Commonplace Book

'...Nothing is more liable to misconstruction than an act of uncommon generosity; one half of the world mistake the motive, from want of ideas to conceive an instance of beneficence that soars so high above the level of their own sentiments; and the rest suspect it of something sinister or selfish, from the suggestions of their own sordid and vicious inclinations...'

from The Adventures of Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett (Chapter Five)

Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

The eccentricity of Powys is the overriding factor I think. Of course the verbal eccentricity: the wild arabesques of digressive sub-clauses, the clatter of childlike playfulness and invention. But also the emotional eccentricity: the unexplainable pet hates, the opposing overweening predilections, the fears and bravura in odd circumstances. Some of it is I'm sure actorly - he is at pains to point out that he is an actor at heart, which he feels aided his long years of lecturing. But he is also quite honest about his incapacities, often trying to detect their genesis, and coming to sometimes wild, sometimes believable conclusions. I feel that he had quite an accurate view of himself; that something unerring within him kept his eyes to his own magnetic north, and that that quality inevitably extended to the members of his family also, being a Powys. This element gives an extra level of revelation to this collection - the view at one remove of Theodore and Llewelyn, let alone the lesser known brothers and sisters, is salutary and instructive. The intimate portrait of his life with Phyllis Playter in both Corwen and Blaenau Ffestiniog is endearing, and the side portraits of literary and personal figures who came into their lives, and indeed the books that fascinated them, provide a richness that intensifies the deep pleasure of his company.

Haunted Islands Part I by J. Redwood Anderson (1923)

This slender volume is a little worrying. Anderson's last collection was a trifle mixed in the effect stakes, and this one continues and amplifies the diminution. Many pieces here are what might be called quietly effective. There is a strong sense, comparable to his earlier work, of his muse going through a quiescence. They are often evening-set nature pieces, softly contemplative, but lifted with his trademark strength of eye. A tendency to repeat himself is becoming more obvious, where often a first verse will also be a last, as though that was to his mind 'a song', but the effect is frankly a little flat. One poem particularly stands out from this crowd - An Old Man. Much tougher and more harsh initially, bristling with pig similes (!), and then rising to poignancy in a stare out to sea and a thought of lives lost, it satisfies in a way many of the others can't. Similarly, the longer The Island of the Stones uses drier, stoic language to build a picture of a St Kilda-like isle of barren windsweptness and stone-walled rocky fields and paths. This too has a greater power and somehow a deeper voice. Although this is overall a slightly disappointing volume, there are compensations. I'm pulling at the bit, though: roll on the renaissance in his craft.

Commonplace Book

'"Towers are measured by their shadows, and great people by their calumniators."'

Eastern proverb, quoted in Helene by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Volume I, Chapter VI)

The Sin of Monsieur Antoine by George Sand (1859)

This has all the hallmarks of classic Sand with one addition. It has the wide landscape, through which the characters ride, walk and conjunct typically. It has the big love affair, challenged in the Sandian way with philosophic implications, which are won out over. It has, though, a new political twist. Here we have Sand discovering her interest in communism versus capitalism. My knowledge of the literary exposure of these ideas is fairly incomplete, but it seems like an early outing for this contest. Young striving Emile Cardonnet and aged misanthrope Monsieur de Boisguilbault discuss their common interest in communism in a romantic way which I'm guessing mirrored Sand's at this time. By contrast, Emile's father is a convincingly presented closed-minded capitalist, whom Sand has also be a potential fool; a local village wise-man knows that his scheme for a factory is doomed to be consistently flooded by an unruly river system. This doesn't eventuate, giving the impression that Sand didn't have an overall plan for this novel, and it was one of a few possible outcomes. Sand is almost always a passionate pleasure, and this is no exception, with great subsidiary characters and bright colour, whilst not being on the level of a great novel like Consuelo, for example.

Parties by Carl Van Vechten (1930)

This is most noticeably the novel of an alcoholic. Drink is the main returning motif, it is the currency of this novel. Set in the time of speakeasies, bootleggers and Harlem Nights for wealthy young white New Yorkers, it is perhaps the novel of all of Van Vechten's which tips its hat to Ronald Firbank, one of the author's fascinations, the most. One character, Roy Fern, is almost definitely a kind of warped celebration of him, with his strange intense effusions, glittering eyes, love of men, and waspish slenderness. The opening chapter is very Firbankian, with its short blasts of conversation and event in quick succession, leaving the reader to fill the narrative. Thereafter it settles into a more classically Vechtenian mode, with the sweet young things of the Jazz Age bouncing off one another in a variety of moods. The purity of the eccentricity of this one is new - notably in the character of the wild Simone Fly, whose standard drunken utterance, "Blaaaa!", and tendency to drop and smithereen her glass in her excitement while exclaiming at odd angles on barstools or on the floor is really fine. The open discussion of drugs (Roy Fern loves 'uppies', some call it snow) is also new. A novel which, while it hardly uplifts the spirit, is markedly clever, super-ready for a film adaptation, and only suffers from a rather whimpery ending.

The New Dawn by Romain Rolland (1912)

This final volume in the massive Jean Christophe sequence shares the feeling one gets from all the others, namely that this gigantic work is of the nature of an ecstatic tirade. It is heightened, rolling and flowing in a poetic swirl which, given its musical subject, may be likenable to a particular musical form of which I'm not cognizant. There is an immensity to it which I think may deafen the reader to some of its weaknesses, while at the same time engendering a kind of wonder. A problem is psychology: there is a manner in which Rolland gets up too much steam, his engine is too supremely primed, in describing the moods and tensions of the characters, that he becomes capable of intra-character contradictions. I'm sure he could poetically claim that red was blue, and up, down; he does seem to claim that his people have a guiding mainspring of a particular kind, only for us to find a few pages later that some quite opposite influence or tendency is inspiring them. Because the matter of which he is dealing is humanity in all its colours and shades there are 'escape routes' in simply saying that he's showing both faces of the human dualism, but I think the truth is probably a lot more prosaic: he gets lost in the ecstatic poetry. But there is no doubting the enquiring intellect and great beauty here. His management of Christopher's last illness is fascinating and reaches high. The portrait of late nineteenth century Europe in flux, the winds of history blowing over it, is rich and fascinating. The whole work is terribly underrated in its standing in world literature.