Commonplace Book

'...the mistakes committed by ignorance in a virtuous disposition would never be of such fatal consequence to the public weal as the practices of a man whose inclinations led him to be corrupt, and had great abilities to manage and multiply and defend his corruptions.'

from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (Part One, Chapter 6)

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (1983)

A slightly bowdlerised version of this was first published in 1947 as Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but the full version was only published in 1983, with the original title restored to it. It is one of a very small band. It comes from a time when Great National Novels were discussed, and that idea was current in terms of its achievability. This is definitely a contender for the title of the Great Australian Novel. It has an outer self set in the 2300s in a kind of super-controlled, super-fertile Australia, like the Ord region of Western Australia has spread around the outer part of the entire continent. At a 'Centre' a young man, Ren, his father, Knarf, and various other members of the local community think about this supercontrol in different ways. Ren is a bit revolutionary and wants, with a friend, to "suggest" a more liberty-driven agenda for the whole country, achieved by means of popular vote. His father is also concerned about it, but his bent is Art. He writes a novel, ostensibly about the period 400 years ago when the world went through its last big convulsions before the change which brought about this more placid, inert but peaceful society. That happens to be the period of the 1930s and 1940s. This work of Knarf's is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow's inner self. It occupies the great majority of the space, with moments spent in the 2300s as Knarf reads it to an old friend and sparring partner, both of them commenting and thinking about it. The 1930s story is set around Harry Munster, a WWI veteran, and his family of wife, two older daughters and younger son. They survive a move to the city of Sydney from a farm Harry loved, endure the Depression, cope with failed love, struggle, want, disparate politics among friends and of the country. Then WWII arrives, and having lost a lot, gained a little, bewildered, they struggle on, and are subsumed into history in a variety of ways. Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw wrote this in 1940-1942, so there comes a point where the narrative must become prospective. Here it happens eerily, with a strange section reporting a kind of plague on board a US ship in the Pacific arena, which has picked up Japanese survivors of an attack. How frightening it must have been to be writing this mid-war, and trying to predict what might happen. The Barnard Eldershaw 'what if' takes us to Japanese surrender and realignment, to further realignment where Russia is recognised to be not an ally but the enemy, and to a revolt within Australia which is led by an anti-elitist element partnering up with socialist elements, all of whom are sick of war, know it not to be an answer, and know that Australia will be further bled dry by the renewed effort expected of it in the new war on Russia. Those elements win out with a tired people, and, incredibly, they destroy Sydney, causing a mass exodus and the beginnings of a completely revolutionised new system. That skeletonised plot is extraordinary enough, but what it doesn't take account of is the magnificence of Barnard's sweeping prose. This pulses in waves of astounding, visionary and yet supremely human strength. Exactly what Eldershaw's contribution was is not clear. Apparently she usually edited, strengthened where necessary, provided alternative plot options and so on. But they were living much further apart by the time this was written; I'm not sure if the to-and-fro of ideas was a little stymied and staled by distance - she is the one who was supposed to be the more tight and concentrated of the two, but she is also an elusive mystery, a little black hole in Australian literature. I'd like to know more. The fact that this book is currently out of print is an indicator I think of where Australia's at, in terms of its national literature. This is one of its great emanations, and Marjorie Barnard in particular needs celebrating as a top-notch wordsmith, and a great figure of her nation's artistic expression.

Commonplace Book

'...Lady Delaval, sooth to say, could as soon have constructed a cathedral as a syllogism, and it is a doubtful point if she had ever drawn an inference in her life; nevertheless nature had been so liberal, and had bestowed on her such a rare talent for argumentation, that the necessity for the assistance of art was in a great measure superceded: so great indeed was her unsophisticated genius in this respect, that it may be questioned whether the redoubtable Aldrich himself, with all his formidable battering train of majors, minors, and consequences, would have been able to force her to capitulate, and admit herself vanquished.'

from Baldwin by Richard Barham (Volume One, Chapter III)

Commonplace Book

'...For the first time Ren was aware of sympathy, not as an impulse or as a need within himself, but as a genuine human contact. Illil had told him nothing, but he knew what ailed her, body and spirit, not through clairvoyance of love or pity, but in the full poignancy of imagination. In this intensification of living, everything in his mind, the day's crisis, the ferment of ideas, awareness of himself as a social being, the semblance of the future, were all illuminated. Two figures on a hillside dwarfed by lonely distance, life simplified to a moment.'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part V)

The Pastor's Wife by 'Elizabeth' (1914)

The biggest surprise must have been this book's size, to the author's fans, when it was first published. A good third bigger than her longest book to date, the main question must have been whether the author's wit could stand, extended to 500 pages. And, as they read, they must have been deeply gratified - it undoubtedly could. In many ways, this is her 'standard' story: young Englishwoman, rather green, goes romantically to live with new German husband on the piny plains of Pomerania, and gets an education in what a variety of experience she hasn't yet sampled. But what 'Elizabeth' manages to do this time is to focus our attention on the woman rather more thoroughly than her erring man. And, as predicated by the length, she takes it slowly, savouring many of the perhaps painful and emotional lessons Ingeborg has to learn with gentle wit that has a concomitant swift stab to it. That deepens the picture. This definitely has a more gentle slope to its topography than The Caravaners, its predecessor, which was rapier-like and a truly grand example of comedy. I wonder whether the death of Henning von Arnim, her husband, in 1910, caused a reflective reflex in the author, where she wanted, for the last time, to visit the theme that had made her famous, to make a final statement upon it. Whatever, this gently humorous novel is a joy comprised of one part sympathy and two parts schadenfreude; Ingeborg's daffy, stumbling realisations of the harsh realities of life form a counterpoint to a vision of compromised content in her life with a very faulty husband. A cynical outlook at its base perhaps, but likely a true one, and transformed by the author's talent.

Commonplace Book

'...Suffering was nothing, bought nothing, brought no compensation, it was a byproduct, and even when it destroyed it was of no account in the logic of event. The people would not be purged or saved by suffering, they would only be selected, freed of the weak and the irresolute, reduced at last to a sticking point. For those who died, for those who despaired, for those who suffered too much and were destroyed in their heart or courage by it, there was no redress. No future could give them back what they had lost. They and their pain would be as meaningless as grains of dust...'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part IV)

Commonplace Book

'...No ridicule knocks the strength out of us so thoroughly as our own.'

from Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (Chapter XV)