Commonplace Book

'There were sharp, short, firm steps ranting up the passage. The wrenching wrongly of the handle gave his face time to solidify in quite incredulous indignation - then in came April.

She came straight up to him, stopped short of his carpet slippers, mirrored him as a turd on a cushion - and rapped out one word, like spitting.

"CAD!"

"I beg your..."

But she had gone. The door had banged. Another door had banged - and this time Lionel was ready for the glimpse of the great swerving saloon - and the swoosh of gravel.

As though his senses, not April, had taken leave down the drive[,] he rose in some haste to catch a last sight of them. No. There she went.

And slowly - slowly his face[,] taking it in, became corrugated - the laugh was not natural. She had been sick on him, actually left something on him. An archaism - and vomit.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 18)

Commonplace Book

'...In the lingo of democracy, America has always been a classless nation. Yet writer after writer, from James to Faulkner, from Dreiser to Fitzgerald, has proclaimed the opposite. A work that does so here, or a writer, is always in danger, at least at first. For Americans, to go back in time is to be a recidivist, a snob, unless, like Lowell, you are already in the national mind very clearly defined. (Then it is patriotism.) Class difference, when finally admitted in the United States, was thrown to the sociologists. Who have treated it as such a stinkbomb of a subject should be - without humor and without human coloration. So that none of us skunks would smell of the results.'

from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part I)

The Piccinino by George Sand (1847)

This is Sand's Sicilian romance, and is classically her, with a rich landscape, young love, a political/philosophical battle, a mystery and the threat of violence. Its overwhelming colours are black and green, and its landscape a tortuous one. The black is the lava, spewed up from Aetna, which underlays the landscape in the area around Catania where the main action is set. The green is all of the intense bright verdure which grows on this super-fertile mix. The landscape is tortuous because of the gullies and peaks all around, through which the characters climb and slip, into which their houses and palaces are built, accessible often by staircases in the rock and staring down chasms. It's a steamy feeling. The main man, Michel (that's short for Michelangelo, so Mee-kell, rather than the Mee-shell) Lavoratori, is taken with a local princess on his return to Sicily from Rome where he has been trying his way into art. She seems strangely connected to his mason-decorator father. Meanwhile the rumoured brigand of the hills, the Piccinino, campaigning furtively against Sicily's Neapolitan rulers of the time, also taken with the princess, slips in and out of a political intrigue surrounding the coming death of Sicily's invalid ruler, the princess' uncle. Michel discovers at a crucial point that all in his life is not what it has hitherto seemed, and the scene is set for he, the princess (the revealer of the mystery) and the Piccinino to play their important parts in the struggle for possible Sicilian freedom. Those who want tough concision, rather than expansive largesse, might find it frustrating. But as a typical example of Sandian high romance, this is full of rich colours and highly entertaining.

Commonplace Book

'...even a virtue can be carried too far. Drake, for instance, carried patriotism as far as to be indistinguishable from piracy. Venetia carried resignation, which is conscious of grave faults in mankind, so far as to be indistinguishable from absent-mindedness, which is conscious of nothing...'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book One)

Commonplace Book

'...Her feet were very small. Her feet were too small. Unable to keep up with Venetia's growth, they turned against her. Like Mexico, they were a disorder unto themselves...'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book One)

Commonplace Book

'...From the first, when it begins to be said that I have a style, am a "stylist," I chafe. Doesn't this mean I have nothing to say comparable to the way I say it - or else that anything I say will all sound the same? I do have in mind an image of sentences I would like to read: long lean branches of them, with buddings here and there or at the end - of fruit, or short stoppages, in sudden calm. And a prose, centrally aural-visual, which would make one hear-see. The "disappearing" style once so vaunted by Maugham and so fondled by the hacks - that seems to me merely a "showing," with no room or vision left for "telling" - and done in an understatement which never dares overdescribe. The best style seems to me so much the fused sense of all its elements that it cannot be uncompounded - how-you-say-what-you-say, so forever married that no man can put it asunder. Its elements may be anything; the expression may be as elaborate or violent as the meaning is. (No one ever raises the point, if it is as mild as the meaning is.)  The word "prose" itself is what should all but disappear in the mind as one reads; just as in poetry, one accepts the marriage of idea and word, but does not too dividingly congratulate. The marriage of meaning and manner is then its own lawful issue, a new object or presence, made accessible. What words make at their best is an open fortress of meaning.'

from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part I)

Commonplace Book

'...modern young men are too easily deluded. For one thing, they have swelled heads, and ask for trouble. They are so sceptical, they believe nothing that they are told. They are so credulous, they believe everything that they tell themselves.'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book One)