Commonplace Book

'A coward! was he a coward? Surely a blind man had very little choice; deeds of danger were debarred from him, but Silas dwelt amorously upon such deeds - courage pre-eminent amongst the high attributes that fascinated, baffled, and angered him.

By a twist of his brain, through his blindness, courage meant light. Courage shone. It allured him, so that he turned constantly round the image. There was nothing moral about this allurement, it was as pagan as any cult of beauty. Courage moreover - physical courage - carried with it the thought of death, which to his egoism was so supremely and morbidly entrancing. That he should cease to be?...he could never adopt this idea. He went up to it, and fingered it, but its clammy touch revolted him, and he violently rejected it always. But he returned to it again and again, working back his way in roundabout fashion, disguising the phantom under a rich cloak of phrases.'

from The Dragon in Shallow Waters by V. Sackville-West (Chapter V, Part 6)

Commonplace Book

'...A minor liner's food is like the conversation of some people I know; it starts with an almost hysterical brilliance; all treasures are produced extravagantly during the first outburst. And after that - corned beef...canned tomatoes...very weary eggs....The eggs on board my ship were so tired that it was no surprise to me to find them one day posing on the menu as Boiled Eggs a la Religieuse. Nobody dared to eat them under this ominous name, but I understood, I sympathised, as I try to sympathise with all weary yearning souls...'

from Japan-I, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (1896)

Lovers of Aesthetic period discursive elegance may take to this book, though it isn't by any means a finer example. Beerbohm outguns Gallienne, so does Wilde, EF Benson gives him a run for his money. That is not to say that there isn't a great deal of pleasure in this book, but where those aforementioned authors manage a sense of lifesap amongst their curlicues, Gallienne in this instance is thinner, his ichor a less pungent substance. There are wonderful moments of prose punctuating this story of the slightly egotistic young man on a pilgrimage of love, meeting various glorious women on a stroll through the English countryside and assessing their potentials for romance. It occurred to me in reading this that Gallienne is an antecedent of Michael Arlen - that what Arlen managed at his best to do is a full-blooded extension in the 20s mode. Sadness ricochets in later chapters of this one, and I'm wondering whether it is a reaction to the early death of the author's first wife; those moments provide a taste I think of what might have been possible in the way of deepening this altogether too light affair. That he was aware of that, and a good sport about it, is indicated by the fact that he allowed the advertising of a parody, The Quest of the Gilt-Edged Girl by Richard de Lyrienne, in the back pages.

Fortunio by Theophile Gautier (1836)

This is Gautier as I have come to expect him to be - bejewelled, sensual, supernaturally tinctured, a little too light. This one is less supernatural, although one suspects it will become so for most of the novel. The set-piece of Gautier, the strangely-behaving creature in the midst of high Parisian society, is set up as usual, but in this one the author decides that we are not to know his secret until within sight of the end. And the secret is quite a lot more earthly than a practiced Gautierphile might be expecting. The gorgeous production of Fortunio's domicile in Paris and his exotic history in India are as hyper-coloured and delicately and yet savagely exotic as Gautier can be, as are the beautiful Parisian women who are mystified by his strange behaviour. Musidora is the heroine here, a cat-like houri caught up by the challenge of the first man who hasn't been captivated by her. The slightly amoral tone is not unusual, in its excitement over sex and death. What is unusual is an ending which suggests that the author didn't quite know what to do with this one - after a cooling, she kills herself, and he enters into a disquisition on the poor quality of European civilisation; end!

A Mad Lady's Garland by Ruth Pitter (1934)

This book is acknowledged to be the first of Ruth Pitter's truly mature work - I believe it is the earliest to supply pieces to her collected poems. I like her earlier work, but I do find richer satisfaction in this. There is more playfulness, more concentration of colour, a more individual voice, though there was a significant amount of all of that in what went before. Hilaire Belloc was her champion for the first twenty-plus years of her career. He says in his introduction that she has the rarest combination - 'perfect ear and exact epithet'. In some cases here this is very true; in some I would say that her ear for a good ending, so vital for the emotional bedrock-level impact of a poem, deserts her. The mostly brilliant Fowls Celestial and Terrestrial is a classic case where the pulsing architecture arches and twists in a growing edifice only to sputter out and flatline on ending. But when these quizzical and sometimes tart pieces really fly they are a joy. Her capacity to enter into states of consciousness which allow her to emulate the rhythms and voice of poetic styles long past is remarkable; her feeling for animals (the main theme here) and their contingencies of life is humorously wonderful. Her ability to relate that to human foibles and poignancy adds subtlety and further levels of weave to an already rich fabric.

Commonplace Book

'...I have been having a lot of trouble with silly little Bloomsburys lately. They all think that it matters to me if they, and people like Desmond MacCarthy, like my poetry. It doesn't. I don't expect them to. They've civilised all their instincts away. They don't any longer know the difference between one object and another, - or one emotion and another. They've civilised their senses away, too. People who are purely 'intellectual' are an awful pest to artists. Gertrude Stein was telling me about Picasso, when he was a boy, nearly screaming with rage when the French version of the Bloomsburys were 'superior' to him. "Yes, yes," he said, "your taste and intellect is so wonderful. But who does the work? Stupid, tasteless people like me!"

How irritating it is, though. In the 1890s, 'superior' people discovered that ugliness is beauty. But the modern intellectual is a bigger fool than that. He has discovered that everything is ugly, - including beauty.'

from a letter to Allanah Harper, c1928 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell

Commonplace Book

'...I met an appalling woman called Madeleine Caron Rock, extremely fat and exuding a glutinous hysteria from every pore. I sat beside her on the sofa, and became (much against both our wills) embedded in her exuberance like a very sharp battle-axe.

Whenever anyone mentioned living, dying, eating, sleeping, or any other of the occurences which beset us, Miss Rock would allow a gelatinous cube-like tear, still warm from her humanity, to fall upon my person, and would leave the room in a marked manner. A moment afterwards, the flat would be shaken by a canine species of howling, and after an interval, Miss Rock would return and beg all our pardon with great insistency....'

from a letter to Robert Nichols, March 1919 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell