Commonplace Book

'...He peopled it with beings of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to his own passing humour. Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary child is often the happiest child, since the social element, with its inevitable materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is unquenched by vulgar comment.'

from The Far Horizon by Lucas Malet (Chapter I)

The Cardinal's Snuff-Box by Henry Harland (1900)

Never has a romance been a candidate for, yet in my experience, considering a reprint, literally a chocolate-box cover. Until now. This is the one. It could also take one of those hypercoloured, incredibly detailed cigar-box illustrations. That's the sort of book this is. Rich veins of deep atmosphere-accentuation, but also the sense of unreality and idealised simplicity. It's a plain-sailing story of a writer who has been captivated by a woman seen only fleetingly a few times - she has become the keystone of his imagination. His works appear under a pseudonym, Felix Wildmay, and he is so inspired by her that she becomes the central motif of one called A Man of Words, his most successful. He is a few years later holidaying in Italy and takes a cottage on a grand estate. To his astonishment, his woman is revealed as the owner. She is a widow and a duchessa. The landscape all around glows and hums in a phenomenally staged manner, mists employed to dull purple vistas, searing sunlight to sharpen intense greens, different points of the topography showing up, or dimming down, in a kind of poetic ecstasy. She reads his book, but doesn't know it's him of course. He thinks he's 'safe' from any interpretation she might put on it, and claims to be a friend of the author, explaining the background to the story as his friend's experience. She finds out secretly that he is the author, but doesn't realise that she is the main character. They try to artfully play each other, without realising what they're playing with. He feels he can never reveal that it's him and about her, because she's a 'high-up' and wouldn't have him (of course, he's a gentleman, but still well beneath her, he feels). She's also a Catholic, and he's not. She feels that he's just covering his personal skin in a game in which she's just an onlooker, and finds it amusing. Then a chance reference from a friend suggests that she may indeed be the subject, which gives her a serious jolt. So much so that she is cool with him at their next meeting, from uncertainty and apprehension, rather than dislike or surety. But he takes this badly, of course, and there is a frost, because he thinks that she may have become fond of him and then rejected the idea because he's not one of her Catholic fold. He still has no idea that she knows he is the author of the book, which she has found fascinating, so assumes her motivations are purely based on him aside from it. His comical, old-Italian-woman servant gets ill as an interlude at this time, and they are parted for a good while through the pressure of his being part of the team looking after her, and the feeling that maybe this frost is permanent. Of course, this is a romantic story, so they finally achieve a rapprochement in her garden, on a morning of suitably pointed dimmed hues and lush drama of terrain. The cardinal's snuff-box of the title is one owned by the duchessa's uncle, who stays in her castle for much of the story, on holiday from clerical duties in the Vatican. Once the cardinal loses it, and returning the lost item is an excuse for him to visit her. A second time she hides it in his garden when he's not there, in the hope that he might repeat the gesture. There is also a strain in it, not profoundly observed but patent, of 'love as a means of conversion', where his quite agnostic Protestantism is altered, through the power of the emotion, to a rich fulfilment of the Catholic right way - a clearing of the path. This is a bit awful, but not pressed. It is all decorously entertaining, with, as may be imagined, an almost fabular tincture. But one strange, caustic thing in the last chapter provides an extraordinary contrast. The duchessa utters some very strong anti-semitic statements when discussing how the castle could have been a hotel owned by Jewish people if she hadn't interceded and purchased. Now, Jew-suspecting / -accusing / -disliking statements are not that rare in literature of this time - one would need to read very carefully indeed not to come across them. So that's not surprising, or, really, unexpected in general. But to have Harland putting them into the mouths of his characters is strange indeed, given what I think was possibly his ethnicity, and his history of publishing, earlier in his life, under his pseudonym of Sidney Luska, works of particular Jewish content. I wonder whether he abjured his Jewishness? If indeed he was? And wow, it makes me wonder whether there was any self-loathing at the basis of all this. Would it have been a 'not to be discussed' subject with him? What is the history of this extraordinary turnaround? So, as a result, this chocolate-box fable can be seen as undercut radically from within, and perhaps keenly disturbed.

Lucius or, The Ass by Lucian (c125-180)

Another strange burst of oddness from long ago. A young Greek goes journeying with a letter of recommendation to a professor of rhetoric in Thessaly. When he arrives, the story is set up such that we think he is probably going to find out that the woman who seems to be the maid is actually the professor's wife. The wife is known for her 'black magic' skills, and it turns out that the maid is not unadept either! Push comes to shove, and the maid turns him into a donkey. Here we leave behind what I'm guessing was the original plan of a tale of deceptive identity, and swirl off into a picaresque story of a young man's ego being challenged by all he undergoes as a beast of burden. Robbers steal him and treat him dreadfully. He is rescued by a wealthy young girl, but her father hands him over to a groom who has an evil streak, and they trade blows. He narrowly escapes castration because his owners drown in a tidal wave, and the groom ends up appropriating him and selling him to a gay cult who worship the ancient Syrian goddess Atargatis. As Lucian was apparently Syrian, this seems a nod to his origins. The cult wander from village to village with the statue of the goddess tied up onto his back, and demand alms via dancing wildly, cutting themselves in nerved-up excitation to prove their devotion. But when they are discovered mid-pleasure with a new convert they are thrown into prison, and The Ass is sold to a baker who runs him to skin and bone servicing his mill. A market-gardener who buys him at this low ebb has a fight with a military officer and hides away with him in the house of a friend. The Ass gives them away by sticking his head out of the window of their hideout, Lucian claiming that this is the origin of the phrase 'don't stick your neck out!'. He then provides great amusement in the family of the chef that purchases him next, by eating all sorts of things that donkeys wouldn't normally like, drinking wine, and being trained to perform tricks, which of course he is only able to do because he is human inside and can understand all that's being said to him. His fame grows as a peculiar phenomenon. A foreign girl comes to see him and falls in love with him - and they are both quite happy to make love together, which is.....an interesting plot development! They are spied on by his owners, who decide THIS will be a good money-earner! Set up in a public spectacle to repeat these pleasures with a female slave for all to see, he sees an attendant walk by with yellow roses, which he has been told by the maid in the beginning are his key to transformation back into a human. He grabs them, munching them up, and duly returns to his original form. The young woman who introduced him to odd pleasures is cautious about him, but decides to give him a try as a human lover when he seeks her out, having grown 'attached' to her. But she is wildly disappointed in his little monkeyishness after his no doubt splendid asinine proportions of yore! So, he returns home thankful to the gods for surviving his strange adventure. What I haven't yet mentioned is the cruelty in this piece. Other animals' legs are hacked off and they are dumped over cliffs, he is beaten to a pulp by several of his owners, and so on. The perverse mixture of sexuality and savagery gives this short piece a sting alongside the humour. A clear window into how much has changed since the second century. Though there was novelty and a species of freedom in aberrance in this, I'm on the whole glad we don't live anymore in a world of this kind of ravening. Just have to cure ourselves of those of our times.