Tales for Christmas Eve by Rhoda Broughton (1873)

 This is five shorter pieces - a couple classifiable as long stories, and the others novellas, broadly speaking. They also have a thematic connection with one another in that they all bar one have a supernatural bias. Positioned as they are before what signifies this genre with most modern readers, they will appear a little tame to them. The first, The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth is constructed of an exchange of letters between two society women where a new address of one of them is slowly revealed to be haunted - Broughton suffixes this one with one line: "This is a true story". The Man with the Nose is a novella of a young couple travelling in Europe, where the wife is disturbed by the constant popping up of a stranger with a pronounced nose, and an evil feeling about him, even in her dreams. The husband doesn't happen to note him, is disbelieving and leaves her in a hotel to return to Britain on business. She begs him to stay. When he returns, she is gone, never to be found. This one is prefixed with a claim of truth. Behold, it was a Dream! is a novella of a woman's journey to stay with friends, a couple recently married, to see their new home in the country. On her first night with them she has a premonitory dream about them being murdered by a farm worker with a sickle, in a grotesque sea of blood. She is horrified and makes plans to leave, completely unsettled, though the couple laugh it off and beg her to stay. On a journey to see around the farm before she goes she is startled to see a worker in the fields who is the spitting image of the man in her dream, and points him out to the couple. Despite their disbelief of her, after she has left for home, they fire him. She learns subsequently that the gruesome events of her dream have come to pass, as the disgruntled farm worker returns to the house to exact his revenge. This one has anti-Irish commentary which make it a problem. Broughton says in a last paragraph that this story is true in every respect except where it took place. Poor Pretty Bobby is the longest novella, and slightly more subtle. A young woman's sailor sweetheart returns to her in a dream, wet through, and she later discovers that this visitation occurred on the night his ship was wrecked. This is the only piece which doesn't have a claim of underlying truth attached. Under the Cloak tells the story of a wealthy woman and her maid on a train journey in Switzerland. They share a compartment with two gentlemen reading papers. The light is dim and they're not particularly visible behind their broadsheets. One of them finally lowers his paper and offers them an unknown drink from his flask. It becomes clear that it is some sort of drug, as the maid quickly falls asleep, and the woman becomes highly drowsy. She feels them attempting to remove her case of valuables from beneath her feet, and in a highly mixed and dubious state realises that the one who has never lowered his paper is in fact a dummy with fake hands, or someone rigged up in that way, wrapped in a heavy cloak. She eventually falls completely under the drug's effect, and wakes to find the man who revealed himself and her maid gone, but the strangely garbed figure still in his position. Summoning courage, she desperately scrapes at the mask she sees it has, and pulls away all the false paraphernalia, to find underneath her maid bound and gagged. This crime, she discovers later, has been perpetrated by a disaffected former servant of her husband. Again, this is suffixed with a claim of genuineness. Though these are very entertaining, they perhaps don't fully play to Broughton's strengths - in her novels she is able to probe emotion and character in a way that these don't allow. 

A Village Tragedy by Margaret L. Woods (1889)

 The most distinctive thing about this is the voice of the author. Where a lot of female authors of this period conformed to various entrenched stereotypes - the wit, the romantic, and so on - Woods has a more forthright tenor. This story of a young woman 'rescued' by family in Oxfordshire from a grim London tenement after her father dies benefits from the author's unflinching directness. She seems to me to be typifiable as a midpoint between Hardy and Kipling, to use male exemplars (as there are far fewer female ones). More stripped out than Hardy, more fated and rural than Kipling. Annie soon realises that her uncle and aunt are not going to be an easy ride, though on the whole she's still happy. A growing feeling for one of the other workers on the farm, an ex-workhouse boy named Jesse, is what brings the climax. Despite complete innocence of all wrongdoing, she is seen entering his house alone and staying a good while. The proverbial ton of bricks descends. Turfed out, she is alone in the world, and lacking all resources. In the end, with the promise of marriage at some unspecified time, she is persuaded by Jesse to come and live with him. Her indignation at the unfair accusations of misconduct has been emphasized. So it is quite a strange move on Woods' part to silently drop this angle and have her suddenly get pregnant. This hoop jumped, we are party to the difficulties Annie and Jesse face in obtaining information about the legal necessaries for marriage and permission to start the process. But things look up, and the pregnancy continues healthily. Jesse returns on the train from going to buy the ring, and is crossing the line to return home when he is wiped out by an express. From this grim point it is only a matter of time until heartbroken and undermined Annie, having just given birth, and panicking about the baby being sent to the ever-threatening workhouse, wanders away from the house in a drastically weakened state and collapses to her death on the riverbank. There are moments when Woods' strong voice shrieks a little - descriptions of characters which are too jagged or oversimplified. But on the whole this is that dangerous thing, a promising beginning. 

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany (1999)

 Delany is at pains to point out, at certain points in this, that though his stated views could be interpreted as nostalgic, they are not so. What I'm about to say could have the same quality. I feel a great sense of loss in thinking about the social sciences academic world before the Second World War (approximately), from one particular point of view. It is that of language and its correlatives. It seemed a world which had a contribution to make which was discernible by a majority in society; that, though one did have to be relatively intelligent to take on its complexities, they were not unattainable, due to the fact of being couched in standard and lively language, albeit taken to a higher level. Because the decoding (such as it was) was in the way of the capacities of a good number of us, and the concepts likewise, change was possible because readers could be energized - via accessibility. This is a book with two sections, represented by the colours in the title. The beginning is the blue one, which is mainly a recounting of his life as a frequenter of the porn theaters of old Times Square, where gay men like Delany had pleasurable sex, even when the film being shown was a straight one. He decries the loss of this outlet, and initiates a discussion of some of the reasons why the "clean up" (and wholesale re-formation) of Times Square took place, many of which had publicised moral background which was overt, and much more nefarious economic background which remained hidden. He then expands upon this in the red one. This red one is the academic one in a formal sense, though some of its terms have already been introduced with the blue. The blue is quietly entertaining and its heart is in the right place, wanting not to have too much of a conservative-run schema for how people relate; understanding the value of sexuality as a connector between people, including people of differing backgrounds, and how that feeds into understandings that underpin democracy. So far so good. The red one is meant as an academic through-threading of the concepts begun in the blue, where they are given basis and proper argument. This is where my nostalgia-that-isn't comes in. We end up with sentences like this: "Like all social practices they make/generate/create/sediment discourses, even as discourses create, individuate, and inform with value the material and social objects that facilitate and form the institutions that both support and contour these practices". I'm not saying this is unintelligible at all - it can be decoded. I think I am saying it's decidedly unoptimal communication if you're looking for change. No-one's going to be thrilled and inspired. It is this that I decry about postwar academia - the dead language and its resulting lack of effect. There is also I think an inescapable conclusion which can be reached looking at this type of talk: we are witnessing a postwar voguing-club. Any given academic's capabilities in wielding this kind of language is what gets them status in the club. I guess I want academia to be part of us all again, rather than this exclusivized and possibly over-egotistic territory, because we see the value of not only expressing things in plain language, but of conceptualizing them that way too. After all, there's nothing inherent in this subject which requires this language or conceptualization, so why is it being employed? In other circumstances this kind of unnecessary obfuscation would be highly suspect, a red warning light would go on in our heads - what are they trying to hide? I'd better say this to be fair - I don't think Delany's trying to hide anything. He's just an exemplar of current academic malaise. He's very possibly just had to play "the game", as it is so often now typified in academic circles. And this typification and state of affairs has been building for over half a century. Some of its originators appear to be people whom Delany admires: Lacan, Foucault, Barthes and so on, where perhaps the motivating factor for obscurantism was quite cloudy and trickster-like, almost the wish to perpetrate a joke. If Delany has toed the line because he wanted to get on, we can hardly blame him - we've all done it at one point or another in our lives. And those things can become habitual and ingrained. He does give the impression that he's still thinking quite independently and with reforming fervour, if one pays attention, which is heartening. But I'd like to see the goalposts shifted on this one, so that he doesn't 'need' to depower and befog, and can convince.

Commonplace Book

 "The gateway opening on the lane had once been filled with fine ironwork, but now a common wooden field gate leaned between the square stone piers. This broken-down gate and the dirty cattle-track it crossed seemed like a coarse satire on the two battered but dignified stone monsters which flanked it, each on his secular perch; each looking out over the country below with an air of haughty dominion, unconscious that the shield he superintended had been removed, and that he had absolutely nothing behind him. Ridiculous yet venerable creatures! They had much in common with the small country aristocracy to whom they owed their existence."

from A Village Tragedy by Margaret L. Woods (Chapter II)

The Charollais by Tom Mac Intyre (1969)

 I haven't read Joyce or O'Brien, except in desultory snippets. This is a major lack in my exposure, I acknowledge. My best guess is that this novel owes a debt to them, probably a huge one. But of course it's also very interesting to come at a modern replay without the background, to see how it hits without it. And, boy, does it. The fact that this is now, seemingly, largely forgotten, makes me sad, but perhaps Mac Intyre wouldn't let it be republished for some reason? I can't believe that nobody asked to. One of the obvious claims re J and O is that their language was incredible: a focusing on folk-inflection, myth, religion and cultural sediments quarried in, out, through and under, in a cornucopia of interweave. All of that jetted out in floods. To the level of my understanding, this is the same. Astounding bravura of play of concept matched with language which kiddingly soars. The plot covers the rescue of a huge Charollais bull from a shipwreck by three chancers. They attempt to realise on their opportunity by offering it as a stud to their parochial town. The plan meets a variety of obstacles, keeps falling down, all seeming lost, only to resurrect in another guise. Then suddenly they are witness to extraordinary acts - growing misty horns, whisking up signs and symbols above his head out of thin air - by the bull, which gives them the hint that he's a bit more than just a piece of useful meat. They get a local vet to examine, and he declares that the bull has the Lia Fail, the coronation stone of the Irish kings, as a testicle. From here, of course, the hitherto disapproving clergy get involved, both on-side and off, in rival factions. The Charollais becomes an emblem of revolution, causing disruption wherever it goes, and it goes some places. They are being pursued by the military, and the conservative forces of order, so there is a non-triumphal progress as the three (wise men?), a newly-converted woman to their cause (newly-sexy as well, so a Magdalen of some kind?), and a coterie of hangers on attempt an outrunning. Ultimately the Charollais is brought down by a mad nun with a poison dart. The army and, indeed, the president of the republic, known as Mr Dee La Veera, catch up with them, and all seems to have fallen in its last heap. But then the delightful inevitable occurs - the dead and buried bull rises again, mostly visible as a giant pink misty phallus in the sky (with the occasional testicle). The revolution has its completion, even though, once the bull's image in the clouds finally disappears, arguments start about it, and some believe, some don't. That's the plot, which is wild and joking and cantankerous. But of course the language in which it's couched is something else again - endless referential interplay, scabrous humour, a toying with image and symbol which would be called Herculean if it wasn't so dedicated to bursting that kind of bubble. A crazy, unmitigated joy is what results from that mixed-up matrix.

Commonplace Book

 '"He won't be able to say them for ages," she spat.

A creature quarried, not born, and the eyes in her like burnt blankets from piety gone mad.'

from The Charollais by Tom Mac Intyre (Chapter 3)

Smile Please by Jean Rhys (1979)

 I haven't read Rhys since the 90s. Then it was her short stories, and I now have almost no memory of them, apart from the feeling of being stirred. This is her unfinished autobiography, presented here in three parts: an almost finished early section (volume?) about her childhood on Dominica - the title piece. A much more 'imperfect' section on her time in London and Paris in the Edwardian period and through the First World War - It Began to Grow Cold. And then a diary excerpt, which she had hoped to either include or make use of, from the 40s, called At the Ropemakers' Arms. The early part is quietly luminous, and gives a fine impress of her sensitivity and feeling of ill-fittedness for the ordinary expectations of late Victorian (and indeed colonial) middle class life - she exhibits the classic mixture of understanding of indebtedness and resentment at it which is common to children who don't 'fit' well. The less finished second part, though, is where it really catches fire - somehow it has a more immediate quality, a riffle of more recognisable tension and what seems her typically contrary shelteredness and worldly self-deprecation winning out by turns. The last section is an attempt, which could well have become brilliant if she'd had time to work on it, to form a philosophical conversation with herself, question and answer, outlining her take on her life and love and death, with all of their contrarieties, and the unsayable far reaches positioned carefully and honed in on in their exact spaces. Through these all, she mentions exercise books and notebooks in which she has been writing, and from which some of the material here has been mined. Here's hoping that that matter has been preserved, as it also apparently includes early fictional work, alongside personal journals of various shades.