Commonplace Book

'...He peopled it with beings of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to his own passing humour. Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary child is often the happiest child, since the social element, with its inevitable materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is unquenched by vulgar comment.'

from The Far Horizon by Lucas Malet (Chapter I)

The Cardinal's Snuff-Box by Henry Harland (1900)

Never has a romance been a candidate for, yet in my experience, considering a reprint, literally a chocolate-box cover. Until now. This is the one. It could also take one of those hypercoloured, incredibly detailed cigar-box illustrations. That's the sort of book this is. Rich veins of deep atmosphere-accentuation, but also the sense of unreality and idealised simplicity. It's a plain-sailing story of a writer who has been captivated by a woman seen only fleetingly a few times - she has become the keystone of his imagination. His works appear under a pseudonym, Felix Wildmay, and he is so inspired by her that she becomes the central motif of one called A Man of Words, his most successful. He is a few years later holidaying in Italy and takes a cottage on a grand estate. To his astonishment, his woman is revealed as the owner. She is a widow and a duchessa. The landscape all around glows and hums in a phenomenally staged manner, mists employed to dull purple vistas, searing sunlight to sharpen intense greens, different points of the topography showing up, or dimming down, in a kind of poetic ecstasy. She reads his book, but doesn't know it's him of course. He thinks he's 'safe' from any interpretation she might put on it, and claims to be a friend of the author, explaining the background to the story as his friend's experience. She finds out secretly that he is the author, but doesn't realise that she is the main character. They try to artfully play each other, without realising what they're playing with. He feels he can never reveal that it's him and about her, because she's a 'high-up' and wouldn't have him (of course, he's a gentleman, but still well beneath her, he feels). She's also a Catholic, and he's not. She feels that he's just covering his personal skin in a game in which she's just an onlooker, and finds it amusing. Then a chance reference from a friend suggests that she may indeed be the subject, which gives her a serious jolt. So much so that she is cool with him at their next meeting, from uncertainty and apprehension, rather than dislike or surety. But he takes this badly, of course, and there is a frost, because he thinks that she may have become fond of him and then rejected the idea because he's not one of her Catholic fold. He still has no idea that she knows he is the author of the book, which she has found fascinating, so assumes her motivations are purely based on him aside from it. His comical, old-Italian-woman servant gets ill as an interlude at this time, and they are parted for a good while through the pressure of his being part of the team looking after her, and the feeling that maybe this frost is permanent. Of course, this is a romantic story, so they finally achieve a rapprochement in her garden, on a morning of suitably pointed dimmed hues and lush drama of terrain. The cardinal's snuff-box of the title is one owned by the duchessa's uncle, who stays in her castle for much of the story, on holiday from clerical duties in the Vatican. Once the cardinal loses it, and returning the lost item is an excuse for him to visit her. A second time she hides it in his garden when he's not there, in the hope that he might repeat the gesture. There is also a strain in it, not profoundly observed but patent, of 'love as a means of conversion', where his quite agnostic Protestantism is altered, through the power of the emotion, to a rich fulfilment of the Catholic right way - a clearing of the path. This is a bit awful, but not pressed. It is all decorously entertaining, with, as may be imagined, an almost fabular tincture. But one strange, caustic thing in the last chapter provides an extraordinary contrast. The duchessa utters some very strong anti-semitic statements when discussing how the castle could have been a hotel owned by Jewish people if she hadn't interceded and purchased. Now, Jew-suspecting / -accusing / -disliking statements are not that rare in literature of this time - one would need to read very carefully indeed not to come across them. So that's not surprising, or, really, unexpected in general. But to have Harland putting them into the mouths of his characters is strange indeed, given what I think was possibly his ethnicity, and his history of publishing, earlier in his life, under his pseudonym of Sidney Luska, works of particular Jewish content. I wonder whether he abjured his Jewishness? If indeed he was? And wow, it makes me wonder whether there was any self-loathing at the basis of all this. Would it have been a 'not to be discussed' subject with him? What is the history of this extraordinary turnaround? So, as a result, this chocolate-box fable can be seen as undercut radically from within, and perhaps keenly disturbed.

Lucius or, The Ass by Lucian (c125-180)

Another strange burst of oddness from long ago. A young Greek goes journeying with a letter of recommendation to a professor of rhetoric in Thessaly. When he arrives, the story is set up such that we think he is probably going to find out that the woman who seems to be the maid is actually the professor's wife. The wife is known for her 'black magic' skills, and it turns out that the maid is not unadept either! Push comes to shove, and the maid turns him into a donkey. Here we leave behind what I'm guessing was the original plan of a tale of deceptive identity, and swirl off into a picaresque story of a young man's ego being challenged by all he undergoes as a beast of burden. Robbers steal him and treat him dreadfully. He is rescued by a wealthy young girl, but her father hands him over to a groom who has an evil streak, and they trade blows. He narrowly escapes castration because his owners drown in a tidal wave, and the groom ends up appropriating him and selling him to a gay cult who worship the ancient Syrian goddess Atargatis. As Lucian was apparently Syrian, this seems a nod to his origins. The cult wander from village to village with the statue of the goddess tied up onto his back, and demand alms via dancing wildly, cutting themselves in nerved-up excitation to prove their devotion. But when they are discovered mid-pleasure with a new convert they are thrown into prison, and The Ass is sold to a baker who runs him to skin and bone servicing his mill. A market-gardener who buys him at this low ebb has a fight with a military officer and hides away with him in the house of a friend. The Ass gives them away by sticking his head out of the window of their hideout, Lucian claiming that this is the origin of the phrase 'don't stick your neck out!'. He then provides great amusement in the family of the chef that purchases him next, by eating all sorts of things that donkeys wouldn't normally like, drinking wine, and being trained to perform tricks, which of course he is only able to do because he is human inside and can understand all that's being said to him. His fame grows as a peculiar phenomenon. A foreign girl comes to see him and falls in love with him - and they are both quite happy to make love together, which is.....an interesting plot development! They are spied on by his owners, who decide THIS will be a good money-earner! Set up in a public spectacle to repeat these pleasures with a female slave for all to see, he sees an attendant walk by with yellow roses, which he has been told by the maid in the beginning are his key to transformation back into a human. He grabs them, munching them up, and duly returns to his original form. The young woman who introduced him to odd pleasures is cautious about him, but decides to give him a try as a human lover when he seeks her out, having grown 'attached' to her. But she is wildly disappointed in his little monkeyishness after his no doubt splendid asinine proportions of yore! So, he returns home thankful to the gods for surviving his strange adventure. What I haven't yet mentioned is the cruelty in this piece. Other animals' legs are hacked off and they are dumped over cliffs, he is beaten to a pulp by several of his owners, and so on. The perverse mixture of sexuality and savagery gives this short piece a sting alongside the humour. A clear window into how much has changed since the second century. Though there was novelty and a species of freedom in aberrance in this, I'm on the whole glad we don't live anymore in a world of this kind of ravening. Just have to cure ourselves of those of our times.

Stet by Diana Athill (2000)

This memoir of editorship and small publishing is interesting to me for a particular reason. Athill was in on the beginning of both Andre Deutsch and Allan Wingate (Deutsch's earlier pseudonymous company), so her experience dates back to the late 40s and the postwar boom in small publishers dedicated to literary work. This was a very particular world of "arty" houses, often based in side streets in old shopfronts or homes, with only relatively few staff, and a LOT of personality going on! By that I mean there were larger than life types, scurrilous types, brazen types well in evidence, displaying their education and erudition, forming a balance to those among the staff who were less obvious in their 'diverting' capacities. I came into publishing on the very last tail-ends of this period, but employed by one of the most noticeable of these big personalities, Marion Boyars, so had a taste of this world as it lay dying. The way Athill speaks of the contrapuntal sway of how a big personality would cause a ruction, and how the lesser ones might have to pussyfoot around to save a situation, or, in the attempt, sometimes make things worse (!) is very familiar. Also her record of dealing with authors, with sudden affronts at a misplaced analytical word, or continuing to publish works even though the author wasn't making any money, or the awkwardness of having to reject one because it didn't cut the mustard, or huge editing jobs to turn works toward the sun, strikes many chords. I don't remember Marion mentioning Diana Athill, but they must have known each other. Marion had a typical response to Andre Deutsch, Athill's 'employer' (she was actually a fellow director) - WHAT a DIFFICULT man! Of course, completely ignoring the fact (unaware?) that she was a good way to also being so herself! My guess is that Deutsch's reaction to her may have been similar. One thing that Athill mentions also rang a huge bell: she speaks of the women of the industry keeping things going while the men peacocked themselves about. In Marion's version of what occurred at Calder and Boyars, she was the one holding things together, once she'd served her apprenticeship to John Calder in the very early 60s. He'd go off swanning around, deeply involved in his theatre festivals and 'scouting' for more works (read 'entertaining himself'), whilst she kept the company moving and got things done. I'm sure, despite Marion's tendency to exaggeration, that this analysis was not far from the truth. I wonder if she and Diana commiserated with each other, and geed each other up? It would have depended on personality; Athill speaks of a particular author here (I can't now remember which one) who was either on the Calder and Boyars list, or very similar to many who were, as being dangerous - by implication, personally as well as in the artistic sense. Perhaps Diana was too 'careful' and (confessedly) upper middle class for the relationship to truly bloom. She certainly is an exemplar of that tight spot where the brave new world of educated liberation met the narrowness of the old way: her editors at Granta should not have allowed her to 'explain' Trinidad and Tobago as 'two islands, one country' in a note, as though the reader were likely to be unaware. But her talk of shepherding authors and their works through the locks without getting sunk, and her candid discussion of the blooming, and dying, of relationships that had long since moved beyond the strict terms of publication, and, of course, the gossip of it all, are really enjoyable reading.

The Marquis de Villemer by George Sand (1860)

This is very much in the standard run of nineteenth century French novels; it is Sand not particularly distinguishing herself, in contrast to how strongly she has done so in other entries in her bibliography. That is not to say that it is in any way a poor read, or a dull one; simply, it does not extend its head above the parapet sufficiently to gain the distinction that is sometimes the quarter of this author. This is the story of a poor but aristocratically-connected young woman, who has no interest in attempting the trappings of wealth. She works as reader-aloud to a marchioness who herself is poorer than she might be through the extravagance of her eldest son, a profligate duke. The marchioness' younger son, the marquis, a quieter, less robust, more academic type, has put in place a financial scheme which will pay his brother's debts, disallow him to indulge any more, and give their mother just enough to be comfortable in the manner to which she is accustomed. He has done himself down in the process, and is a much poorer man now than he might have been, but happier because the precarious situation has been repaired. Caroline, our heroine, goes through a typical-for-the-times arc of an attempt on her virtue by the duke, a growing understanding that she and the marquis are soulmates, a misunderstanding which causes the marchioness to reject her, a running away to peasant connections in the Cevennes and an interlude in a dramatic, perilous and mountainous landscape, and a last, desperate reconciliation with the marquis with his health and life at stake. Interposed are young society schemers, marriage plan shenanigans, joyful rustics, Caroline's sister struggling as a widow with four young children, and other accoutrements of the quintessential plot of the times. Whilst this was not truly an inspiring novel, it was still enjoyable as the recognisable product of a brilliant pen at its more moderate pitch.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952)

After reading her first novel quite some while ago, it is great to be back visiting Pym. From memory, the previous one was set in a village in the country, whereas this is set in London, so quite a change of milieu. Clearly, she is famed for her investigation of what could be described as the smallness or seeming incompleteness of women's lives mid-twentieth century, and this one is an example of that. Equally obviously, one of her great claims is in how she makes humour from that purportedly limited material, and there's no questioning that here! This one's space is placed amongst the attendees and surrounds of an urban London church in 1945. The main character, Mildred Lathbury, knows herself to be one of the 'excellent women' who formed the backbone of a church's community back then when the church was a great deal more alive. That world presided over by the vicar and including bazaars and fetes as fundraisers is very much her locale, but she is also aware of herself in it as seen from the outside, at least to some extent. She knows that she might appear disappointing to a more romantic, or deep-living individual, and her connection to that wider world comes from imagination, poetry and occasional spurs of contact with more travelled types. She accedes in seeing herself with some disenchantment, definitely, but is keenly realistic about what someone of her nature can stand, or manage. Pym allows us to see this in quite a lot of detail; my suspicion being that the depiction is one of herself, give or take a bit. This combination of faithfulness to the details of the somewhat strictured life, where she appears to celebrate its limitations and delight in the minority of its concerns, with quietly sly undercutting of their constraining smallness through tossed-off satiric swipes, is the adroit stuff of the Pym mixture. This one centres around a couple who move in on the floor below Mildred. Rockingham (Rocky) is a handsome and effusively charming officer, just back from the war in Italy, whom Mildred imagines as having charmed a swathe of lonely Wrens at his villa, and Helena is a semi-glamorous looking anthropologist who hasn't seen Rocky consistently for the duration, and has got on with her academic life as best she can, including very possibly some amorous adventures. Mildred is careful around them, as they seem so urbane and worldly. Through visits to Helena's learned society, meetings with various unmarried and possibly eligible males, frugal meals, both out and in, in the rationed restriction of these spare new days of freedom, a drama with the vicar and an entrapping widow, and gossip with her associates among the bevy of excellent women who keep the whole edifice moving, Mildred's preparedness to help, occasional social uncertainty and wry self-criticism are well-exercised. Also given a workout is dry reproval of not only the smallness of mind necessary for such a life, but also of the more expansive romantic silliness to which she is largely immune. Attitudes to the should and shouldn't of things are compassed with forgiving fascination and zest by Mildred as she is given more of an education in how others live. Though I couldn't possibly survive on a diet of this shade alone, I cannot but acknowledge its penetrating intelligence, and saving comedy.

Commonplace Book

'"...you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that - you must never shrink from it. That doesn't suit you at all - you're too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views - that's your great illusion, my dear. But we can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all - not even yourself."'

from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Chapter 20)