Saturday, December 21, 2019

Stet by Diana Athill (2000)

This memoir of editorship and small publishing is interesting to me for a particular reason. Athill was in on the beginning of both Andre Deutsch and Allan Wingate (Deutsch's earlier pseudonymous company), so her experience dates back to the late 40s and the postwar boom in small publishers dedicated to literary work. This was a very particular world of "arty" houses, often based in side streets in old shopfronts or homes, with only relatively few staff, and a LOT of personality going on! By that I mean there were larger than life types, scurrilous types, brazen types well in evidence, displaying their education and erudition, forming a balance to those among the staff who were less obvious in their 'diverting' capacities. I came into publishing on the very last tail-ends of this period, but employed by one of the most noticeable of these big personalities, Marion Boyars, so had a taste of this world as it lay dying. The way Athill speaks of the contrapuntal sway of how a big personality would cause a ruction, and how the lesser ones might have to pussyfoot around to save a situation, or, in the attempt, sometimes make things worse (!) is very familiar. Also her record of dealing with authors, with sudden affronts at a misplaced analytical word, or continuing to publish works even though the author wasn't making any money, or the awkwardness of having to reject one because it didn't cut the mustard, or huge editing jobs to turn works toward the sun, strikes many chords. I don't remember Marion mentioning Diana Athill, but they must have known each other. Marion had a typical response to Andre Deutsch, Athill's 'employer' (she was actually a fellow director) - WHAT a DIFFICULT man! Of course, completely ignoring the fact (unaware?) that she was a good way to also being so herself! My guess is that Deutsch's reaction to her may have been similar. One thing that Athill mentions also rang a huge bell: she speaks of the women of the industry keeping things going while the men peacocked themselves about. In Marion's version of what occurred at Calder and Boyars, she was the one holding things together, once she'd served her apprenticeship to John Calder in the very early 60s. He'd go off swanning around, deeply involved in his theatre festivals and 'scouting' for more works (read 'entertaining himself'), whilst she kept the company moving and got things done. I'm sure, despite Marion's tendency to exaggeration, that this analysis was not far from the truth. I wonder if she and Diana commiserated with each other, and geed each other up? It would have depended on personality; Athill speaks of a particular author here (I can't now remember which one) who was either on the Calder and Boyars list, or very similar to many who were, as being dangerous - by implication, personally as well as in the artistic sense. Perhaps Diana was too 'careful' and (confessedly) upper middle class for the relationship to truly bloom. She certainly is an exemplar of that tight spot where the brave new world of educated liberation met the narrowness of the old way: her editors at Granta should not have allowed her to 'explain' Trinidad and Tobago as 'two islands, one country' in a note, as though the reader were likely to be unaware. But her talk of shepherding authors and their works through the locks without getting sunk, and her candid discussion of the blooming, and dying, of relationships that had long since moved beyond the strict terms of publication, and, of course, the gossip of it all, are really enjoyable reading.

Monday, December 16, 2019

The Marquis de Villemer by George Sand (1860)

This is very much in the standard run of nineteenth century French novels; it is Sand not particularly distinguishing herself, in contrast to how strongly she has done so in other entries in her bibliography. That is not to say that it is in any way a poor read, or a dull one; simply, it does not extend its head above the parapet sufficiently to gain the distinction that is sometimes the quarter of this author. This is the story of a poor but aristocratically-connected young woman, who has no interest in attempting the trappings of wealth. She works as reader-aloud to a marchioness who herself is poorer than she might be through the extravagance of her eldest son, a profligate duke. The marchioness' younger son, the marquis, a quieter, less robust, more academic type, has put in place a financial scheme which will pay his brother's debts, disallow him to indulge any more, and give their mother just enough to be comfortable in the manner to which she is accustomed. He has done himself down in the process, and is a much poorer man now than he might have been, but happier because the precarious situation has been repaired. Caroline, our heroine, goes through a typical-for-the-times arc of an attempt on her virtue by the duke, a growing understanding that she and the marquis are soulmates, a misunderstanding which causes the marchioness to reject her, a running away to peasant connections in the Cevennes and an interlude in a dramatic, perilous and mountainous landscape, and a last, desperate reconciliation with the marquis with his health and life at stake. Interposed are young society schemers, marriage plan shenanigans, joyful rustics, Caroline's sister struggling as a widow with four young children, and other accoutrements of the quintessential plot of the times. Whilst this was not truly an inspiring novel, it was still enjoyable as the recognisable product of a brilliant pen at its more moderate pitch.

Friday, December 13, 2019

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952)

After reading her first novel quite some while ago, it is great to be back visiting Pym. From memory, the previous one was set in a village in the country, whereas this is set in London, so quite a change of milieu. Clearly, she is famed for her investigation of what could be described as the smallness or seeming incompleteness of women's lives mid-twentieth century, and this one is an example of that. Equally obviously, one of her great claims is in how she makes humour from that purportedly limited material, and there's no questioning that here! This one's space is placed amongst the attendees and surrounds of an urban London church in 1945. The main character, Mildred Lathbury, knows herself to be one of the 'excellent women' who formed the backbone of a church's community back then when the church was a great deal more alive. That world presided over by the vicar and including bazaars and fetes as fundraisers is very much her locale, but she is also aware of herself in it as seen from the outside, at least to some extent. She knows that she might appear disappointing to a more romantic, or deep-living individual, and her connection to that wider world comes from imagination, poetry and occasional spurs of contact with more travelled types. She accedes in seeing herself with some disenchantment, definitely, but is keenly realistic about what someone of her nature can stand, or manage. Pym allows us to see this in quite a lot of detail; my suspicion being that the depiction is one of herself, give or take a bit. This combination of faithfulness to the details of the somewhat strictured life, where she appears to celebrate its limitations and delight in the minority of its concerns, with quietly sly undercutting of their constraining smallness through tossed-off satiric swipes, is the adroit stuff of the Pym mixture. This one centres around a couple who move in on the floor below Mildred. Rockingham (Rocky) is a handsome and effusively charming officer, just back from the war in Italy, whom Mildred imagines as having charmed a swathe of lonely Wrens at his villa, and Helena is a semi-glamorous looking anthropologist who hasn't seen Rocky consistently for the duration, and has got on with her academic life as best she can, including very possibly some amorous adventures. Mildred is careful around them, as they seem so urbane and worldly. Through visits to Helena's learned society, meetings with various unmarried and possibly eligible males, frugal meals, both out and in, in the rationed restriction of these spare new days of freedom, a drama with the vicar and an entrapping widow, and gossip with her associates among the bevy of excellent women who keep the whole edifice moving, Mildred's preparedness to help, occasional social uncertainty and wry self-criticism are well-exercised. Also given a workout is dry reproval of not only the smallness of mind necessary for such a life, but also of the more expansive romantic silliness to which she is largely immune. Attitudes to the should and shouldn't of things are compassed with forgiving fascination and zest by Mildred as she is given more of an education in how others live. Though I couldn't possibly survive on a diet of this shade alone, I cannot but acknowledge its penetrating intelligence, and saving comedy.

Monday, December 9, 2019

Commonplace Book

'"...you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that - you must never shrink from it. That doesn't suit you at all - you're too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views - that's your great illusion, my dear. But we can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all - not even yourself."'

from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Chapter 20)

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Commonplace Book

'...She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case - it had not seemed to her in other cases - that the actual completely expressed. But she often reminded herself that there were essential reasons why one's ideal could never become concrete. It was a thing to believe in, not to see - a matter of faith, not of experience. Experience, however, might supply us with very creditable imitations of it, and the part of wisdom was to make the best of these...'

from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Chapter 19)

Saturday, November 16, 2019

In Search of Lost Books by Giorgio van Straten (2016)

I suspect that this may have more clout in the original Italian. It strikes me that there are attempts here to render little bursts of poetic prose into English, alongside a majority which feels in English a bit ordinary. I don't know Italian, but my feeling is that there is perhaps a simple strain in it which retains poetry, but whose terms are not replicable, or not easily anyway. The subject matter is always of interest - the 'lost' novels of major writers, whose manuscripts were left on a train / burnt in a house fire / got rid of by a vicious ex, etc etc. The examples here are largely the obvious ones: Hemingway's juvenilia, Lowry's second novel, Plath's last, and so on. The likelihood is that a couple of them still exist; Bruno Schulz's is probably in old KGB files somewhere, or has been 'moved on' through various owners post the Soviet breakup; Plath's may well be amongst the papers Ted Hughes left to the University of Georgia, which cannot be looked at until 2022. The quality of these essays varies wildly, from a repellently flippant one on Hemingway, and a really silly one on Byron, to the tender one on Schulz, and a revealing stab at Walter Benjamin. On the whole it feels a bit too much on the light side, almost like it's a capitalisation on the books-on-books craze which seems to be current, which appears to have its monuments, but also a lot of dross. Perhaps, if I could read Italian, I would find here much more than this translation advertises.

Commonplace Book

'"And that's not the worst," she went on, rummaging in a small desk which stood open and seemed to be full of old newspapers. "Read this." She handed me a cutting headed OWL BITES WOMAN, from which I read that an owl had flown in through a cottage window one evening and bitten a woman on the chin. "And this," she went on, handing me another cutting which told how a swan had knocked a girl off her bicycle. "What do you think of that?"

"Oh, I suppose they were just accidents," I said.

"Accidents! Even Miss Jessop agrees that they are rather more than accidents, don't you, Miss Jessop?"

Miss Jessop made a quavering sound which might have been "Yes" or "No" but it was not allowed to develop into speech, for Mrs. Bone broke in by telling Everard that Miss Jessop wouldn't want any sherry.

"The Dominion of the Birds," she went on. "I very much fear it may come to that."'

from Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (Chapter Sixteen)

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Commonplace Book

'...She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity. Mrs Touchett might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased. This way of her own, of which she was so fond, was not intrinsically offensive - it was just unmistakably distinguished from the way of others...'

from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Chapter 3)

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

But Not for Love: Stories of Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw (1988)

This volume seems to have been the first fruit of a career spent in trying to keep returning these writers to the public consciousness. Robert Darby is the one keeping up the fight, but even he has now seriously diversified into other interests, though he appears to still be occasionally venturing into this territory. It was published the year after Marjorie Barnard died (and thirty-odd years after Flora Eldershaw's death). What is collected here is most of what was not yet in book form in their work in the short story. Barnard Eldershaw had planned a short story volume in the early 30s which was rejected around the traps of London. Barnard on her own published a magnificent one in Australia only in 1943, The Persimmon Tree, which Virago republished with a couple of extras thrown in in the 80s. An Australian publisher had planned another in 1949 / 1950, which also never eventuated. This volume collects most of what seems from research to have been the proposed contents of the two stillborn volumes, to complement the Virago reprint which was newly available at the time of publication. Darby gives a fascinating history of all the background of publication of various of the stories, why others were rejected, and, most importantly, the attitude of Barnard and Eldershaw to story-writing, and that of the literary world around them. It is astonishing how wrong a lot of people got these stories, including the authors - proof, if more were needed, that writers themselves are not always the best judges of their work from a public perspective. That said, Barnard always seems to have had a special place for the short story in her heart, and despite seeming to droop under the criticism of Vance or Nettie Palmer (for example), kept up her fascination with the form. Eldershaw, as usual, seems a far less easy-to-decipher individual. These stories have a lot of hurt in them, a stormy colour, and troubled contemporary settings which didn't sit well I'm sure with the more larrikinesque bush-yarn expectations of a good number of punters. That they portray the greeny-grey disturbed skies of modern 30s and 40s city life, and its concomitant nervous disorders and banjaxing frustrations, is what brought to them continual criticism of depressiveness, and is what now makes them so wonderful as a vision of alterity to the traditional picture. Add to that the particular and revealing talent of these two writers, who are still not accorded their due, and one has a book filled with rich layering and significance.

Friday, October 11, 2019

The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith (1871)

Well, the pleasure continues. I've spoken before about the joy of reading Meredith, which is of course not unalloyed. But it can easily still be a celebration, mainly of complex filtered expression. Where others would hammer the nails in, Meredith will often sit them in position for a few seconds and then direct the reader's attention elsewhere, expecting them to remember that quicksilver placement and count it fully as far as plot development goes. Or hint at the affixing by referring to it poetically, lending precedence instead to how someone felt about it, or looked to a bystander with other preoccupations. Here we have a return, after two errant pieces (at least in some senses), to the central mode. A wide-ranging story of the life of a young fellow of the mid-nineteenth century which, like Evan Harrington before it, owes some of its motive power to Meredith's own biography. Harry is a trusty fellow, a good lad, whose father has delusions of grandeur. We follow him through halcyon schooldays, growing into a species of the young blood, but with more than usual brains and sensitivity. This young man idolises his father, who is persona non grata at Riversley, a large house in the countryside where Harry has grown up. His father has, in the eyes of the squire, Harry's grandfather, been the destruction of his dead mother, the squire's daughter. And, for this reason, and for his profligacy with money, the squire despises Harry's father. Harry's father is a sleek charmer, always capable of bending opinion to his will and sympathies in his direction, mostly about his claim to a great fortune through his own wronged mother, whose circumstances are kept behind a discreet veil. The squire is a blustering eighteenth century character, frustrated by the seeming snake-oil he's being fed by Harry's father, but caring a great deal for Harry himself and wanting to keep him from the lowering he is sure his father will bring. Meredith's own father was apparently of a similar make; he is clearly working out through comedy the sense of discomfort this brings him, trying to lay it to rest, perhaps, but also registering the benefits it brings in terms of high tension undercurrents. This develops into what seems to be a great love story via the reconnection Harry effects with his father, and an extended visit by them to a small principality in Germany. Harry falls for the princess, Ottilia, a fact which his father jumps on in order to try to advance his egotistical scheme of social exaltation to his just deserts. We travel through sea voyages, mysterious machinations among London solicitors, adventures on the political hustings, interludes with gypsies, reverses and aggrandizations of fortune and friendship along the way. At the end, Harry's father takes a step too far in a time of heightened tension on the Isle of Wight, a gentle deception is revealed, and all falls down. This acts as a clarifier to Harry, who recognizes that his heart is elsewhere. His real beloved is by now betrothed to someone else, long having given up on him. The pain this causes sees him escape on another sea journey, only to discover on his return that the marriage never happened, her lover was false, and the two are finally free for each other. Though this does have some irritations, which would not be unfamiliar to seasoned Meredithians, like very hidebound ideas of the value of Britishness and its almost supernatural inherent superiority, particularly as associated with the Britannia-like British female at her best, it is still joyfully comic and richly erudite. It also allows the mind to sink into subtleties of expression which, for all the patience they require, reward readers with rare flavours which exalt their palates.

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

The Paston Letters 1422-1509, A.D. (1875)

This is a three-volume set which seems to have culminated a lot of work in the late nineteenth century to discover and print the complete Paston correspondence. My guess is that James Gairdner, of the Public Record Office, who edited, and Edward Arber, who published, are leading lights of the scholarly history of these records of the fifteenth century, even though I feel sure that some of their conclusions about who did what and when have long since been overturned. Which itself gives evidence of the moveable feast-like quality here; does a particular reference apply to John the elder, Sir John, his first son, or the later Sir John, his second? Often other evidence can provide an answer: such-and-such, who is referred to in such a position, was so only in the lifetime of one or other of them, or died before some other person achieved their title, and so on. What that gives me is an insight into the process, and it's one I'm fascinated by, would love to do similar things myself, for a living preferably. Two other interests are catered to here. One is what people wrote about in those days - these are not on the whole personal revelations of wondering souls, rather they are updates about politics and money and all sorts of cases people had in play, in terms of inheritance. Every now and then a parent will warn a child to apply themselves more, or perhaps a mother will adjure a child to recognize that they need to reply, and not leave all sorts of threads hanging. Of course we are pre-postal, so letters always have bearers, who are often mentioned as being able to provide more information if required on some key matter. The other interest which is slaked in reading these is language. These are in the original spelling and syntax, which becomes very familiar over such a long journey. Variation in spelling, given that there were so many fewer rules; ways of greeting; the invocation to the Lord having you in his keeping at the end (or variations thereof); the language world before easy possessives - "the Earl of Warwick his wife" and so on; how close English was to what we would now think of as something like pan-Europeany Spanish, with 'what' spelled qwat, and 'you' as zow. A brimming compendium for a language nerd and history nerd like me.

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Commonplace Book

'...Old Lady Kane, great-aunt of the Marquis of Edbury, was particularly my tormentor, through her plain-spoken comments on my father's legal suit; for I had to listen to her without wincing, and agree in her general contempt of the Georges, and foil her queries coolly, when I should have liked to perform Jorian DeWitt's expressed wish to "squeeze the acid out of her in one grip, and toss her to the Gods that collect exhausted lemons."'

from The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith (Chapter XLI)

Thursday, August 15, 2019

The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (1901)

This was called The Life Romantic in Britain - I read the American edition. It is the same old Gallienne to a strong extent, but I do notice a welcome change. It is a change hard to pin down in some ways, but best exemplified by saying that, though it has the same philosophical preoccupations as always, and the same high-falutin' over-delicacy about them, it does also show signs of increased gutsiness of appreciation of them. There is some iron in the skeleton of this which accrues weight to the proceedings. And then leads to quite strong plot-lines: Pagan Wasteneys, the main character, even gets to the point of wishing to become a 'holy killer' toward the end, which hasn't been on the cards in any of Gallienne's other tales of great love to date! It is the story of a young, but no longer very young, man in a crisis of love. The obsession which typifies it has detrimental effects! Wasteneys philosophises about the minutiae of the great emotion, trying to get to the bottom of his locked existence via various women who surround him - this trope is familiar right through his oeuvre, but particularly from his first novel The Quest of the Golden Girl. Some of his attitudes toward women will make modern readers twist and wriggle in their easy chairs; they're like artsy pontifical versions of extremely conservative ones of today. Interestingly, in the end, it is not any quality in one of the women which releases him from his misery. Instead it is a day out alone in nature which does the trick. This sounds hopelessly twee, but is in fact reasonably well put. One chilling thing about this narrative, as mentioned earlier, is the fact that Gallienne posits a certain near-climactic stage of this process as being one where Wasteneys decides to kill the woman of his obsession, in some sort of heightened consciousness of doing a greater good, once he has realised that they can never break the deadlock and be together. This is a frighteningly calmly put echo of the kind of process of thought that I'm pretty sure a lot of obsessed men of our time go through before they murder their partners. What a window, even if it is one with Gallienne's rose-tinted Edwardian high-cultural biases.

Saturday, July 27, 2019

I Looked Alive by Gary Lutz (2010)

This is apparently an expanded edition of a collection of stories first published in 2003. The main analogy I'm going to use is the unlikely one of bells. If we imagine that any given author is a bell, we can think about all sorts of elements contributing. The material of which the bell is made; how decorated it is; the sound. Not sure what material the Lutz bell sports, but it is extraordinarily deeply decorated - in other words, he's doing a lot with the language. His experiment is to collate, fold and interfile the words of English into highly expressive belts, along the planes of which unusual combinations point to rare expressions, where implications are built up with not quite the usual suspects. This bell-decoration is sometimes a peculiarly successful experiment - the implications are strangely apt and illustrate patterns of thought or ways of mind limpidly. At other times there's only one word for them: tryhard. Baroque forcedness. Like an unnatural lump to be got over. So the decoration of this bell is a mixed bag, but admirable from the point of view of the fact that it's an experiment given to us in what feels like a molten state; this does not feel like finished experimental fiction, like many a piece in that genre, but rather almost a notebook of goes at a target. Lutz's people are the ones you may imagine in inner cities, or spiritually like places - people who have a lot of ordinary sex and kinkier sex, a lot of issues, nip down the street a bit wobblily in dark clothes, are seen maybe a bit more at night but still crustily during the day, often look a bit thin or pockmarked with whacked hair, look like they might have reputations for looseness somewhere, wander from relationship to relationship, polyping from world to world leaving behind messes and moving on. In attempting those generics I am trying to find the sound of this bell. Really the resound of it. Because that's what it seems to me often to lack. I would reach the end of a piece and feel the need to shrug. Why doesn't this resound more? Why is its impact often a dulled thud? Maybe because Lutz is so close to the action in these (most of them have a first person narrator which could well be him) that they're seen at too tight a register? Or maybe just because sometimes when the expression is too over-milled, the experimental bell cracks under the heat.

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Commonplace Book

'"...It seems to me that there is a moment when the soul's beauty and the body's beauty are one. That moment is youth. All fresh and unused, the body is then as beautiful as the soul, but soon, alas! the body, being made of perishable stuff, begins to wear, and less and less resembles the soul within. The soul is growing more beautiful, perhaps, every day, but the body is dying. In vain it strives to answer to the soul within. I know you will say that some old faces are beautiful. They are, but it is a negative beauty, like the beauty of what we call skeleton leaves - the beauty of a clean decay..."'

from The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XVIII)

Sunday, July 7, 2019

Commonplace Book

'...impregnated as they were with that immediacy of impression which words, simple enough, written in an emotional present, are sometimes able to retain far into the future, when perhaps the opportunities of such emotion can occur no more. Such is the value of a journal, such is the value of all concrete expression. A journal of old feeling is like a telescope through which we see the past history of the heart, not as a mere hazy cloud of distant glory, but separate star by star, moment by moment. The old agonies, the old ecstasies, may thus be repeated for us, as by some diabolical marvel of physical science...'

from The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XV)

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Commonplace Book

'Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me to tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and a beautiful refinement of cleverness...'

from The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith (Chapter IX)

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Nancy by Rhoda Broughton (1873)

This novel is marked in a couple of ways. The most insistently noticeable is that it is written in the present tense. We follow Nancy Grey as one of six 'children' in a mid-Victorian family in the country. At their sizeable house, the children (who are in reality aged between 11 and the early twenties) still occupy the supplicant position in their home - they are all still regular denizens of the nursery, where their tea is taken separately, and they indulge in boisterous games. This is an excellent reminder of the very different position of young adults at that time. Whilst on the one hand they are frightened of their gruff father, and repair to their upper floor to shout and carry on, on the other the older ones are thinking about marriage and smoking freely. The unusual feel of the present tense keeps this unusual (for us, not them) situation humming. An old school friend of their despised father, Roger Tempest, who is in his late forties, is staying with them. Previously his age has kept him apart, but he has proved interesting because he doesn't appear to harbour the same bitterness as their parent. Needless to say, he shows signs of interest in Nancy, who is around 20. She is youthful, immature, noisy-but-thoughtful - and cannot wait to get away from childhood and their grim father. So, despite his incredible age, she accepts him. On their honeymoon in Germany they meet a young neighbour of Roger, Frank Musgrave, who pays Nancy a lot of attention and clearly finds her company appealing. Nancy persists, in her ignorance, in regarding him simply as a friend in these tough first times away from the only companions she has ever known. Back in England, and ensconced in her new large home, Musgrave is a regular visitor. He tells her of another neighbour, Zelphine Huntley, who he claims was Roger's fiancee in both their youths, and who abandoned him. Nancy's bounding nature jumps to jealousy, much as Musgrave may have hoped it would. Every time she sees Zelphine, she seems to be having private tete-a-tetes with Roger - at parties and balls she favours him and whisks him off for private conversations. Nancy is left reeling, and the all-but-confrontations she and Roger keep having keep amounting to nothing at the last moment. Roger is absent for a while in the West Indies on business, trying to save Zelphine's dissolute husband from making even more of a mess of his affairs. Musgrave capitalises on this to press his suit. Again and again, the same almostness pervades the scene. They keep almost coming to grips, and missing it by inches. Nancy remains apparently blissfully unaware of the deeper affections which surround her, and yet.....not completely so. One evening, in a wood between their estates, Musgrave finally blurts out his feelings directly, and Nancy is "horrified" and crying, despite there having been hints of her nascent understanding of him. She emerges from the wood, teary and flustered, only to see Zelphine driving by, and noticing her particularly with a meaning look! When Roger returns it soon becomes clear that Zelphine has mentioned it. Roger urges Nancy, in guarded terms, to come clean about what has occurred, clearly thinking that she's been unfaithful to him. Nancy is lost in her own suspicions about Zelphine and her husband, as well as shame at having seemed to lead Musgrave on and been involved in 'questionable' behaviour in public, and makes an odd decision - to lie. Nothing has happened at all, she insists to Roger, Zelphine is lying. They both go through agonies of uncertainty and non-communication with one another, and their marriage looks doomed. Musgrave, bitter and confused, seeks out Nancy's softer elder sister Barbara, and asks her to marry him, which had been the outward plan all through his secret affection for Nancy. Barbara is delighted that her seemingly terminally hesitant suitor has finally come around, and Nancy feels separation from her for the first time in her life - she can't tell her the real story for fear of breaking Barbara's heart. All this time, Nancy and Barbara's oldest brother, Algy, has been the faithful dog at Zelphine's feet, having fallen for her and developed drooping and sotted habits as his fortunes with this temptress rise and fall, and jealousy at Roger's closeness to her takes its toll. Eventually he becomes ill, and is near to dying. Barbara nurses him back from the brink of succumbing to the fever which has been decimating the district, only to feel its effects herself almost as soon as Algy is out of danger. Barbara is not so lucky as her brother, and catastrophe comes in her death. Nancy is prostrate with grief, and nothing at her new home is calling her to stay. She heads back to the family home, and to a period of intense reflection. Having decided to try to forgive Roger his love for Zelphine, and ask him for his forgiveness for her lies, she returns to the marital home, stopping in first to the churchyard where Barbara is buried. There she encounters a miserable Roger by Barbara's grave, and they finally have the honest conversation which has been in the offing for so long, clearing the air and providing the makings for a chastened new beginning. Roger and Zelphine's engagement is revealed as a gossip-originated construction of Musgrave's in order to gull Nancy, and so the road is cleared for reconciliation with Nancy's own honesty about what happened in the wood. My impatience with the consistent avoidance of these two (and Nancy and Musgrave's) coming to an understanding resides in the fact that it doesn't follow their characters as set up - they are both engagers, and Nancy is a perversely honest blurter. It makes for a feeling of trumped-upness which mars this a little. Broughton is still as charming as always, however, so it's a flaw in the crystal which is more noticeable, and yet not terminal. Here's hoping for more psychologically tenable plotting from her in future.

Monday, June 10, 2019

Commonplace Book

'To hope, and not be impatient, is really to believe...'

from The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith (Chapter III)

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Mist in the Tagus by Tom Hopkinson (1946)

Positioned as it is just after the war, this straddles some really interesting territory. It is the story of a young dissatisfied woman in 1939, who has left her stultifying and slightly blank family, changed her name, moved to Northampton, and is fending for herself. Caroline (formerly Hazel) works in an advertising agency and isn't finding life enormously satisfying, but anything would be better than her grim and dull family. Having a few adventures in relationships has been part of the journey, and now, off the back of the end of one of them, and approaching the time for a holiday, she decides to avoid all the offered jaunts of her workmates and set off somewhere on her own. She focuses in on Portugal, and in particular on Marinha, a coastal town somewhere in the estuary region of the Tagus. There she meets a typically 30s pan-European group of 'bohemians' - among whom lives a lionised gay German poet, Leo, who is away in Estoril at the time. This group fascinates Caroline: Maxim, a dapper Italian waster; Helene, a fashion-obsessed, socially haughty French worryer; Paul, a slightly camp, slightly egotistical English bitch; Bettina, a Carrington-like, insightful and emotionally-aware German free-thinker, and Robert, another intense worryer, who is a German doctor and Leo's partner. Alongside discovering Marinha's cliffs with their little chapel balanced on top, a local castle-fortification, the hot market and town, the incredible gado musicians, the sectioned beach with tourists at one end and almost indigent local fishing families at the other, Caroline gets swept away by a rip and rescued by Robert. This first focuses her attention on him particularly. True to the times, his relationship with Leo is understood but only glancingly referred to, and it feels clear to Caroline that he is 'fluid' in his interests. As she gets to know him, she can feel herself falling for him. It is revealed that Leo is away because it has been felt that he should absent himself for a while. This aspect is where this novel reveals its age a little - he has apparently enjoyed the company of one of the young fisher-lads, and this has been very much frowned upon by the local people. What Hopkinson doesn't make clear is how old this young chap is and anything of the circumstances, but there is a strong feeling of taboo surrounding it. Whether this is more of a typically 40s homosexuality taboo, or one associated with pederasty is not clear, but it tends to the latter. With Leo away, Caroline is able to intensely interact with Robert and they grow close. Bettina encourages her to at least try to connect with him, because she feels that his and Leo's relationship may not be good for him. Backgrounding all of this is the feeling of Europe in 1939. Leo and Robert, being German and definitely non-Nazi in sympathies, are needing to find some way to get to relative safety. But the fact that Leo's misdemeanor has been reported to police may make that very difficult. Paul is attempting to gird himself and get into the diplomatic service, and it is possible that he may be able to help them get to England, but only without a police record. Bettina thinks that perhaps her convenient relationship with a local police chief, Quinta, may be useful in getting Leo's record quashed. All of these options are live and swirling at the time of Caroline's visit. In the end, with the end of her stay looming, Caroline and Robert come to grips and spend the night together. But at the end of it, she is devastated to see Robert's attention slip away to the clock and the possibility of Leo's return by the daily bus, and realises that what she wants is not going to happen; Robert is ultimately completely attached to Leo. The distinguishing features of this novel are its emotional maturity - Caroline is aware and broadly realistic about the chances she is taking; its modernity of theme and telling - it is an extraordinarily early example of what became grist to the mill of modernity as the next 20 years passed; and the singularity of Hopkinson creating a very capable and independent modern female lead character who anticipates many who came later. Hopkinson is the least of figures on the postwar literary stage, but by the evidence of this, this lowly position is not at all deserved. It is also an object lesson in not despatching a novel to the bin because its first chapter doesn't hit the spot - this one's is a bit lame, but it makes up for the lapse later most resolutely.

Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Commonplace Book

'...What was moving and affecting about Leo, what, at this moment, and in spite if everything, shafted to her heart, was the air of detachment which hung round him like a mist. It was as though he did not quite belong - as though, in spite of all the efforts he made, in spite of the most intimate contacts and a power of the deepest sympathy with others, of active suffering upon their account, he was still not one among other men. He could not ever forget, or lose, himself. He conveyed to every seeing eye a haunted feeling, the tooth-mark of the hidden worm. Leo had been born with the fox inside his shirt, the murdered albatross about his neck, that would never, do what he would, slide off into the sea - until one day it would drop with a dull echo but without a splash, and carry him down with it...'

from The Wanderer's Return, a chapter in Mist in the Tagus by Tom Hopkinson

Friday, May 24, 2019

Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist (2014)

'Types of Americans' is one way I want to approach this. When you're on the tube in London, people from elsewhere can stand out. Most Australians, for example, unless they're longtime resident, are like sore thumbs. Americans, too, but that's a slightly more complex story. I divide them into AIMs and AAMs. AIMs are Americans of International Mores and AAMs are Americans of American Mores. AIMs are often quite indistinguishable from locals and have a sense about them of slotting right in. AAMs are a different story altogether, though they are not some sort of clunky cliche of Americanness. They have a wealthy gloss about them, and combine it with a kind of knowing and intelligent wryness which demands respect. But AAMs are also somehow preoccupied with their 'smart' and 'well-heeled' lives, whereas AIMs are happy to be rougher round the edges. Anyway, almost all of Ellen Gilchrist's characters in these stories are AAMs. I've read volumes of hers in the past and realise now that these people, perhaps except where she's gone historical, are her central preoccupation. There's one story here which is the epitome of it, called Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, where a group of women going on holiday to Italy are caught up in a terrorist emergency at Heathrow. Each of them is a notable in some way, and perhaps calls the governor of their state or mayor of their city by his first name, for example; somehow they look out at the world through wryly privilege-acknowledged but not quite ground-level aware eyes. Their doctor friends are not just GPs, but more likely are authoring a key text, or taking up a lucrative professorship, maybe. They are intelligent enough to be aware of their privilege, but not enough to do any serious sheep-from-goat-separating on the basis of it. They're just a little over-comfortable. And this is of course combined with their Southernness in this Gilchristian context, which has a tang to it. The other thing that strikes me from this reading of Gilchrist after such a long break is that she suffers from Oates' Disease. The major criticism I think which can be made of Joyce Carol Oates comes in the lack of differentiation in the voices of her characters. Other than that, much of her work is supremely powerful. This volume has made it obvious that Gilchrist has the same problem. Too many of these characters sound like one another in conversation. And she adds a further subtlety to the problem - even the rhythms are often the same. The conversations in Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (again it's the perfect example) are strange things indeed, with staccato recountings of life history in ways which feel removed enough from real speech to cause the reader to confirm their disbelief rather than suspend it. Now, with all those cavillings expressed, what I must emphasize is the fact that Gilchrist is, even so, an incredibly limpid storyteller, who manages, through some sort of magic, to make the ordinary details of these people's lives fascinating. One can drop into these pages, and feel surrounded by an atmosphere, sometimes of direct engagement with the scary parts of life and death, sometimes with warm Southern penumbra which soothe.

Monday, May 13, 2019

Commonplace Book

'...trying to bring lucidity into minds whose natural element was an amiable confusion, making himself hot, and exhausting his own spirit. Caroline saw Robert always with a slight frown, which came from his inability to make other people see. She loved him for trying - but what is the inability to make other people see, except one's own inability to accept other people as they are?'

from The Visit to Vallado, a chapter in Mist in the Tagus by Tom Hopkinson

Saturday, May 11, 2019

The True History by Lucian (c125-180)

Lucian was apparently a Syrian (in the ancient sense) and probably wrote in Syriac, but all of our records of his work are from Ancient Greek translations. This is a simple, splendid and short satire of the tall tales recorded as truth by ancient writers. He mentions a good many of the writers he has in his sights as the narrative progresses. Wow, what a narrative. Thinking about all the things that might have appeared fascinating and liberating to a mind of those times, Lucian seems to attempt a good proportion of them. Visiting the moon, sailing through air rather than water, all manner of strange creatures, all sorts of exigencies coming out of things being composed of elements they shouldn't - fire-waves, grapes full of milk, dreams being corporeal (and then again not). The satire is fairly straightforward, almost like saying "look, we can all make things up!"; it doesn't appear to me to have lots of layers, but the results are great mind-freeing fun. This 1958 adaptation-translation by Paul Turner appeared while John Cowper Powys was still alive. I wonder if he read it, and it helped to fuel the beautiful crazed short fantasies that he had already begun writing and that constituted his late-life wonder. But I guess, given his predilections, he was probably already all-too-familiar with this book. This is a spirited and airy flowering of nonsense-imagination, stacked full of the gods, heroes, and literary figures like Homer and the ancient historians - lovely releasing stuff.

Friday, May 10, 2019

Commonplace Book

'"...We let our children see us drink. Then we let them drink, thinking they will learn how to drink intelligently, but most of them never do. They learn to use drugs and alcohol for props, for courage, for macho, for pain. They use amphetamines for study. In the high-octane lives we prepare them for there may not be a way to withstand the pain except getting high. You can't teach young people to meditate. It's unnatural. So we have this culture and we are killing ourselves and our children with it even when we aren't at war..."'

from Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a piece in Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Commonplace Book

'He lifts his eyes again, and again their keen search investigates the depths of my soul; but no human eye can rightly read the secrets of any other human spirit: they find what they expect to find, not what is there..'

from Nancy by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XXXVI)

Thursday, May 2, 2019

My Life and Times: Octave One, 1883-1891 by Compton Mackenzie (1963)

By this stage Mackenzie was in part an old relic, and the ageing process was speeding up as the revolution that marked the 60s gathered pace. He was in the last period of his productivity, still producing comic novels every couple of years. He was also still reasonably prominent, in the backwash of the success of Whisky Galore 15 or so years earlier - the just postwar world that it typified was only now beginning to look a bit crumbly. He had been many and varied things earlier in his career and I guess they can be discussed when the autobiography gets there. This first volume is strictly to do with his early childhood, attached to his father's repertory company and its constant caravan of movement and interaction with aged stage-stars and literary ones and, as well, up and comers of those times. So there is opportunity for him to name-drop a little, which one can tell he likes. But he also provides a sound glimpse into the 1880s version of a child's world - jealousies, toys, night fears, puzzling over adult motivation. There are also recurring tropes here which give a window onto his internal nagging preoccupations: his nurse is depicted as an eternally thoughtless, conformist killjoy, determined to restrict in the name of something which even she doesn't quite understand - disappointment and curtailment of pleasure as a life lesson; psychology and psychiatry are consistently regaled as foolish misapprehensions by him, anticipating where such charlatans might interpret his actions as significant, and belittling their conclusions. The fact that he does these things in a pre-eminently reasonable tone, like an 'if you think about it sensibly, or have the right inside information, these things couldn't possibly be true', is testament somehow to a kind of holding off of challenge by utilizing bluff dismissal. I both get this, and see equivalents of the same very human behaviour in myself and others, and also wonder whether something else was going on - he does seem so very keen to make sure it is his interpretation which wins out. He mentions in the postscript that he is worried that the book is not interesting or entertaining enough, and claims in his usual forthright (or is it mock-forthright?) way that he ought to be excused, after a lifetime of being an entertainer, for writing for himself only for once. I can gainsay him in terms of interest and entertainment - this book is quite happily so. But I do need to add in the next breath that it doesn't produce thrills and excitement - if there was any poetry to Mackenzie, it is long gone.

Monday, April 29, 2019

The Wicker-Work Woman by Anatole France (1897)

France is very much like Richard Le Gallienne for me - very enjoyable in the moment, but difficult to remember long afterward. I'm not sure why this is, but there is a 'loftiness' in both of them, whereby their ideas can be typified as being high falutin', and ground-level things like plot can seem to fade into the background a little. But, whereas Gallienne is usually, ultimately, quite simple in outlook, with notable exceptions, France is always complex, which more suits the mode. This is he in his classic guise as antiquarian, philosopher, moral enquirer, with a wily line in comedy running at the backdrop. It is barely a novel, the only plotline of any calibre being the breakdown in the marriage of Monsieur Bergeret, the main character. I can't remember whether or not I've been introduced to him before, but I know he recurs in later books, because the name appears in their titles. My assumption at this point is that he is the latest in a long line of France characters who represent the author in their enquiringness and fascination with archives, papers, translations, and literary work, as well as the morals of their time. These older gentlemen, caught up in the small politics of their location, and exemplifying various philosophical angles in their life and thoughts, seem to be France's central stock-in-trade. They can be religious, or laypersons. Some of them seem to be exemplars of high ideals for France, and his depictions can become a little cloying, like Abbe Coignard. But this guy, Bergeret, is much more faulty. A bit windy, and given to opinionising, and cold and ruthless when he feels he's been hard done by; he's no slice of perfection, and much the better for it. His wife has an affair with one of his pupils, and her gradual freezing out of the home when he discovers it is something to behold. But the space allocated to this is relatively small; all of the rest takes the form of a series of historic-philosophic-moral conversations about all sorts of topics with various men, or groups of men, met up with around the provincial town where they live. Clerics and academics abound, so I think it must be some sort of university town, unless it is a fantasy-place that France has simply peopled with an abundance of his favourite things. I have a strong feeling that this one will suffer the same fate as the others of its kind in his oeuvre in my memory, and quickly fade as to detail. But I was struck, in the moment of reading, with how many levels there were on which to appreciate it, especially his rueful recording of human frailty, and his ability to both gouge it and laugh at it at the same time, and even yet display empathy toward it.

Thursday, April 25, 2019

The Man in the Silo and other stories by EO Schlunke (1955)

What a fine surprise. I had a set of possible expectations of this where one of the major likelihoods was that it would be aged and uninspiring. It has proved me wrong, resoundingly. This large set of short stories is typified by a rueful quality, a sourly wise sense of humour. And what they also sport is a low-key poetics; almost noirish. Schlunke had been well known for a while in Australia by the time this was published, mainly for his stories published in the Bulletin magazine, and also a couple of serialized novels which never made it into book form. He was the chronicler of the countryside, not in its salt-of-the-earth guise, but instead with a full wily realisation of the scheisterism and conservative malfeasance of the zone. Knowing some parts of country Australia as I do, he captures beautifully these aspects; in fact, the only one he doesn't quite go for the jugular in is that of the difference between what holier-than-thou farmers professed in their churches on Sunday, and what they got up to every other day of the week! These sins are obviously not only the province of the country, but, given the wholesale absence of truthful record in current times of any darknesses in Australia's literature of country life (it's a neverending story of romance and "the best people in the world") this book is ever the more crucial and valuable. And it is 1950s, ultra-white, breadth-blind country Australia with which it deals - humorously! What a blessed thing! These stories of villainous salesmen, creepy real estate agents, uptight moralist farmers and lazy exceptions to the rule, the conned and misled, suspicious incomers of a doubtful marque, bemused Italian prisoners of war lost in this lack of perspective, as well as an occasional adventure into the otherworldly and chilling, have a four-to-the-floor bite which exhilarates. The noirishness is matched by an almost Chekhovian fated sourness. If ever a book's perspective was needed in a national literature, to redress a too-rosy picturing, this is it, in Australia's here and now.

Monday, April 15, 2019

Commonplace Book

'"...Now, on the contrary, our parliamentary sharks are betraying France to a foreign power, Finance, to wit. For it is true that Finance is to-day one of the Powers of Europe, and of her it may be said, as was formerly said of the Church, that among the nations she remains a splendid alien. Our representatives, whom she buys over, are not only robbers but traitors. And, in truth, they rob and betray in paltry, huckstering fashion. Each one in himself is merely an object of pity: it is their rapid swarming that alarms me."'

from The Wicker-Work Woman by Anatole France (Chapter XII)

Sunday, March 24, 2019

Commonplace Book

'...These two masses of matter, the dictionary and the lady, thought he, were once but gases floating in the primitive nebulosity. Though now they are strangely different from one another in look, in nature and in function, they were once for long ages exactly similar.

"For," thought he to himself, "Madame Bergeret once swam in the vasty abyss of the ages, shapeless, unconscious, scattered in light gleams of oxygen and carbon. At the same time, the molecules that were one day to make up this Latin dictionary were whirling in this same vapour, which was destined at last to give birth to monstrous forms, to minute insects and to a slender thread of thought. These imperfect and often harrassing creations, these monuments of my weary life, my wife and my dictionary, needed the travail of eternity to produce them. Yet Amelie is just a paltry mind in a coarsened body, and my dictionary is full of mistakes. We can see from this example alone that there is very little hope that even new aeons of time would ever give us perfect knowledge and beauty. As it is, we live but for a moment, yet by living for ever we should gain nothing..."'

from The Wicker-Work Woman by Anatole France (Chapter I)

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

The Edwardians by V. Sackville-West (1930)

I can see why this has been called a bad book. But I can't really accede. I think the thing it does badly is symbolising particular tropes in too clumsily generic ways. A really good example happens near the end, when we're at the coronation of George V. At a particular point of the proceeedings the peeresses must reach up and put on their coronets, tiaras and what not. The subdued rustle is heard of this happening, and then many of them surreptitiously also reach for small mirrors to adjust for perfection. The author then really pushes the boat out by having 'many dowagers' tut-tutting this behaviour from the galleries, all of these apparently thinking to themselves how unladylike this vain behaviour is, and how it wouldn't have been allowed to occur, or even thought of, in their day. It's not that it's impossible, it's just that it's too wholesale. Sackville-West also includes slightly forced or banal conversations to do the same work on a few occasions. My feeling is that, were this novel to be analysed to the hilt for perfidiousness, it would be these moments that are the true culprits. The experience of reading this strange piece is another matter entirely; it somehow has a stark freshness, with plenty of cool space between the bursts of intensity. Despite looking creaky in our times, I think it would have looked quite modern in its own - it doesn't quite consist of the standard, filled-out, conservative prose that would have been seen as "regulation" back then. It is the story of a young man of the aristocracy who meets an explorer at a weekend party at his great house in 1906, and is challenged by him to see himself freshly, unencumbered by his position. Sebastian is ruffled by this challenge, but it is fed by his sense of youthful bucking against propriety and tradition, and his feeling of stifledness. We then follow him through parts of the next five years experimenting with defying expectations in various ways, with the explorer's words in the back of his mind. (An interesting aside: the explorer's name is Anquetil. I've been experimenting with various ways of pronunciation: French origins retained would make it On-ke-teel, but usually Norman-sounding names have been mangled-Anglicised over the centuries, so perhaps it has ended up as An-kettle?) The connections with what came after are somewhat striking - was this novel a source for / a dry run for Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited? Not only the challenge to orthodoxy, not only the symbolic picturing of the times and the class, but also the name of the main character? I can't remember whether Sackville-West thought anything about this, but have a feeling it was noticed and marked, at least. Though I am sad not to see her following up on the truly modernist promise of Seducers in Ecuador, there's still just enough here to keep up some enthusiasm for this unusual writer's strange journey.

Saturday, March 16, 2019

Leviathan by Philip Hoare (2008)

This is a personal meditation on whales. It stands in the shadow cast by Moby-Dick, quite intentionally. As a fan of that book, it was likely either to fill me with joy, or set my teeth. In the end, it did neither, but landed up much more on the positive side than the negative. A huge amount of territory was covered in Hoare's mosey through the history of whaling and the actualities of whales. Most of it was quite gripping without being, as many of the reviewers would have had it, mesmerising. I am learning to take much of modern criticism's gigantic excitement with certain works with a boathold's worth of salt. But that overdone enthusiasm doesn't take away from what was achieved, which is an often engaging survey of the culture and nature of cetaceans, and their "interactions" with we humans (for that read bloody slaughter and gutting indignities, as well as some more recent, maybe largely ineffectual, appreciation). Hoare has a tendency of style in this which bothers me: I'd call it 'hyperbolism', or the over-egging of phrasing with no additional effect, or without a great deal of true meaning. Here's an example. On page 361 he speaks of being on a boat conducting a whale watch, and talks about being first out for the day: "...We are the pioneers of the day; in our watery tracks the other boats will follow, bearing a mixture of children and parents, lovers and loners, the lost and the found, all looking for something." It's that 'the lost and the found' that bothers me most (but not only). The whole sentence has weighty phrasing with a sense of profundity that actually says not a lot, its wish for poetry over-exposed. This type of thing skitters throughout, an implication toward....emptiness. I wonder whether it's built of extreme enthusiasm, in which case I guess it's understandable to an extent. But if his other works show this tendency too, I hope he can slowly guide himself out of it. His great facility with language is also of course to be celebrated - I would like to read it reined and fact-circumscribed. Two other important things - one is his angrily heartfelt long cataloguing of the endless slaughter and attitude of utilization that humans have had toward whales. And a sense of forlorn hope that they are salvageable as a group of beings on our planet - has their ocean home gone too far toward acidification, and are their genes already too limited through population reduction to be viable for a long period of survival? And an odd fact which spurred a spike of research in me: a whaleship called the Monongahela claimed to have seen and killed a 'sea-serpent' (a gigantic snakelike creature) and retained some specimens of it, only to be lost before they returned home. It has been called a hoax, but I think there might be more to find here. A lot of the objections to the veracity of the story are revealed to be nonsense on examination. Intriguing savours for future investigations.........

Saturday, March 2, 2019

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869)

Obviously I won't recount plot. It has been 14 months in the reading. And I guess the overweening conclusion coming from that is the question of whether or not it was worth it. I wouldn't be without the experience on the one hand. On the other, there is a serious question in my mind as to whether the net result feels like it has enough inherent inspiration to justify the time spent. I'm pretty sure it doesn't. That is built of a couple of things, again two sides of a coin: on the one hand, it was never completely uninteresting, and managed to keep up a low hum of basic worthwhileness; on the other, there were things like what I would call 'foreshortening' of character in it, where no-one felt particularly compelling. Almost all the characters are only mildly interesting, with perhaps the exception of Pierre, who occasionally reaches to higher heights. One is certainly not rooting for anybody overly, but then again that may be the effect of the Russian approach to literature, which is one in the classic sense at least of no character being anything other than mixed, and their 'negative' aspects being well marked. I wonder whether this foreshortening of which I speak is also influenced by the broader notion of "the epic", and its inherent constraints. Because we have to look at such a wide scene, is there also a somehow necessary lowering of individual height in the characters? Are they 'seventy-five percenters' by dint of their breadth of background? There are, however, moments of concentration where normal novelistic intensity is approached, which are wonderful. One in particular I remember is the scene of the shooting of some prisoners in burning Moscow after the French have conquered. Powerful stuff. But those moments are comparatively rare. Also to be mentioned is the last section of the book, the second epilogue, which is a philosophical treatise on the understanding of history, and leaves all the characters, and fiction, behind. Tolstoy's instincts here are brilliant, in terms of his wish to break down how we understand history and therefore what we see as its motive forces. He does this with as much atomising as was possible in his times I think, with many of his lights and their terminology reflecting those of philosophical works I have read, even quite recent ones. Some of his conclusions are quite wobbly, though. Whether this piece belonged in a work of fiction is a moot point, I guess, given that it appears that he was all about breaking down some of the distinctions between types of writing. An experience, but a highly flawed one.

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse (1906)

Though the heading says 1906, I actually read the current hardback edition, which utilizes the text of a substantial revision from 1920. This is my first Wodehouse, and there are mixed feelings. The general opinion which seems to surround him is of unparalleled hilarity. But, although this was great fun in a light way, and had occasional moments of intensification where an audible laugh issued from me, it had nothing of the nonpareil about it. It's the story of an Arthur Dentish young chap, a beginner-novelist, who takes an opportunity to accompany a slightly scoundrelly gent, with any amount of front and total self-belief, to start a chicken farm at 'Combe Regis' (in all respects Lyme Regis) on the Dorset coast. The gent is apparently a recurring Wodehouse character by the name of Ukridge. On this exposure, I'm not that keen to come across him again - pretty irritating, and supposed to be, but not that satisfyingly so. Of course, Ukridge runs up huge bills, has bizarre and ill-thought-out notions of how to run the farm, and how much money will come from it, blazons his way through all sorts of situations with minimum real awareness whilst claiming to be the all-pervading authority. Alongside this is a love story between our young novelist and a locally-staying professor's lovely young daughter. The professor is Irish in background and phenomenally touchy. So our novelist gets into scrapes trying to maintain and further his scheme of capture. This novel has a fun wry tone all through, and the two main characters have an interesting line in self-convinced dodginess. Just can't say that I'm overwhelmed with the brilliance. Happened to be rereading an Ada Leverson published 6 years later, at the same time, for business purposes, and found myself, by contrast, enchanted and laughing out loud. Certainly not a dyed-in-the-wool Wodehouseite yet.

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Arria Marcella by Theophile Gautier (1852)

Another slice of voluptuousness. Whereas many of the author's pieces in this mode were published early on, this one proves that the preoccupation was a long-lived one, as it was published in 1852, a good decade and a half into his career. In this, three sensualist young Italian men visit Pompeii and are fascinated by the ruins and artifacts retrieved for the museum. Gautier describes them and their impressions very much from a Parisian standpoint, likenings abounding to French originals and ways of thinking. Max and Fabio are fairly straightforward creatures, Octavian is a historic dreamer. He becomes obsessed by one of the 'casts' displayed in a glass cabinet, which outlines the form of a superbly rounded young woman delineated into a casing of ash and cinders. At dinner that night, with the wine flowing, Max and Fabio rib Octavian about his melancholic fascination with this twenty-centuries-dead creature. When they tumble off to a drunken sleep, Octavian, who is less affected, decides that he'll go for a walk in the ruins as he can't sleep. But under the pressure of the wine, the enchanted moonlight and the urgent call of his soul, he begins to see Pompeii come to life as it was in AD 79. It starts with shadows flitting just out of eyeline and then buildings resume their complete shapes. He begins to see the denizens walking the streets in full view. Then they start to notice him and wonder at his strange attire. Eventually, a young man of the town takes him under his wing as an incomer who needs a welcome. He organises for Octavian to attend the play that is about to be put on. The audience mutter confusedly and curiously about Octavian when he enters the amphitheatre, but they are quickly distracted by the comedy on stage, as is he. Part way through he notices among those in an adjoining stand a young woman who absolutely arrests his attention. As he marvels over her sultry beauty the realisation dawns on him that this is the original of the 'cast' in the museum! Arria Marcella herself is before him. She notices him too, and after the play has her slave Tyche seek him out for an assignation. Tyche leads him through the alleys of the town to the home where, twenty centuries later, the melancholy cast was found, now resplendently beautiful. After he undergoes a ritual bathing, the two finally meet and talk, Arria Marcella explaining that it is his belief in her and the profound urgings of his soul that have brought her back to corporeality. Their sensuality heightens until the curtain is brushed aside angrily and they are faced with her father, Arrius Diomedes, a believer in the then new cult of Christ. He excoriates Arria Marcella for her sensualist ways, exhorts her to stop, and having received a defiant negative, screams out an exorcism which defeats her. She crumbles back to dust in Octavian's arms, her father disappears, and he slumps to insensibility in a small chamber in what is now again the ruins. This is lovely, deeply coloured and entertaining stuff, which Gautier uplifts to other heights with discursions upon the power of the imaginations of true believers and what they mean to art, and psychological and historical detail which enliven it.

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

La Vie Errante by Guy de Maupassant (1890)

Published two years before Maupassant died, this feels, in some senses, like a posthumous piece. The editing is a little odd, allowing him to repeat strong impressions and colourings in a couple of places only a few paragraphs after they were first employed, almost like the editors were suffering, by that stage, from Great Author Syndrome, and wouldn't gainsay him. It is a much more beautiful and satisfying piece than its companion, Au Soleil. After a niggly first chapter which bodes badly, complaining narkily about the Eiffel Tower, we are taken on a tour of the western Mediterranean by boat. The most gorgeous of these impressions is that of Sicily, which is rampant with colour, exoticism and poetic breadth, taking in its vulcanism and history fundamentally. Then there is an extended land tour of Algiers and, most importantly, Tunisia, where he explores profoundly the richness of the place from a European-eye view. He is fascinated by Islam and its adherents, and critical of them too in some senses - very much a colonial attitude underpinned with a strong sense of intrigue and mesmerizedness-with-the-alien. His descriptions of the landscape are powerfully evocative; swamps, mires, white towns, terrains of cactus-growth and rock, ancient ruins, decorations of mosques, religious compounds and private houses, mirages, mists, the huge variety of the colourings and moods and wear of the people themselves. One of the examples of the author's work where his ability with fluid verbal decoration and addiction to his version of truthfulness are allowed full sway without being drowned out in snarkish attitude and over-simplified concentration on the negative. Quite quietly stirring.

Sunday, January 20, 2019

Miss Fallowfield's Fortune by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (1908)

This one marked a change of publisher, and one wonders why. Did she feel dissatisfied with Hutchinson and seek new energies elsewhere? Did Hutchinson reject this? I feel it must be the former, considering how well she continued to do, and Cassell were the lucky recipients. My copy is from the fifth thousand in the first year of publication, so things appear to have gone well in this first instance. This one is not markedly different, in terms of contents, to those which it succeeded, but whether it's my brainscape talking, or whether there is a slight alteration, it feels a little more airy, bright and confident than she has for a while. The story is of a young woman mid-century who loses her lover before their marriage, but is nominated by him to receive the enormous fortune his uncle has just bestowed upon him. Thus Charlotte Fallowfield becomes a wealthy woman on her own in the world. We skip forward in time to her very well-established in the manor house at Dinglewood in the midlands (Fowler's favourite territory, re-dubbed, as she always does, Mershire), which is a fairly small village. There is with her her niece, the daughter of her dead sister Phoebe, to whom we had been introduced earlier. Dagmar is young and beautiful, of course, and quite forthright, like her mother. It is at this point that the really enjoyable humour of this piece is introduced, in two forms. One is a chorus of women of the village who meet to knit, sew and read improving books, and gossip like hell. Thelma Barlow, Pam Ferris, Deborah Findlay and other actresses perfectly calibrated for these roles immediately come to mind. The other is in some subsidiary characters who have puffed up opinions of themselves, particularly a young journalist with the improbable name of Octavius Rainbrow, and a persistently disappointed young cleric with snooty tendencies whose savage mother is part of the sewing circle, Theophilus Sprott. The push and shove comes when a new vicar is touted for the parish and, as usual, Theophilus misses out, disgracing himself with hopelessly propounded self-congratulatory views and no 'people-sense' whatsoever. The man who is offered the job comes from a little further north, has lost his wife, and has a son in his early twenties with him who spikes the local female interest. Dagmar also takes an interest in Claude, but they are doomed to a lot of misunderstanding in their primary, opinionated and varyingly idealistic natures. However, as they are more mature, the affinity between Charlotte and Luke Forrester, the new vicar, is quickly developed. They marry and head off to Australia on a very extended honeymoon. But, on the way their ship strikes a reef in the Indian Ocean, and all aboard perish, bar one, Octavius Rainbrow, who has accompanied them. Before this is known, though, the probate court operate on the interesting assumption that Forrester would have been likely to have survived his wife, being a stronger male, and that therefore the fortune should go to his son Claude rather than Dagmar. Once Rainbrow returns to Mershire, and explains that Forrester went down in the ship quite quickly, but Charlotte was with him in one of the boats and survived a few days, it becomes clear to the probate court that the fortune should go to Dagmar instead. This means that an architecturally beautiful retreat-style religious house that Claude has started building will no longer be funded. Dagmar asks him once she's re-inherited to continue building it, but instead to dedicate it to her favourite passion, an orphanage. Claude is pretty devastated by the loss of his dream, but complies. Through these testing monetary times, when absolute enmity could have eventuated, he and Dagmar have managed to remain not only civil, but connected as friends. Dagmar is more aware than he is (he is lost in his dreams of the helping of humankind) and sees eventually that the dream which he has embraced is not a slap in her face, but rather something quite separate, and part of his soul. She makes a deep sacrifice to her own dreams, and foregoes the beloved idea of her orphanage so that Claude can have his 'monastery' (an Anglican institution of retreat and religious education, rather than anything "Popish"!). Even the love that she shows him by this act doesn't quite get through Claude's dreaming miasma. He still doesn't register that she cares for him enormously. Then, in an enormous surprise, Luke Forrester himself turns up at the manor. He has survived the wreck by clinging to a spar and being picked up by another ship. His memory was temporarily expunged by the deprivations and he lived for some months in Australia not knowing who he really was. So, with all the joy that his 'resurrection' brings also comes yet a third turnaround for the fortunes of Miss Fallowfield's fortune. He tells Claude very tenderly that Charlotte was quite clear about how she wanted her fortune used should she die, and that his 'monastery' will need to be turned this time into almshouses for older single women! Claude is devastated for a second time, and contrarily some very blackly funny dialogue is perpetrated between he and Dagmar about how old women will have no appreciation of the beautiful building, it will be wasted on them, and that people of that age don't care where they live or what they do. In the end, in talking it all over with Dagmar, he is carefully alerted by her to the slightly cryptic Biblical text of the alabaster box of ointment, whose contents was better poured out than sold and the proceeds given to the poor. Claude decides, in a moment of enlightenment, that he needs to simply pour out his contribution and have it used in any way that God wills. The fact that Dagmar alerts him to this finally opens his eyes to her care for him, which is perhaps for me the least believable part of this already stretched tale in the matter of plausibility. But again, what saves it is Fowler's cheerful and robust storytelling. Despite her nonsenses, one wants to spend time in her company.

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Commonplace Book

'...Breathes there a man in this modern England of ours with soul so dead but that at some time or another he has not yielded to the almost universal temptation to cut down, in a few fatal minutes, trees which it would take a century to reproduce; and then endeavour to fill their place by dwarfed and squalid shrubs; and - which is stranger still - has counted the same to himself for righteousness? Breathes there a town council, or even a county one, with spirit so unurban and impolitic that it has never once pulled down old and beautiful and well-built houses in order to erect new and vulgar and unsubstantial villas in their stead? If such there be, let me make a friend of that man; and give me a vote for the re-election of that town or county council!'

from Miss Fallowfield's Fortune by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Chapter XVII)

Monday, January 7, 2019

A Family and a Fortune by I. Compton-Burnett (1939)

[Reading this brought on an extra urge, which was devising further Compton-Burnettesque titles as an extension of her bibliography. Each one which was convincing enough I will scatter through this summary in square brackets just for fun. I've allotted them each a year of publication and have managed to extend the author's career (and lifetime!) by quite a margin. We'll start with The Guessed and the Glimpsed 1973]. The main tonality of this instalment in the C-B lists is no different from those which have preceded it. [Destinies and Histories 1976]. There is still the late Victorian/Edwardian family; they still bicker endlessly, loving all the contretemps flickering between them, picking each other up and revealing faultlines with agitated glee. [Going Without Saying: An Autobiography in Dialogue 1978]. These cerebral scenes still have occasionally physical consequences where interlocutors are shoved aside, people run out of the house 'never to return', doors are kicked - bashing people's heads. [The Most and the Least (a magnum opus of 660 pages) 1981]. In other words, the fuming regurgitative spiral of interplay is the mode here as it always seems to have been. [The Exposed and the Excused 1983]. But nevertheless there has been a revolution. The change is in how much Compton-Burnett tells us via authorial interpolation. [A Pauper and His Plenty 1986]. Whereas the previous few novels have seemed to betray the author's wish to develop the project of scraping out everything except dialogue, this one tells a different story. [Yeasayers and Naysayers (a tiny novel of 76 pages) 1991]. That scheme has been dispensed with here; she gives us a great deal more in her own voice, describing how people react, how and where they move, the looks in their faces, and so on - the 'usual fare' of novel-writing. Now what has prompted this change? [The Moulded and the Marred 1993]. Did that particular effort reach a 'natural' end, or was this a specific piece which needed a more traditional approach? Will the all-dialogue project be taken up again in the next book? [A Firebrand and Her Foil 1996]. We'll see, but I will admit to the after-feeling of a great deal more filled-outness in this piece, and there's a form of satisfaction in it. [Compton-Burnett-reanimes has reached the grand old age of 112 by the time that that last mentioned novel has been published. I think I'll keep her going well on into her second century as good ideas for titles present themselves].