The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith (1871)

Well, the pleasure continues. I've spoken before about the joy of reading Meredith, which is of course not unalloyed. But it can easily still be a celebration, mainly of complex filtered expression. Where others would hammer the nails in, Meredith will often sit them in position for a few seconds and then direct the reader's attention elsewhere, expecting them to remember that quicksilver placement and count it fully as far as plot development goes. Or hint at the affixing by referring to it poetically, lending precedence instead to how someone felt about it, or looked to a bystander with other preoccupations. Here we have a return, after two errant pieces (at least in some senses), to the central mode. A wide-ranging story of the life of a young fellow of the mid-nineteenth century which, like Evan Harrington before it, owes some of its motive power to Meredith's own biography. Harry is a trusty fellow, a good lad, whose father has delusions of grandeur. We follow him through halcyon schooldays, growing into a species of the young blood, but with more than usual brains and sensitivity. This young man idolises his father, who is persona non grata at Riversley, a large house in the countryside where Harry has grown up. His father has, in the eyes of the squire, Harry's grandfather, been the destruction of his dead mother, the squire's daughter. And, for this reason, and for his profligacy with money, the squire despises Harry's father. Harry's father is a sleek charmer, always capable of bending opinion to his will and sympathies in his direction, mostly about his claim to a great fortune through his own wronged mother, whose circumstances are kept behind a discreet veil. The squire is a blustering eighteenth century character, frustrated by the seeming snake-oil he's being fed by Harry's father, but caring a great deal for Harry himself and wanting to keep him from the lowering he is sure his father will bring. Meredith's own father was apparently of a similar make; he is clearly working out through comedy the sense of discomfort this brings him, trying to lay it to rest, perhaps, but also registering the benefits it brings in terms of high tension undercurrents. This develops into what seems to be a great love story via the reconnection Harry effects with his father, and an extended visit by them to a small principality in Germany. Harry falls for the princess, Ottilia, a fact which his father jumps on in order to try to advance his egotistical scheme of social exaltation to his just deserts. We travel through sea voyages, mysterious machinations among London solicitors, adventures on the political hustings, interludes with gypsies, reverses and aggrandizations of fortune and friendship along the way. At the end, Harry's father takes a step too far in a time of heightened tension on the Isle of Wight, a gentle deception is revealed, and all falls down. This acts as a clarifier to Harry, who recognizes that his heart is elsewhere. His real beloved is by now betrothed to someone else, long having given up on him. The pain this causes sees him escape on another sea journey, only to discover on his return that the marriage never happened, her lover was false, and the two are finally free for each other. Though this does have some irritations, which would not be unfamiliar to seasoned Meredithians, like very hidebound ideas of the value of Britishness and its almost supernatural inherent superiority, particularly as associated with the Britannia-like British female at her best, it is still joyfully comic and richly erudite. It also allows the mind to sink into subtleties of expression which, for all the patience they require, reward readers with rare flavours which exalt their palates.

The Paston Letters 1422-1509, A.D. (1875)

This is a three-volume set which seems to have culminated a lot of work in the late nineteenth century to discover and print the complete Paston correspondence. My guess is that James Gairdner, of the Public Record Office, who edited, and Edward Arber, who published, are leading lights of the scholarly history of these records of the fifteenth century, even though I feel sure that some of their conclusions about who did what and when have long since been overturned. Which itself gives evidence of the moveable feast-like quality here; does a particular reference apply to John the elder, Sir John, his first son, or the later Sir John, his second? Often other evidence can provide an answer: such-and-such, who is referred to in such a position, was so only in the lifetime of one or other of them, or died before some other person achieved their title, and so on. What that gives me is an insight into the process, and it's one I'm fascinated by, would love to do similar things myself, for a living preferably. Two other interests are catered to here. One is what people wrote about in those days - these are not on the whole personal revelations of wondering souls, rather they are updates about politics and money and all sorts of cases people had in play, in terms of inheritance. Every now and then a parent will warn a child to apply themselves more, or perhaps a mother will adjure a child to recognize that they need to reply, and not leave all sorts of threads hanging. Of course we are pre-postal, so letters always have bearers, who are often mentioned as being able to provide more information if required on some key matter. The other interest which is slaked in reading these is language. These are in the original spelling and syntax, which becomes very familiar over such a long journey. Variation in spelling, given that there were so many fewer rules; ways of greeting; the invocation to the Lord having you in his keeping at the end (or variations thereof); the language world before easy possessives - "the Earl of Warwick his wife" and so on; how close English was to what we would now think of as something like pan-Europeany Spanish, with 'what' spelled qwat, and 'you' as zow. A brimming compendium for a language nerd and history nerd like me.

Commonplace Book

'...Old Lady Kane, great-aunt of the Marquis of Edbury, was particularly my tormentor, through her plain-spoken comments on my father's legal suit; for I had to listen to her without wincing, and agree in her general contempt of the Georges, and foil her queries coolly, when I should have liked to perform Jorian DeWitt's expressed wish to "squeeze the acid out of her in one grip, and toss her to the Gods that collect exhausted lemons."'

from The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith (Chapter XLI)

The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (1901)

This was called The Life Romantic in Britain - I read the American edition. It is the same old Gallienne to a strong extent, but I do notice a welcome change. It is a change hard to pin down in some ways, but best exemplified by saying that, though it has the same philosophical preoccupations as always, and the same high-falutin' over-delicacy about them, it does also show signs of increased gutsiness of appreciation of them. There is some iron in the skeleton of this which accrues weight to the proceedings. And then leads to quite strong plot-lines: Pagan Wasteneys, the main character, even gets to the point of wishing to become a 'holy killer' toward the end, which hasn't been on the cards in any of Gallienne's other tales of great love to date! It is the story of a young, but no longer very young, man in a crisis of love. The obsession which typifies it has detrimental effects! Wasteneys philosophises about the minutiae of the great emotion, trying to get to the bottom of his locked existence via various women who surround him - this trope is familiar right through his oeuvre, but particularly from his first novel The Quest of the Golden Girl. Some of his attitudes toward women will make modern readers twist and wriggle in their easy chairs; they're like artsy pontifical versions of extremely conservative ones of today. Interestingly, in the end, it is not any quality in one of the women which releases him from his misery. Instead it is a day out alone in nature which does the trick. This sounds hopelessly twee, but is in fact reasonably well put. One chilling thing about this narrative, as mentioned earlier, is the fact that Gallienne posits a certain near-climactic stage of this process as being one where Wasteneys decides to kill the woman of his obsession, in some sort of heightened consciousness of doing a greater good, once he has realised that they can never break the deadlock and be together. This is a frighteningly calmly put echo of the kind of process of thought that I'm pretty sure a lot of obsessed men of our time go through before they murder their partners. What a window, even if it is one with Gallienne's rose-tinted Edwardian high-cultural biases.

I Looked Alive by Gary Lutz (2010)

This is apparently an expanded edition of a collection of stories first published in 2003. The main analogy I'm going to use is the unlikely one of bells. If we imagine that any given author is a bell, we can think about all sorts of elements contributing. The material of which the bell is made; how decorated it is; the sound. Not sure what material the Lutz bell sports, but it is extraordinarily deeply decorated - in other words, he's doing a lot with the language. His experiment is to collate, fold and interfile the words of English into highly expressive belts, along the planes of which unusual combinations point to rare expressions, where implications are built up with not quite the usual suspects. This bell-decoration is sometimes a peculiarly successful experiment - the implications are strangely apt and illustrate patterns of thought or ways of mind limpidly. At other times there's only one word for them: tryhard. Baroque forcedness. Like an unnatural lump to be got over. So the decoration of this bell is a mixed bag, but admirable from the point of view of the fact that it's an experiment given to us in what feels like a molten state; this does not feel like finished experimental fiction, like many a piece in that genre, but rather almost a notebook of goes at a target. Lutz's people are the ones you may imagine in inner cities, or spiritually like places - people who have a lot of ordinary sex and kinkier sex, a lot of issues, nip down the street a bit wobblily in dark clothes, are seen maybe a bit more at night but still crustily during the day, often look a bit thin or pockmarked with whacked hair, look like they might have reputations for looseness somewhere, wander from relationship to relationship, polyping from world to world leaving behind messes and moving on. In attempting those generics I am trying to find the sound of this bell. Really the resound of it. Because that's what it seems to me often to lack. I would reach the end of a piece and feel the need to shrug. Why doesn't this resound more? Why is its impact often a dulled thud? Maybe because Lutz is so close to the action in these (most of them have a first person narrator which could well be him) that they're seen at too tight a register? Or maybe just because sometimes when the expression is too over-milled, the experimental bell cracks under the heat.

Commonplace Book

'"...It seems to me that there is a moment when the soul's beauty and the body's beauty are one. That moment is youth. All fresh and unused, the body is then as beautiful as the soul, but soon, alas! the body, being made of perishable stuff, begins to wear, and less and less resembles the soul within. The soul is growing more beautiful, perhaps, every day, but the body is dying. In vain it strives to answer to the soul within. I know you will say that some old faces are beautiful. They are, but it is a negative beauty, like the beauty of what we call skeleton leaves - the beauty of a clean decay..."'

from The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XVIII)

Commonplace Book

'...impregnated as they were with that immediacy of impression which words, simple enough, written in an emotional present, are sometimes able to retain far into the future, when perhaps the opportunities of such emotion can occur no more. Such is the value of a journal, such is the value of all concrete expression. A journal of old feeling is like a telescope through which we see the past history of the heart, not as a mere hazy cloud of distant glory, but separate star by star, moment by moment. The old agonies, the old ecstasies, may thus be repeated for us, as by some diabolical marvel of physical science...'

from The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XV)