Sunday, January 21, 2018

Commonplace Book

'"The new great ethical attack has to be launched against the cruelties and dirtinesses and dishonesties which are sanctioned by everyday custom and extolled as part of our competitive theory of survival. Do you think you could educate people out of that frame of mind?"

Deryk assumed an expression of regretful worldliness.

"You can't alter human nature, sir," he objected.

"That, my dear Deryk, has been said in every generation and disproved by every generation. People are lazy; and peculiarly lazy, you'll find, when it comes to radical thinking..."'

from Midas and Son by Stephen McKenna (Chapter VI, Part III)

Saturday, January 13, 2018

Personal Record, 1920-1972 by Gerald Brenan (1974)

This record is interesting in terms of fact. The writing is plain, rarely adorned with poetry. The focus of the earlier parts is Dora Carrington, and the tangle around her in which Brenan became involved, which included the love of her life, Lytton Strachey, as well as her husband, Brenan's good friend Ralph Partridge. It also included Frances Marshall, Partridge's second wife, and the edges of the Bloomsbury set, including Roger Fry, Augustus John and others. Carrington and Brenan had a typically (for her) changeful relationship, in which pretty well everything blew hot and cold, and got twisted up in moodful wrangling. As their connection waned, she took on other lovers (of a kind), but was ultimately left at Ham Spray house with her one mainstay, Strachey, after whose death she killed herself. Brenan is honest enough at this longer distance of time in examining their relationship, and includes in that spirit some information which I think is critical: Carrington told him that he had a quality of sometimes understanding very deeply, sometimes of being really very slow on the uptake. Here she seems to me to have been piercing. This trope is repeated again and again in this book, acknowledged and otherwise. He can be insightful and thoughtful one moment, quite blunt and unseeing the next. Brenan, as comfortable-space-for-the-otherwise-engaged, is next drawn into a relationship with Gamel Woolsey, who is pretty dedicated to Llewelyn Powys. This brings him into the remit of this other circle, the Powyses, who are an alternative to Bloomsbury. Her love affair with Powys, and friendship for his wife, Alyse Gregory, made the connection with Brenan another complicated one. Although Brenan's summary is that their marriage was a good one in many ways, he does admit that there were spaces in their lives in which they were quite separate, almost not knowing each other, or, if knowing, not deeply appreciating. His travel through, and living in, Spain throughout this period, with punctuations in Britain, underlies these stories. The section on the Spanish Civil War and how it affected Woolsey and he in Malaga changes the tone considerably. Again, here, there is the feeling that he had an obtuseness which meant the making of some interesting decisions, like harbouring a fascist, which, although consistent with his ideas of pacifism, and of nobody being hurt despite their views, which I find essentially admirable, has an underfeeling in this section of 'careful' telling and perhaps of recasting for more favourable light, unlike the rest of the book. Overall, I like that I am left with a clear-eyed view of the fact that I may not have felt completely at ease with the author had I met him - this seems a shard of honesty shining through. This, with the countering idea always at the back of the mind that autobiography is a constructed reality, leaving us with the classic conundrum; true mixed picture or mixed picture as reconstructed truth?

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Commonplace Book

'...the air was like a drug. One could walk all day without getting tired and sleep for eight or nine hours at a stretch without stirring. Everything spoke of sleep. The long, low hills looked like bolsters and pillows, the dogs yawned when they tried to bark and even the cockcrows, though they began well, ended in a snore. Only the flowers were awake. They gleamed and sparkled in the clear light like that which one sees rippling under the surface of chalk streams - the light of a subaqueous world, thick, watery yet infused with drowsiness.'

from Personal Record, 1920 - 1972 by Gerald Brenan (Chapter 24)