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)

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.

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.........

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.