped him with chivalry. He still knows her very little; their marriage is still a secret, for the reason that her brother and protector is apparently a wildly fierce man who will stop at nothing to make sure she is hemmed in and virtuous. Rumours, whose origin we never really discover, begin to circulate about Lomax's role in Bellamy's death. He gets a visit from Whitaker's brother, who, contrary to Lomax's growing surmise, is very real and very angry, warning him to steer clear. Feeling the heat, and beginning to consider himself doomed, Lomax flits to Paris to see Artivale, sensing that it's only a matter of days before the police catch up with him. He has a peculiarly honest talk with Artivale about leaving him the Bellamy fortune if he is found guilty and hanged, about which Artivale seems weirdly unsurprised. He is nabbed on Artivale's doorstep on leaving and placed on trial for murder in London. He exists through his trial in a state bordering on torpor, noting Whitaker's testimony, which suggests that their marriage was his idea and that her claim of pregnancy never happened, very calmly, resigned now to his fate. She is indeed found not to be pregnant by the medical officer. Bellamy's body is exhumed and it is discovered that he was not ill at all. The question of why he would therefore have wanted to be killed slips elusively through Lomax's shutting mind with minimal impact. In his cell, stripped of all the pairs of spectacles, seeing the white walls exactly for what they are, he softly consoles himself with the fact that the fortune will go to Artivale, in Lomax's mind therefore to science. Science has assumed primary importance in his world of changeable notions - it comforts him to think of it. The last paragraph details the fact that, after Lomax's conviction and hanging, Bellamy's relations have successfully challenged the will. The fortune is left as 'conscience money' to Her Majesty's Treasury, thereby almost amusingly defeating the hapless Lomax yet one more time. I can't help but somehow make a happy connection between Arthur Lomax and Mr Robinson, the "hero" of Stella Benson's The Man Who Missed the 'Bus, published a few years later. Both characters, and the novellas they occupy, have a sense of quixotic strangeness and the everyday sinister built into a highly coloured but spare, modernist context. Stella Benson was a master of these sorts of conceits and repeated her triumph again and again. I only wish V. Sackville-West had also pursued them, on the strength of this - all indications are that the mixed reception of Seducers in Ecuador, based on the queerness and slight dissatisfactions of its psychology, deprived her of the wish to try again. It had the promise to be her master-territory also, given some refinement. I hope I'm wrong and I find her going here again.

Commonplace Book

'...The station, that great cavern full of shadows, swallowing up the gleaming tracks, stopping the monstrous trains as with a wall of finality; those tiny figures so senselessly hurrying; those loads of humanity discharged out of trains from unknown origins towards unknown destinations; all this appeared to him as the work of some crazy etcher, building up a system of lit or darkened masses, here a column curving into relief, there a cavernous exit yawning to engulf, here groins and iron arches soaring to a very heaven of night, there metallic perspectives diminishing towards a promise of day; and everywhere the tiny figures streaming beneath the architectural nightmare, microscopic bodies of men with faces indistinguishable, flying as for their lives along passage-ways between eddies of smoke in a fantastic temple of din and murk and machinery...'

from Seducers in Ecuador by V. Sackville-West

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

What to say. One of the most magnificent sustained feverings in all literature? That about sums it up. Most people, it seems, can do without a lot of the talk about species of whales and whale- and whaling- and whaleship-lore. I don't find that problematic at all. Melville writes at a pitch which confounds most criticism, or at least leaves it behind swirling and submerging in his wake. I'd dare to say that the only people who can legitimately cavil are those who won't handle poetry, and won't countenance reaching for the stars. This solid earthboundness is this book's enemy. Every now and then his English will lose him in a net of sparring impressions, where so much is being attempted that the resolution seems to dim, like the gravitational drop as a wave crests. And, given that endings are important, I'll say that there's something in Tashtego continuing to try to nail the flag to the mast once he and almost all of the Pequod are underwater that niggles me a bit. There's not quite this level of nutso anywhere else here. This portrayed, to then go on to the nagging descent of the skyhawk and the accidental intercession of its symbolic wing between one hammerblow and the next from the drowning harpooneer seems an appropriate extravagance. All of the talk of raving encoded homosexuality seems wildly out, and typically ahistorical. Have these people never read into history? Seen how people talked back then? What lights they seemed to live by? The differences between then and now, in terms of how emotion was let out, and the terms of connection between men, in particular? And in those sorts of circumstances? How common was sharing a bed, and what did it signify? Beyond history, in terms of Melville's own territory of the mind as evidenced in the book itself, these assertions seem over-egged. Seem a wish to claim to this book an underlying gangway physicality which it rarely, if ever, explores. Moby-Dick is not a novel of downstairs. It may even be one of the pre-eminent novels of the metaphysical upstairs. Terrible old intellectuality, questing into the great unknown via the assaulting knowns of humanness and fallibility. It's an old recipe, and most barbarously tasty.

Monday, April 10, 2017

Commonplace Book

'"...I had convinced myself, experimentally, that human existence, human nature, was a bottomless pit and an uncommonly filthy one at that. Reaction was inevitable. Then I understood why men have invented gods, subscribed to irrational systems of theology, hailed and accredited transparently ridiculous miracles. Such lies are necessary to certain stages of development simply for the preservation of sanity, just as, at another stage, sanity, for its own preservation, is necessarily driven to declare their falsehood. And so I, after the manner of my kind, was driven to take refuge in a dream. The subjective, in some form or other, alone makes life continuously possible..."'

from The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (Book V, Chapter II)

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Clarimonde by Theophile Gautier (1839)

This vampire tale was originally published in a volume of novellas called A Tear of the Devil. Its title is La Morte Amoureuse, perhaps translatable as something like The Deathly Lover (Clarimonde is the invention of the translator, the celebrated Lafcadio Hearn). It is Gautier at his most sensual. A young priest, Romuald, notices at his confirmation a splendid woman of dreamlike beauty, who stares at him in a desiring manner. Her eyes are an almost luminous and trancelike green. Romuald has never been overly bothered with women before, but this is somehow different. His mind is enchanted and captive. He can't stop thinking about her. A day or so later, his Abbe comes to send him off to his first position, and they speak of her. He names her as Clarimonde, an infamous courtesan. Romuald is deeply disturbed inside himself but tries not to give in to thoughts of her. He is struggling on in his new position out in the country, when the Abbe comes on a visit and mentions that Clarimonde has died. Romuald is stricken and upset; he 'dreams' that night (but the dream almost seems more real than reality) that he is visited by a servant of Clarimonde, who whisks him off in a dark equipage with steaming horses galloping at an astonishing rate to an unknown castle. Here he meets Clarimonde, who berates him with his choice of God over her, and enraptures him once again, this time to fulfilment. Their relationship is all that Romuald had hoped for, and fantasised about; Clarimonde too is deeply affected and starts to focus in on her love for him as proof that she is far more honourable than she was ever portrayed. Romuald and she continue in this vein, to the point where he is unsure which is the true reality - his daily life as a country priest, or his nightly life as Clarimonde's votary. Romuald gets more and more worn out in trying to encompass both worlds. One night he cuts his finger and Clarimonde, who had been seeming more and more white, wan and empty, suddenly bounds up like a maniac and sucks at the wound. She is restored to blushing life. A few nights later, he spies her in a mirror putting a powder into his drink. He feigns drinking it, and throws it away. That night, aping sleep, he witnesses her vampiric ways, as she very slightly punctures his arm to suck his blood, thinking he is drugged. All the same, though, she utters loving thoughts for his continued health, as he is her wellspring of life. Finally, confronted by the Abbe, who has entertained deep suspicions of their connection, Romuald is persuaded, exhausted, to pursue her second end. They exhume her coffin and see her there well preserved with a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth. The Abbe makes the sign of the cross over her with holy water, at the slightest touch of which she disintegrates. Romuald 'sees' her only once more; she tears at him for his disloyalty and asks what she did to deserve this fate, then disappears like smoke. In the end, he tells us, he has lived to regret this action, for her love was the key of his life. In its wild language and eroticist exaggeration, this is textbook sensualism, and fun as such without being particularly edifying.

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Daughters and Sons by I. Compton-Burnett (1937)

This is unexceptional in the sense of being consistent with the rest of the author's bibliography to this date. But, of course, any reader of Compton-Burnett knows that her work, compared to any other writer of her era, or any other, with the possible exception of Ronald Firbank, is utterly extraordinary. This difference is most exemplified in reference to the interpersonal atmosphere between her characters, pictured by what they say to one another. These novels are Beckett for an earlier generation: stripped down to dialogue only, with only the slightest authorial interference where absolutely necessary (probably a total of about five pages of these two hundred and ninety). But not only does the whole direction derive from the fact that speech is the means, which is very unusual. The tone is equally so: a criss-crossing of tangential comment is made between the characters, taking each other up on greater or lesser points, reframing contentiously so as to bitchily challenge, uncharitably agreeing with the original statement perhaps, or most candidly not. Grabbing the original statement and referring it to someone else with vicious intent. And all very syntactically complex and spare - the reader's mind must dig around for intended meanings. In this one, an 1890s family is dominated by an intense matriarch. The son is an author; his wife is long dead, but his four children reside in the house, ranging in age from late 20s to 11. The unmarried daughter is also resident, and manages the household forcefully. They bat and swat one another with savage truths (and some untruths) whilst trying to stay afloat in the tight atmosphere. Various governesses come and go, more or less exhausted by the thick air. Their few friends, arranged in tight groups of their own with all sorts of powerplays and attitudes reigning, visit from time to time. They refer to the intensity of the atmosphere of the central family, but in reality are just as much so themselves. Which begs the observation, which I've made before and can't get away from, that these novels' one difficulty is their lack of differentiation. Compton-Burnett has a style like a parlour-game, it applies to everyone, and so the depth of the extraordinariness is undercut whilst being emphasised. The climax of this one comes when a rumour is spread by a subsidiary character that the matriarch's will has preferred the tutor to her two grandsons, a young man who has befriended her in her last days, seeming to be her only true friend amongst an ungrateful family. He reveals himself to be less than noble after her death and the rumour of the will, by not reconferring the family wealth back onto it, instead saying he will keep half for himself and marry the eldest of the son's daughters. She is so needful of escape from the family's clutches that she agrees. When the will is finally formally revealed, the inheritance is not as was rumoured; he has not only not inherited, but has looked grasping and ignoble to boot. This also calls for a question to be asked about Compton-Burnett's plot: how could such a wily character risk so much on only a rumour? Surely someone embroiled in such minute teasings and stabbings would have caution as a byword? So, this wildly entertaining niggle-storm was ever so slightly undone by obviousness.

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Commonplace Book

'"...In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou shouldst go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How canst thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou canst not go mad?..."'

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Chapter 113)

Commonplace Book

'...Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote...'

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Chapter 112)

Sunday, March 5, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...God help us, what a stricken, famished world it is! Will you not always find sorrow and misfortune seated at the root of things if, disregarding overlaying prettiness of summer days, of green leaf and gay blossom, you dare draw near, dig deep, look close? And can nothing, no one, escape the blighting touch of that canker stationed at the very foundations of being?..'

from The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter VIII)

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Commonplace Book

'Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary...'

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Chapter 107)

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Commonplace Book

'Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller, believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. Tomorrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least, gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp - all others but liars!'

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Chapter 96)

Friday, February 10, 2017

Commonplace Book

'"What does Dr Chaucer call you, Stephen, as he always calls Alfred Marcon?"

"He never speaks to me; I have seen to that."

"What does he think of your seeing to it?"

"He does not know; I have seen to that too."'

from Daughters and Sons by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter IV)

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Au Soleil by Guy de Maupassant (1884)

This is a strange compendium in terms of content. Its main part is concerned with the author's travels in Algeria, but tucked away at the end are three things: a short story-sketch called At the Seashore about a typical French late nineteenth century gent taking a demi-mondaine along on a journey masquerading as his wife, for whom he falls (and she for him), but not quite enough not to let her go when they return to Paris; a long piece on travelling in Brittany; and a final short piece on a tour of the Creusot Ironworks, with strong, fiery, piston-pumping, hell-like imagery. These extras have nothing to do with the sun, rather they are reasonably often set in cool temperatures and cloudy conditions, so why they were incorporated in a volume of this name is anyone's guess. The best one would probably be proximity of production, this presumably being "the latest collection of Maupassant's works" at the time, despite the disparity of subject matter. Or perhaps they are included in this collected edition volume, but were not originally. Anyway, the dominating factor, slathered on in this instance, in the major part of the book on Algeria, is the author's stance. A seasoned Maupassant reader gets to know this well. It is a pulsing, intense stare at the darknesses and uglinesses in human character. It could be called a fascination with those aspects, undertowed by a one-eyed conviction that there is a kind of extra-reality about that vision - almost as though a more balanced view, incorporating a broader conception, is a traduction of that supremo-reality. Red-in-tooth-and-clawedness as the only real truth. The impression that one ultimately gets is of a kind of selective blindness, where the author feels dunderheaded and lacking in perspicacity. The implied insight and the paraded lack of it are occasionally very difficult bedfellows. The lifebuoy thrown out to the reader drowning is the stark intensity of that aforementioned stare; it can't but claim the attention. Thus the dirty, violent, immoral Arabs, the corrupt or stupid colonial officials, the universal criminality and, most of all, the suffocating, endlessly parching, interminable, ever-lonely, death-ridden heat have a species of compromised but compulsive muscle in their writing that keeps the dumb show going.

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Commonplace Book

'"Yes, but are we not, just that - all of us at the mercy of the wrong-doing of others? - The courageous forever suffering for the cowardly, the wise for the ignorant and brutish, the just for the unjust?..."'

from The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (Book I, Chapter V)

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Commonplace Book

'...Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log - shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents, there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!'

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Chapter 69)

Friday, January 13, 2017

Green Willow and other Japanese fairy tales by Grace James (1910)

Some of these read beautifully, some are a little more awkward, in a way that I'm coming to expect from volumes like this. James apparently grew up in Japan, and her family was in some way reasonably well-established there. This was her first book, and as far as I can tell, she later moved back to Britain, and became better known for her series of educational stories for children based around the characters John and Mary. There does though seem to be some biographical and bibliographical confusion, so much so that I'm assuming there were two Grace Jameses, one born in 1864 and dying in 1930 that I'm less sure about, and the one who wrote this book and the John and Mary books who didn't die until the early 60s. It will require some extra research to untangle them. Anyway, this one did occasionally revisit her Japanese specialty - a non-fictional summary in the 30s and a volume or two of the series where the children were touched by Japanese subjects. But the handsomeness and pre-war beauty of this volume seems never to have been repeated in her career. The central concerns of many of these tales (very few of which involve fairies by the way, much more often gods and demigods) are lost love, retribution, quests, talismans and the toll of human weakness. The awkward ones are so because the story either seems just to get going and then stops suddenly, or perhaps to threaten a conclusion of note and provide instead somewhat more of a whimper. The final element to mention are the magnificent illustrations by Warwick Goble, which are misty, detailed and tender in exactly the proportion required to adorn these often melancholy, occasionally savage pieces.

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Comedies and Errors by Henry Harland (1898)

Harland is one of those who always seem to sit in the second rank of Aesthetic/Decadent era literature. He was literary editor of The Yellow Book, very well respected in his time, but somehow, when faced with Wilde, Beerbohm and others, he fades a little. This collection of eight novellas and four stories, many of which first appeared in The Yellow Book, confirms this analysis. Most are middling and pleasant enough; a couple are better. Many are stories of intrigues of identity and playful mischief between men and women, circling one another in the dance of love. But The Friend of Man, a novella about an obsessed ascetic social theorist whose monomania affects atrociously not only his own life, but that of those who succour him in admiration, is a stage more involving. The Invisible Prince, one of the novellas of mischievous love, twists the skeins a little more skilfully in its playful double-story of twinned deceptions. P'tit-Bleu, a novella of a demi-mondaine cursed with the love of a dissolute, brings more to the heart than Harland can usually manage. Flower o' the Clove, a novella about an altruistic heir to a fortune falling for someone she regards as its true inheritor, travels through its territory with a shade more subtlety, playfulness and awkward truth. So, yet again, Harland is becalmed in trite waters in some cases, and blows a greater headwind in others; the mixed story continues. His most famous books are looming on the horizon; I wonder...