Cornelius by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (1903)

The unavoidable excellence of Pasture is her colour and clarity. This novel follows its three adult predecessors in being astonishingly lucid and brightly clear. She is a classic purveyor of what can be seen as typical Victorian and Edwardian schemes involving love, marriage, money and inheritance. Of course, what was Austen about other than these things?; this ur-story is much older. But where others of her era have shadows of their age across them, or spurts of greater or lesser definition, Pasture is a core storyteller in every inch of her bone. I can't help but feel that were she to receive a BBC adaptation, or a reading on Book at Bedtime, or whatever other popular-exposure method, her thirteen adult novels would find a very ready audience were they to be republished. In this Welsh Borders-set piece, the eponymous main character has a decision to make when it is discovered that he may be heir to a huge fortune. The real main characters are his affianced and her sister, orphaned returnees from a Belgian school, one a soft considerate beauty, the other a fierier artistic thinker. Their somewhat stifling family includes a ripely snobbish nervous aunt and a much more down to earth truth-talking one, a supremely wealthy and mother-coddled cantankerous ugly cousin as well as a smooth-talking ultimately generous good-looking one. The supporting cast are just as lively and ultra-delineated. The question of the fortune is disposed of in an honourable denouement - and the reader's pleasure in a satisfying story is almost physically palpable.

Commonplace Book

'"The best poets," said Lilias, didactically, "are those who never write verses, or, at all events, never publish them. Thus they can never be shrivelled up by the cold breath of criticism into ordinary cross human beings. They can enjoy every moment in peace, and think kindly of everybody. You can revel in your own opinions until you are foolish enough to write them down; but the moment you do that, somebody feels bound to contradict you..."'

from Cornelius by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (Chapter XXXI)

Commonplace Book

'O but i have begun - it's Old Age! - yes, I have begun - & in "my writings" as well as letters - to digress & forget to reach the Point! Do you ever do that? You see, my dear, all (without any exception) of the talent, gift, eloquence, insight, clairvoyance I possess is always digression - never anything else. But of course I do painfully, laboriously, lengthily build up (I speak of both my tracts and my long romances) a sort of foundation, and on top of that a sort of scaffolding, both very simple - including all the Main Characters & where they live, or all the main theses, propositions & contentions & where they end! Then I let the chance moment have its way - have its way with the characters, have its way with the ideas! In both cases I am absolutely irresponsible & unscrupulous &, at the best, Mediumistic, and at the worst both silly and dull!'

from a letter dated October 5, 1944 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

Commonplace Book

'...& I am glad (you can believe!) to be spared that emotion; for it wd. be a bit too direct for that labyrinthine system of hollow catacombs - full of girlish graves - that I call my Heart.'

from a letter dated April 25, 1944 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

Commonplace Book

'"...Old men are like children for falling in love with a new pleasure; but when it comes to losing it, they are not easily consoled like children. They become old men again and die..."'

from The Sin of Monsieur Antoine by George Sand (Chapter XIX)

Moonlite by David Foster (1981)

It seems that, unwittingly, Ruth Pitter had David Foster's number: 'The dirty demagogue, damned and out of date, / Howling the pains of fragmentary perception, / Horridly impaled on jagged spikes, / Teeth of the alligator-god, phenomenon / Acclaimed as actual and total.' (from My God Beholds Me). But I must come out from behind her. I cannot but acknowledge the prodigious invention on display here, and the almost chronic depth of implication drawn from that invention. Extraordinary, no other word for it. This seems to be widely regarded as a 'satire on colonialism' - the satire (if such it is) seems to me to be much more scattergun than that. I would call the space this inhabits by other names: the first 170 pages are experimento-gutturo-scientificised far Celtia. The last 50 pages or so are raucous-experimento-gutturo-scientificised-mythopolitic-Australiana. Foster calls for such explosions of nomenclature. Some of the great failures of this work are fascinatingly anticipated by the author in the work itself - two in particular: the fact that it presents limited purviews of Europeans (he has the crazed albino main character rattle off "All Irishmen aren't dunces, all Scotsmen aren't misers...") and the fact that emotion is detrimentally missing from the entire narrative (the same character admits near the end "I am a man utterly without human emotion of any kind! Nothing!..."). These appear like bandages in the text, in anticipation of exactly those criticisms, which I guess is minorly interesting metafictionally, and I suppose bodes well for my reading of Foster as his career progresses - he is at least aware of these weaknesses though kicking against the pricks of remedy. This is a fantasy, and a novel of ideas, and a warped kind of folkloric ritual-burning. But those three things can be so brightly accessible as to enrich a culture - I wonder if this book will be able to reach forward with enough universality to have the same effect? It's been thirty years at this writing - the case is well in doubt. (Just an aside - I believe it's possible that this book has an elder sister. Moonlite's potential sibling's name is Ottoline Atlantica. She's by Paddy Figgis (writing as Helen Wykham), and was published in 1980. She's the only one of hers I haven't yet read, but a quick examination of the first few pages confirms - lonely far western Celtic island, strongly experimental and tough-guttural approach, scientific tinctures, slipping in and out of paradigm and space-time. Oh hell, please save us from the Magic-Realist-Post-Colonialist comparative doctoral theses!)

Commonplace Book

'Then the darkness would be illuminated by the inward fire which gave him life, and his radiant vision would appear before him. In that ecstatic state he ceased to have the sensations of sleep or of waking. He dreamed with his eyes open, he saw with his eyes closed.'

from The Sin of Monsieur Antoine by George Sand (Chapter XVIII)