Commonplace Book

'The book we've just finished is Sartre's Novel translated, called 'The Age of Reason'. You ought to read it --- It's a Peach! - a lovely soft rotten Peach! whose juice keeps running down your chin as if down Aaron's beard! and you have the lovely liquorish taste long after it's done & down!'

from a letter dated June 7, 1947 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

A Trophy of Arms by Ruth Pitter (1936)

This volume won the Hawthornden Prize and, in so doing, established Pitter on a new level among her contemporaries. It is not hard to see why. Very, very rarely does any piece among these strike a false note. (In fact, there are times when the perfection of the pieces appears almost like the gloss of mother-of-pearl on the clouds of some ineffable Heaven! Some are almost registering in an undetectable octave such as only animals can hear! I think I've been reading too much John Cowper Powys lately.) It is in her small, solitary fight against depression, against worldliness, in her dive into the healing dark spaces striving for contrary unity, that she achieves most. These poems are truly transformative and great. I am assuming that the tart whimsicality of her previous volume has not disappeared; that perhaps this is a kind of holiday-mode for her which will be expressed at irregular intervals. Volumes such as this one, by contrast, are the mainstay; they are her working at the core seam. These first signs of absolute greatness, no matter how minor the key, are inspiring. All power to her gentle toughness, and her standing apart from the crowd.

Commonplace Book

'"...Of all men the Italians seem most utterly to have lost the sense of harmony [...] Must a stranger once more reveal to them its work?...And what man shall teach it to our musicians? Music has not yet had its Raphael. Mozart is only a child, a little German bourgeois, with feverish hands and sentimental soul, who uses too many words, too many gestures, and chatters and weeps and laughs over nothing..."'

from The New Dawn by Romain Rolland, part ten of his Jean Christophe sequence, translated by Gilbert Cannan (Part I)

Commonplace Book

'...reading two Books that I wd. give a lot to know your reaction to - both by the same bloke or chap or fellow or partner or Mr or Johnny - I don't know what he looks like. But he loathes humanity & retches at the common man's common ways, he vomits at the rampaging spectacle of the human zoo and at the horrors of the concentration camp of all human relations! And Nature (that patient Rest Home for the Maniac-Monkey-Magnons of the Powys family's Cave) is no help to him. He doesn't cotton to it. He sees spiders, he scents skunks, he fears snakes, & he is watched by Vultures.

Where therefore does this high-minded distinguished intellectual artist look? I mean whither does he wander? He drifts in among the little secret pleasures of (no, I must not blaspheme) of the Blessed Trinity; & there finds peace. I speak of Mr Graham Greene - not of the other two or three Greens of this epoch. The literary world seems to be only too green - "They must have their greens" as a Major-General once said to me, referring to the copulations of his troops...The books I refer to are 'Brighton Rock' and 'The Power & the Glory'. Now this Greene - whether he be a Greene you could call "old fellow" or wd. speak of as a matey pard - is clearly a Catholic, and by the Mass none of that bunch has fascinated, allured, infuriated and HORRIFIED me as he in these two books. They find my spot, they get my goat, they tickle my gizzard, they reach the place of the little me that's inside the inside of my Master Johnny Start-Up...'

from a letter dated September 15, 1945 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

Commonplace Book

'...Any sort of competition stimulates vulgar minds, but a refined mind suffers from an unworthy rivalry. An exalted nature will infallibly be disgusted with the being who takes pleasure in the homage of stupidity; the mere fact that the object of his adoration tolerates such homage too patiently may be enough to cause him to blush and take himself away...'

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

Commonplace Book

'I dunno, said King Swan. There's a girl up there now you oughta hear. She does her hair so her head looks like a wet seal and when she pounds the piano the dawn comes up like thunder. Say, she rocks the box, and tosses it, you can bet, and jumps it through hoops, and wait till you hear her sing Subway Papa and then go back to the farm and tell the folks and your pappy'll hitch lions to the plough instead o' mules.'

from Parties by Carl Van Vechten (Chapter Three)

What I Was by Meg Rosoff (2007)

Rosoff is a fairly ordinary writer - there is a sense of lack of finish in her craft. Often I had the unmistakable feeling taking me back to my days of reading manuscripts while reading this. That is not to say that, on rare occasions, she is not capable of pulling off a quiet reach up to some adroit profundity. The next thing to say is that this story has the makings of something magical: the 16-year-old boarder-schoolboy near the Suffolk coast in 1962 finding down winding paths a way to the lonely beach; finding a lost colony of fishermen's huts on a sandy island beyond the marshy extremities of a small estuary; finding there, in his erotic confusion, a very attractive boy about his own age who lives alone in the last inhabited hut, almost completely separated from society; befriending the stern, almost wordless boy, who fishes, fixes the hut, lives an active, masculine life; wanting, in his mixed desire and naivety, not to have the boy, but to be him; the interior of the hut worn but warm; the feeling of being out at the edge of the world, windswept, water-suffused and very alive, contrasting his miserable school existence. The part of Rosoff which 'found' this almost dreamlike delicate ideal-come-real and was able to write about it is the part I want to see more of. And there is a bit of quiet humour and the grimy everyday which balance this well. Then there is a twist in the story which, without giving it away, I can confirm as vastly silly. Rosoff has the boy, looking back in later life, call himself 'stupid'. Well, yes, he is. And so would we be to believe it. A novel banjaxed, in one fell swoop.