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'...She had the grace of silence, of reflection, to a rare degree. Some people found her frightfully dull, but then imagine what "some people" are, it can be said that their disapproval is a distinction that no fairly admirable person should ever be without...'

from To Lamoir, a piece in May Fair by Michael Arlen

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'...There is Shih-li-p'u, a village of temples. In one of its temples the stair has crumbled away, but, by climbing the wall, we found in an upper room some restful paintings representing rather overdressed persons on fat piebald horses cutting one another's heads off. The optimistic expressions of the severed heads while still in mid-air was a lesson to us all...'

from Yunnan-II, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

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'His eyes were closed against her beauty, else he had seen the sudden smile that touched her beauty, touched it and was going, going, lurked a while in the depths of her eyes like a very small bird in the ferns of love-in-the-mist, and lo! was gone.'

from The Three-Cornered Moon, a piece in May Fair by Michael Arlen

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"A laugh was circling among the ladies of whom Adrian was the centre; first low, and as he continued some narration, peals resounded, till those excluded from the fun demanded the cue, and ladies leaned behind gentlemen to take it up, and formed an electric chain of laughter. Each one, as her ear received it, caught up her handkerchief, and laughed, and looked shocked afterwards, or looked shocked and then spouted laughter. The anecdote might have been communicated to the bewildered cavaliers, but coming to a lady of a demurer cast, she looked shocked without laughing, and reproved the female table, in whose breasts it was consigned to burial: but here and there a man's head was seen bent, and a lady's mouth moved, though her face was not turned toward him, and a man's broad laugh was presently heard, while the lady gazed unconsciously before her, and preserved her gravity if she could escape any other lady's eyes; failing in which, handkerchiefs were simultaneously seized, and a second chime arose, till the tickling force subsided to a few chance bursts."

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXXVI)

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'We live in a world of generalisations, which the wise never tire of telling the foolish to mistrust, and with which the foolish never tire of pointing the failures of the wise.'

from The Ace of Cads, a piece in May Fair by Michael Arlen

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'"...that period [...] when science shall have produced an intellectual aristocracy, is indeed horrible to contemplate. For what despotism is so black as one the mind cannot challenge?"'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXXIV)

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'"...I see now that the national love of a lord is less subservience than a form of self-love; putting a gold-lace hat on one's image, as it were, to bow to it."'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXXIV)

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'"Speech is the small change of Silence."'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXXIV)

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'"We are all as God made us," sighed the young gentleman.

"By no means," said the Princess Baba, "for some people are charming and some are not, and what does God know of charm? It is dreadful to lie awake at night thinking that God lacks charm. Yet the word is never so much as mentioned in the Bible."'

from May Fair by Michael Arlen (Prologue)

The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (1891)

This is a really elegant and typical late-Victorian novel. It has the expectable richness of description and breadth of incident; it has the social divisions and indeed comedy; it has the discursive spread. I would lay some emphasis on the elegance. The style is poetically backboned whilst being comfortingly familiar, and has the tonal depth that presents the reader with the feeling of dramatic immersion. Her faults are here, too. She has a tendency toward the hothouse - a feeling of dramatic twisting to serve plot which is, of course, not unfamiliar, and oddly quite re-assuring, but still disserves the highest ambition. Her novels seem to me to be alternating. The first and third are slightly more ascetic, a little quieter and shorter, whereas the second and this one are greater, more spreading pieces that capture a whole group in their society and exigencies. But after all that, whatever it is that draws them together is stronger than that which separates them. The identifiably notable Malet style and the world it creates is rich and enveloping: so much so that characters are beginning to re-appear from the previous novels in subsequent ones - her fictional notion was clearly an all-embracing one. Henry James thought very highly of her; she is certainly a deeply satisfying, rounded tale-teller.

Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby (1937)

This collection of letters were written to 'Rosalind' from 'Celia'. Rosalind was Jean McWilliam and Celia, of course, Winifred Holtby. They met in a WAAC camp at Huchenneville in France toward the end of the Great War, where McWilliam was in command and Holtby her hostel-forewoman. An instant mutual respect and friendship bloomed and they became lifelong correspondents. As, after the war, McWilliam soon became a headmistress in South Africa they saw one another in the flesh very rarely. These letters expose a part of Holtby I hadn't divined in reading her first two novels - her amazonian quality and her political and philosophical savvy. But just in case that sounds rather serious it needs mentioning that the other thing they expose is her light-heartedness and wit. The sun shines and hope echoes through these missives; it's a bright book. She discusses her own novels and those of others with a self-deprecating strength of appreciation; she gives flavourful impressions of life as it was lived by her day to day; she analyses popular politics with insight; she argues lovingly and with even passion when disagreeing with McWilliam. This book also allows deep glimpses into her friendships with Vera Brittain and Stella Benson and her part in those literary times - an influence lost with her early death in 1935.

Commonplace Book

'"...Kissing don't last: cookery do!"'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXVIII)

The Glasshouse by M. Barnard Eldershaw (1936)

This is in one sense a phenomenal departure from the previous efforts of this joint author. Both A House is Built and Green Memory are novels set in Australia and among colonial families, involving their businesses, reputations, and generational life (including a few cataclysms). I wonder whether Marjorie Barnard or Flora Eldershaw came to the fore with this one, and imagine a more balanced share in the earlier two. It is one of a fascinating group of novels from the age of sea-travel: Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, V Sackville-West's No Signposts in the Sea and Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools immediately come to mind as examples. This one is quite Woolfian in a sense, with a small group of characters, passengers on a freight ship in a contemporary 30s milieu, on a journey from Antwerp to Fremantle. Their small tragedies and comedies, their prepossessions and social sniping are recorded by the main character, a writer, whose efforts to distil what she imagines as their back-story are included in the novel. For its impressionism, simple poetic description, malicious comedy, and rich rushes of deeper sadness I value this book. Vastly more valuable than its non-existent reputation would imply.

Commonplace Book

'The philosophy of the point of view is a great and illuminating philosophy; but it tends somewhat to the promotion of pessimism, showing, as it does, the permanent and surprisingly great gulf fixed between one human mind and another.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book VII, Chapter I)

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'Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection. Once characters have been born they assume a complete life about which everything exists, waiting to be recorded. The whole of art lies in the omissions.'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', October 6th 1926 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

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'It is comparatively easy, under certain conditions, to forgive our neighbour his own trespasses; but it is well-nigh impossible to forgive him the trespasses he makes us ourselves commit.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book VI, Chapter IV)

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'Hitherto it had been simply a sentimental dalliance, and gossips had maligned the lady. Just when the gossips grew tired of their slander, and inclined to look upon her charitably, she set about to deserve every word they had said of her; which may instruct us, if you please, that gossips have only to persist in lying to be crowned with verity, or that one has only to endure evil mouths for a period to gain impunity.'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXIV)

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'"When a wise man makes a false step, will he not go farther than a fool?"'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XXII)

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'...I really shall be disappointed if I go through life without once being properly in love. As a writer, I feel it my duty to my work - but they are all so helpless, and such children. How can one feel thrilled?'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', April 22nd 1925 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

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'Patriotism - love of country. How excellent an emotion - not, I think, a virtue, except in so far as any strong feeling has more strength, more virtue in it than tepidity. When we speak of it as a proper and decor[o]us sentiment towards the State, we wrong it, as a man wrongs a woman whom he loves merely because she is his wife. The love of country is a feeling for the countryside - its hills and villages and race of men. It is a thing wholly individual and un-moral, as the love for another person is individual. To confuse this love of country and race for an adulation of the State lies at the bottom of much pain and confusion - of sentimentality and positive danger, too, I think. To raise it into a civic virtue, to clothe it with pomp of armies and banners, to stain it with blood and to slay before it as before an unholy altar sacrifices of gold and of men and of men's liberty - this is not patriotism any more than the lust of a senator who lays before his mistress the spoils of a state and of his rivals in love.'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', April 10th 1925 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

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'...She was not in love, she had sought love so often, so eagerly, and so futilely that her capacity for it was long ago exhausted. Instead her mind was invaded by a sentiment to which she wholly surrendered herself. Around it she twisted all the imaginative garlands of which she was capable. These dreams were more to her than actuality could have been, for in them all was arranged to her liking, they far overtopped any possible reality, and left tasteless and unwished for the friendships or even love that she still might have had. She had never known summer; so must suffer again and again these false spring-times, these long moments of counterfeit enchantment, secretly feeding herself on miracles...'

from The Glasshouse by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Book Two, Chapter VIII)

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'Perhaps love played his tune so well because their natures had unblunted edges, and were keen for bliss, confiding in it as natural food. To gentlemen and ladies he fine-draws upon the void, ravishingly; or blows into the mellow bassoon; or rouses the heroic ardours of the trumpet; or, it may be, commands the whole Orchestra for them. And they are pleased. He is still the cunning musician. They languish, and taste ecstasy: but it is, however sonorous, an earthly concert. For them the spheres move not to two notes. They have lost, or forfeited and never known, the first supersensual spring of the ripe senses into passion; when they carry the soul with them, and have the privileges of spirits to walk disembodied, boundlessly to feel. Or one has it, and the other is a dead body. Ambrosia let them eat, and drink the nectar: here sit a couple to whom Love's simple bread and water is a finer feast.'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XIX)

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'...He belonged to the unlucky order of persons who possess the temperament of genius without possessing any sufficient practical talent to act as safety-valve and carry off the alarming rush of steam genius is continually in the process of generating. Such persons are worthy of all commiseration. In the abstract one regards them with the tenderest pity. In the concrete one too frequently finds them insupportable.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book V, Chapter II)

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'But here, in this grey city, there is all the sorrow and dignity of a conquered people. Never believe any one when they tell you that it is more dignified to win than to be defeated. It isn't true. Here in the streets, lit no more brightly than London during war-time, English Tommies march up and down, looking very gay, friendly and irresponsible. Their canteens are in the best hotels, and a lovely building down by the Rhine. Outside are great notices "No Germans allowed." The money for their food is all paid from the German taxes, and the German children crowd round their bright lit windows, watching them gobble up beefsteaks. It is one of the most vulgar things that I have seen...'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', October 6th 1924 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

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'It is most disheartening for those of us who try so hard to be good yet attractive to see how easy it is for rogues to make their effect. We good mild persons who powder our noses and pin our hopes to marriage with a docile breadwinner - we are inheriting and devastating the earth. We have invented Disarmament and Prohibition and the Girl Guide Movement and Higher Thought - and lo! one splendid lie, one fantastic coxcomb, can make us all look fools!'

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

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'Young women in the West simper to match the men's swagger. Sombreroed beauties who ride gloriously from one adventure to another have never been seen by me in the Western States - indeed, I know no Western girls who can sit a horse at all. As far as I have seen the young generation of Western charmers, they seem to be exclusively indoor. Pioneering was mother's job. With rouge, rolled silk stockings, near-silk jumpers, hobble-skirts and silly pretty little city toques, they outrage the enormous desert skies; on high French heels they totter along remote boardwalks; with servile squeakings and gigglings and nudgings they ensnare the simple cowboy hearts that we have believed that only the free, the untamed, the primeval, the trick-equestrienne female - (like us in our movie mood) - could ever charm or deserve. Here are mincing suburban morals, small-town graces, city smirks and wiles, seducing our interesting rogues....'

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

Commonplace Book

'There are several highways across the North American continent, and this fact alone fools travellers. Highway is a word with an easy and comfortable sound to the ears of all but those who have already motored across the States. Actually the use of the word in this connection is an act of faith, and very beautiful. It means that some day Ford-errants, or their successors, will be able to run singing, without changing gears, on a road like a taut wire stretched from the sunrise to the sunset. Let us not dwell on the disappointing fact that, by that time, all the trans-continental fools will be inefficiently using aeroplanes, and the only improvement will be that they will fall into air-pockets instead of bog-holes, and so end their folly and their difficulties once and for all. At present, however, the winter highway is inadequate as a way and can hardly be called high...'

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

Commonplace Book

'Ignorance is the impetus that pushes all travellers from their starting-points. We travel because we do not know. We know that we do not know the best before we start. That is why we start. But we forget that we do not know the worst either. That is why we come back.'

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

Commonplace Book

'"If one could only stop the machinery for an hour or two," he said to himself, "and get a rest - expunge thought and feeling, put out one's eyes, shut one's ears, sit dumb, blind, solitary in the void - if there is a void. But that's just the intolerable wear and tear of it: there is no void, no space of silence and quiet. Everywhere energy, force, drive. Everywhere a crowd, a hideous jostling crowd of things struggling to be born, struggling to make themselves heard and felt, struggling to push something else aside so as to make their word, their want, their meaning known. And all to no purpose. Their word is emptiness, their want fruitless, their meaning nil. For the circle is never broken: nothing, nobody, can eve[n]r break out of it and be free. The great millstones turn and turn on themselves eternally, grinding down each generation - man, beast, all living things alike - into food for the coming generations, which in due time will be ground down too. If one could only remember that, be passive, be careless, refuse to expect, refuse to fight. But then comes in the infernal malice of the whole conception. Good care has been taken to make us so that we must expect, must fight. For the sake of keeping the gigantic farce in full play, we are tricked with an innate conviction of our own power, freedom, personality - tricked by the flattering conceit that it is not only possible but incumbent upon us to act, and create, and believe, and find out."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book IV, Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'..The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note: the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers: a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude: a boat slipped toward her, containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked at the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territory, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weir-fall's thundering white, amid the breath and the beauty of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting; a terrible attraction.'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter XIV)

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'Perhaps the inherent force of a nature is shown even more in its passive and negative than in its active and positive self-expressions. In its power of voluntarily limiting its own horizon; of setting itself arbitrary boundaries; of saying, "Thus far will I go, see, admit, and no further." For it takes a lot of latent strength to sit, either mentally or physically, really still. Not to fidget. To "stay put," in short.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book IV, Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'The wind that bowed the old elms, and shivered the dead leaves in the air, had a voice and a meaning for the baronet during that half-hour's lonely pacing up and down under the darkness, awaiting his boy's return. The solemn gladness of his heart gave nature a tongue. Through the desolation flying overhead - the wailing of the Mother of Plenty across the bare-swept land - he caught intelligible signs of the beneficent order of the universe, from a heart newly confirmed in its grasp of the principle of human goodness, as manifested in the dear child who had just left him; confirmed in its belief in the ultimate victory of good within us, without which nature has neither music nor meaning, and is rock, stone, tree, and nothing more.

In the dark, the dead leaves beating on his face, he had a word for his note-book: "There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness: from that uppermost pinnacle of wisdom, whence we see that this world is well designed."'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter X)

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'This description of poverty is addicted to moving. It frequently changes its address. It lies abed late of a morning, and only regains a sense of security and freedom after dark. It is almost invariably in debt and in a persistent state of anxiety as to ways and means. It seldom enters a place of worship, though it contrives to show a gay face and smart garment in the music-hall or gallery of the theatre. It is generally vulgar, mean, tawdry, sensual, improvident, disreputable, incorrigible - often clever, witty, kindly, unselfish, as well. And it is always pathetic - pathetic with the desolating pathos of things mistaken and gone astray; of things by nature glad and pleasant, but through accident or wilful mis-use grown soiled and dirty; of things born with a curse of inadequacy and futility upon them - dancing, as vessels dance, all the more merrily over the waves for lack of the ballast, that, while it would make their course a slower and more laborious one, would save them from foundering at last.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book IV, Chapter I)

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'Women come to India, I understand, either because they are married to empire builders or because they want to be. They are expected to learn to play bridge well, to dance well in the manner of about two years ago, and to know what to wear at the races. To take an interest in India is, on the other hand, most unladylike. A nice woman may go so far as to say sometimes, "My dear, I'm simply terrified of these fiendish revolutionaries and things, I sometimes think they'd like to blow us all up in our beds." A kind of imperial district visiting is also permitted and one may hear a Perfect Lady talk about "My little Thursday Ranees", to whom she teaches leather-work and basket-making. But to find a woman going farther than this, or to hear her admit that she has come to India to see India, will make any well-brought-up empire builder blush. The younger he is, the pinker he blushes.'

from India - II, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

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'...She hadn't any vulgar longing for story or plot, natural patterns were enough with their inconsequent significance, their broken cadences and unplanned twists of irony. Life directed, edited, and shaped gave her less satisfaction, not more. It was second-hand; this was first-hand, quite genuine raw material, as potentially interesting as murder, rape and arson. [...] They fascinated her as the water, moving by the ship's side, always changing, always the same, fascinated her. This had been a typical day at sea. Its very normality was a sort of curiosity, an inverted stimulus. Its very fragmentariness stirred in her the wish to mould it to some literary ends. Each of these people placed a thread in her hand; if she followed it into her own mind she could walk the mazes of their lives. She felt that power in her. Why shouldn't she shape something out of the little chaos about her? These thoughts were not hard and clear; rather were they a sensuous mental drifting, a state of mind, peaceful but fertile, created in her by the rhythm of the ship...'

from The Glasshouse by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Book One, Chapter III)

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'"Marriage is a sort of grave [...] in which, it seems to me, women are called upon to bury a whole lot of precious and delightful possibilities."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter IV)

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'...Miss Williamson carried jauntiness to its logical conclusion. She had put on her yachting cap, a sailor blouse with anchors worked on the collar, and a bright and skittish blazer. When she thrust her hands into the pockets it rucked up saucily over her behind. A nautical roll completed the toilet. It was acutely embarrassing to look at her. You felt that she might realise at any moment how she looked and be publicly and painfully ashamed. It was like seeing the Lady Mayoress's bloomers fall off at a civic function, amusing of course, but uncomfortable too.'

from The Glasshouse by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Book One, Chapter III)

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'"...Has it never occurred to you what a lovely thing revolution is - La Revolution - she, the person, the spirit, the beast, perhaps - I am not sure which - who wipes off the dust and makes the rusty wheels turn again, and sweeps away dead ideas and brings forth living ones; that persistent enemy of stagnation without whose broom and dustpan human affairs would be smothered by refuse and cobwebs and eaten out by dry-rot? I don't paint allegorical pictures, you know; but if I were ever deluded enough to attempt one, I would try to put Revolution worthily on canvas, in her blood-red robe, holding a scourge in her hand. She is a divinity much more to my taste than smirking marble Apollos, or even Raffaelesque Madonnas, dressed, parrot-like, in half the colours of the rainbow."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter II)

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'"Beauty lies far deeper than most people are willing to suppose. It consists in the true relation of things to themselves. Everything natural is beautiful."
[...]
"Every action, expression, aspect, rightly understood, is beautiful in as far as it is spontaneous and according to nature. And by that I don't only mean nature groomed, and rubbed down, and in magnificent condition, like a prize animal at a show. I am not going back to any mythic golden age for my beauty - not to impossible gods and goddesses in marble."

"You acknowledge the antique as the basis of instruction, surely?" gasped Mr Barwell.

"No, not as the basis - most emphatically not as the basis. That is getting hold of quite the wrong end of the stick. Work towards perfection, if you like - if you can - if perfection exists; but to begin with it and work back from it is a self-evident mistake, I should say, contrary to all known laws of development. By setting your students down opposite to those faultless marble impossibilities you create a false standard in their minds. Nature does not come up to that standard; consequently, when you show them Nature, they despise her. Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. Nature is the good; it is an impiety as well as a stupidity to discredit her by filling your students' minds with dreams of a non-existent better. The very best life model you can get looks defective after the Apollos, and Venuses, and all those other ill-conducted classic divinities whom it is customary to make such free use of in the education of English youth. The final measure must always be Nature. Why not send your students to her at once? Why use lies, in short, as a preface to the truth? And why be afraid to take the truth as a whole? I find Nature is full of imperfection, failure, pain, of irony, and of humour of a very broad literal kind. Well, I accept her unhappy and malign aspects as just as true as her happy and benign ones. After a tremendous struggle we have come to understand, thanks chiefly to Turner and Constable - some of the younger men are beginning already to forget or ignore the lesson, though, I am afraid - that rain and storm and cloud are at least as beautiful as clear sky and sunshine, the elements at war as beautiful as the elements at peace. Well, I want to carry that understanding further and deeper. I want to show that, if intelligently looked at, poverty, disease, sorrow, decay, death, sin - yes, I am not much afraid of the word - are ideally beautiful too, paintable too, intrinsically and enduringly poetic."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter II)

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'"Don't talk to me about beauty as if it was a thing by itself - a quantity, measurable, ponderable, producible or removable at will," he was saying - "as if it could be laid on, as a cabinetmaker lays on a veneer of precious wood over a plain deal surface; as if it could be bought and sold, taken hold of, carried about; as if you could put your finger on it and say, Here it is; or on the absence of it, and say, Here it is not. That is a horribly gross, carnal conception of it. Beauty is a spirit, and they that worship it must worship it in spirit and in truth - specially in truth, not in shams, and delusions, and pretences, and fashions, and affectations, which are precisely that in which the majority always have worshipped it, and always will worship it, I suppose, human nature being what it is, protest as one may. Beauty is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and yet it is always changing, shifting, showing you a fresh face, revealing itself anew. It is endlessly stable and endlessly fertile. It informs all things, and yet in a sense is nothing. You apprehend it more with your intellect than with your eyes. And that is what English people persistently refuse to understand. They are ruining their stage, as they have already ruined their picture-galleries, by the besotted belief that intellect has nothing to do with it; that beauty - which is only another word for art - begins and ends with an appeal to the eyes. We English plume ourselves on our respectability and decency, on avoiding the quagmire of sensuousness into which other nations fall. Only look at the walls of our exhibitions, look at the mise en scene of our theatres! I declare I believe we are the most sensuous nation on the face of the earth. The appeal is always to the eye, and to what are called the domestic affections. And the domestic affections are the biggest shams out. Legalized sensuousness - that is what the domestic affections amount to if you run them to earth."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter II)

Commonplace Book

'"...the truth is always sad," Colthurst said quite gently. "The great fundamental facts are not only sad - they are almost hideous. That is why nature tries to hide them under leaves and flowers, and glories of colour, and of light and shadow, and why we try to hide them under poetry and art. That is why, taking it at a lower level, we lay out gardens, make fountains play, light up lamps. In a commonplace way even these trivialities help to hide the 'accepted hells beneath', the ugly bases of our life..."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book II, Chapter VI)

Walls and Hedges by J. Redwood Anderson (1919)

This was Anderson's first publication post-war, and I wonder whether he served and what effect that service had. Coming through the familiar tone from his previous volumes is an unexpected repetitiveness and occasional flatness. That said, there are moments in this which soar. The piece entitled Ecstacy is a perfect example of untrammelled exploration of a tender feeling. His word- and indeed phrase-choice in this poem is spectacular, most obviously when read aloud, allowing the discovery and wonder in the poem to really breathe. There is another called Stars which unfurls a similar array of artillery, with words and inherent wonder brilliantly building the sense of the feeling explored together. The other explanation of the flatness sometimes apparent here is of course the effect of modernism and its typifying repetitions - I am hoping he steered clear, because, as exampled here, it doesn't aid his style. Quite whose it did aid is something I'm on the road to finding out - anyone's? Despite its moments of magnificence, this is the first Anderson volume I've read where he looks vulnerable to failing. Perhaps, though, that's a sign of the movement and turmoil required for something really great to come.....

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'There was war in Szechuan - if you could call it war, for there were no posters about war. No pictures of strapping heroes encouraged those who felt neither strapping nor heroic to find out what tonic war could do for them. In Szechuan war advertised itself; one saw the war and one saw the heroes - which was unfortunate from the point of view of those who deal in war. Even the losers advertised the war. I watched the dead losers go, in procession but not in triumph, face downward in the river, threading their forlorn way through the plaited rapids, pausing indifferently in the quiet reaches where the water enfolded them like gold silk. I saw the less fortunate losers come to seek the protection of the mountains, the wounded slung painfully on poles carried by unfriendly coolies forced into service, or riding on bleeding and dying ponies. The unwounded also carried significant news of the glory of war; their sunken eyes saw nothing, their faces were like crumpled paper, they wavered on their feet. Only those of the vanquished who escaped first were strong enough to revenge themselves upon a cruel world. Like locusts they paused in their passing, and where they paused desolation entered.'

from The Yang-Tse River, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'Among boys there are laws of honour and chivalrous codes, not written or formally taught, but intuitively understood by all, and invariably acted upon by the loyal and the true. The race is not nearly civilized, we must remember. Thus, not to follow your leader whithersoever he may think proper to lead; to back out of an expedition because the end of it frowns dubious, and the present fruit of it is discomfort; to quit a comrade on the road, and return home without him: these are the tricks which no boy of spirit would be guilty of, let him come to any description of mortal grief in consequence. Better so than have his own conscience denouncing him sneak. Some boys who behave boldly enough are not troubled by this conscience, and the eyes and the lips of their fellows have to supply the deficiency. They do it with just as haunting, and even more horrible pertinacity, than the inner voice, and the result, if the probation be not very severe and searching, is the same. The leader can rely on the faithfulness of his host: the comrade is sworn to serve.'

from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (Chapter III)

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'Miss Crookenden refused to see what was unlovely, to admit the existence of what was impure. If she needs must touch pitch, she would whitewash her pitch first, believing thereby to escape defilement. Many of the sweetest and noblest women go through life practising these pious frauds upon themselves. It is impossible not to honour them. Yet fraud, even of this high-minded description, remains fraud still, and brings its inevitable punishment along with it.'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book II, Chapter IV)

Drift by James Hanley (1930)

This is at once an amazing and a confounding book. Its picture of a young Catholic man and his fight with ideas of God, religion and duty both inherited and wished for is at its best astonishing. The visceral depth of the portrait rolls in poetic pulses through a landscape of the mind beautifully captured. This internal struggle is set within a richly rounded external scene, made up of the lilts and customs of the Irish in Liverpool in the 1920s; the hypocritical deceits and religious time-serving, the hints of sensuality under the iron hand of uprightness, the emotional pull of surviving on nothing, as well as physical hunger and want. Joe Rourke is part of all of this, and yet yearning for more in what seems an alternatingly knowing and then ignorant way. There are also, though, disturbances of this strong mixture; times when it seems Hanley has become almost unhinged - he'll drift off into a peculiar meditation on some seemingly unimportant or odd issue, or surprise the reader with a reference which is deranged or, if not, at least utterly disconnected. I don't think that these are fully intentional, but rather the effluvia of a notion that this needed to be written at high heat and left to roll its own course. A self-indulgence (which occurs a little too often) I'm tempted to forgive as the results are otherwise brilliant.

Mother of Pearl by Anatole France (1892)

This is France-as-antiquarian at another high point. The first group of stories deal with the times surrounding first of all the birth of Christ and secondly middle ages developments in sainthood. Here his voice is sometimes folkloric and always playful and often redolent of "the real thing". The second, and larger, group are stories in the byways of the French Revolution, with portraits of minor aristocrats, their adherents and tormentors tussling in harsh and uncertain conditions which bred deception and secrecy. Each piece is not so interested in narrative fullness so much as the sketch-like capturing of moments in time. They can feel a little unended and unfinished as a result. France's tone is his own alone; there is no mistaking him, and there is a claim to originality in that. I think the reason that his popularity has dimmed from its original dizzy heights is that he is not a sensualist - heavy atmosphere and rich description are not his stock. Rather it is a light touch on people and their situations, examined with wise amusement and a wry sentimentality which occasionally descends to a deeper pathos. This mixture, combined with what would now be seen as esoteric subject matter, consign him to unpopularity. I too find it unaffecting but there is no doubt that the clear air of it is refreshing and shouldn't be underestimated.

Mademoiselle Miss and other stories by Henry Harland (1893)

This was the volume in which Harland finally showed fully the mettle that I'm guessing gained him the editorship of The Yellow Book. It is a collection of five long stories. The first two are set in Paris exclusively and are quaint elegies of the slightly racy kind about notable young ladies of the demi-monde; an elegant innocent one having departed back to London and left her ripple behind her, and a more selfish but beautiful one of the class of ladies of the streets. This one's cough grows louder and more pronounced until.....the elegy has its point. The third is set in London and is the first exposure of Harland's gift for Wildean wit, where a nonchalant bohemian father is perplexed by the return of the son he gave up at birth, who has been schooled in rigid American ways. The fourth is set again in Paris and then New York and concerns the disappointment inherent in trying to realise a youthful love when ways have long parted. The last is set in a German principality in the midst of a royal succession. The intrigues engulf a traveller and involve a hackneyed resolution. Though these stories read well, they leave relatively little impression. I am waiting for Harland to move me and it hasn't happened yet.

Commonplace Book

'"....in difficult situations intellect is but a sorry shield: virtue alone can suffice to safeguard him who merits safety."'

from Memoirs of a Volunteer (Part I), a piece in Mother of Pearl by Anatole France (translated by Frederic Chapman)

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'Pity is the widow's mite; it is the incomparable offering of the poor man, who with generosity outstripping that of all the wealthy in this world of ours, gives with the gift of his tears a piece torn from his heart.'

from The Manuscript of a Village Doctor, a piece in Mother of Pearl by Anatole France (translated by Frederic Chapman)

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'...We heard hourly that someone was running away from someone else, often that everyone was running away from everyone else in all directions. Sometimes Tuan Chi Jui was pursuing Wu Pei Fu in the direction of Tibet with every hope of getting there, as it seemed, and sometimes Wu Pei Fu was spilling Tuan Chi Jui over the coast into the Yellow Sea. We became quite callous about the war. It seemed, to say the least of it, childish for two armies large enough to know better to run about so quickly in such hot weather.'

from Peking-III, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'...I think modern art, in England anyway, has fallen under the pernicious influence of Augustus John. The Slade School calls every charming picture "pretty-pretty" and flies to the other extreme, in mistaking the grotesque for the beautiful. The poets are just as bad; for those who have energy and freshness fear to become Sunday-magazinish and write their Wheels and Rolls and other atrocities under the impression that they are out-Henleying Henley, and discovering a new pathless world of vers libre, free from the trammels of such minor accessories of poetry such as rhyme or metre or even musical language.'

from a letter to 'Rosalind', February 20, 1921 in Letters to a Friend by Winifred Holtby

Commonplace Book

'...he had too just a realising sense of the nature of art, to fancy that success in art - success in giving material form to the visions of the imagination - is ever possible; an artist might be defined as one whose mission it is to fail.'

from A Sleeveless Errand (Part I), a piece in Mademoiselle Miss and other stories by Henry Harland

Commonplace Book

'...His mind was unhinged by all the worry that attends those of the abyss. For the abyss is the dark-house of the world - and yet the world knows it not - for it is beyond the sight of men. No light flares in the abyss. No flame burns in the abyss of one's soul. All is dark and gloom. All is silent. Save for the winds which blow, save for the winds that blow them adown the dark roads of life.'

from Drift by James Hanley (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'On their way home he took his father to task. "Of course you didn't mean the things you said in that lady's house?" he began.

"Why? Did I say anything I hadn't oughter?"

Harold frowned in wonder at his father's grammar, and replied severely, "You said a good many things that you couldn't have meant. You said a lie in time saves nine. You said consistency is the last refuge of a scoundrel. You said a lot of things[...]"'

from The Prodigal Father, a piece in Mademoiselle Miss and other stories by Henry Harland

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'"...I'm afraid you take life rather seriously, don't you?"

"Why certainly," the young man answered with gravity. "Isn't that the way to take it?"

"Oh, bless you, no. It's too grim a business. The proper spirit to take it in is one of unseemly levity."'

from The Prodigal Father, a piece in Mademoiselle Miss and other stories by Henry Harland

Commonplace Book

'..The theatre he avoided, because he deemed acting at its best but a bad reflection of the creative arts, and at its worst, as he maintained we got it nowadays, a mere infectious disease of the nervous system....'

from The Prodigal Father, a piece in Mademoiselle Miss and other stories by Henry Harland

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'"Duty, my dear, is the last weakness of great minds; and patriotism, as manifested at any rate by such travelling fellow-countrymen of ours as I have met on British soil, patriotism corrupts good manners. Of the patriots themselves I may say, as of divers birds, orators, operas, and women, that they should be seen perhaps, but certainly not heard; and if I could not talk, I should not wish to live."'

from The Prodigal Father, a piece in Mademoiselle Miss and other stories by Henry Harland

Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell (1970)

The most revelatory element of reading these is, as it should be, the portrait of the writer which slips through the wit and the commonplaces. Sitwell was touchy, super-sensitive, and a brazener-out of conflicts. She had typical evasions and moments of ego which were skilfully combined to become a 'blind' to any attacker, or to any whom it was worth her while to dismiss. All of this is, of course, very familiar from two angles - one being that of the well-known Edith Sitwell showing the colours we expect, the other being the point of view of the reader's own personality. It's impossible to ignore one's own propensities of this ilk, reading between these lines! These agonies are all of ours. Agonies aside, though, these letters are highly entertaining. The occasional repetition of exclamations of gratitude for services rendered by various correspondents doesn't deeply mar the experience. They of course evoke a world, actually not that long ago, where an Edith Sitwell could exist - as could a Margaret Rutherford or an Irene Handl. This is a fulsome part of the pleasure of this volume, as is the back story to notable developments - the first publication of Wilfred Owen's poems, the advent of Dylan Thomas, the outrageous baiting of Wyndham Lewis and FR Leavis - rich colours.

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'By the way, I did not praise Mrs Meynell. Please erase that. She is hopelessly bad. And I do not remember praising Dowson. He is limp and lifeless.
[...]
...Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter'.
[...]
...Vachel Lindsay is, technically, a simply horrible poet, and the Congo poem is the worst of the lot. (I like The Golden Whales of California, but his technique is always ghastly. He has had no influence on me whatever.)'

from a letter to Geoffrey Singleton, 11 July 1955 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell

The Dragon in Shallow Waters by V. Sackville-West (1921)

This is Sackville-West's second novel, and a livelier proposition than her first. The quality that they both share is the ineffable sense one gets of a fine mind at work, even though the results are mixed. Her first suffered from a slight stiffness which is here too, but in a smaller amount - it feels, at least for the first two-thirds, like a very intense Hardy. I wonder if he read it. Set in a fenland village near Spalding with a soap factory at its centre, and also an abbey (I think it can only be modelled on Crowland), it is a rich study of the psychology of bitterness in the form of Silas Dene, a blind man and curdled with it. He has equal parts of violent perversity and bullying hauteur. His brazenly domineering nature is weirdly contrasted with a fatal fearfulness and changeability. He is a murderer and a weakling. The tendency toward superintensity, really very evenly handled initially, finally overheats at the two-thirds point, with the plot twisting on a belatedly remembered reaction of Dene's to a relatively inconsequential event. The results are too much, with explosively poetic exchanges and agonized soul-searching at too high a pitch. But throughout it all there is still that element that calls for forgiveness of these excesses - the awareness that the writer is giving it everything she's got - one also can't help admiring her for it. And there is a sense of survival after the turmoil - the ending is satisfyingly filmic, broad and fatalistic.

Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford (1935)

Being able to read this book is a treat. It had been banned by the family since its first publication. Nancy's sisters Unity and Diana were furious with her for her plowing of their fascist beliefs in the form of the Union Jackshirts in this novel. In fact, almost everyone gets similar treatment in these pages, excepting perhaps those few who most closely resemble Nancy's own nothing-matters-seriously approach to life. The abiding background memory of this novel is of blinding summer sunlight and radiant heat in the English countryside. The foreground is filled with old aristocratic matrons stuck in Edwardiana, young aristocratic freebooting males on the search for wealthy wives, eccentric peers in their delightful asylum modelled on the House of Lords, socially mobile Local Beauties desperate to break into society and aristocratic young ladies on the run from boring husbands and philandering fiancees. The Cotswold village of Chalford doesn't quite register what is hitting it as a pageant is planned and the Union Jackshirts, in the person of the young lady of the big house (actually she's the grand-daughter), Britannia-like and fascist to her bootstraps, attempt to give it that special National Socialist flavour. What follows is delightfully chaotic. This is Mitford in dry-run for her later successes, using her family to superb effect.

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'...I wonder if you met that appalling woman Hedda Hopper? I had trouble with her, so I've told everybody that I heard on the best authority that the very bad outbreak of rabies in Hollywood was due to the fact that Miss Hopper had pursued the dogs and succeeded in biting them. I added that personally I didn't believe a word of it - for, after all, they run very fast!'

from a letter to John Gielgud, 12 May 1953 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell

Commonplace Book

'...She then said "Are you ill? You are so pale." I said "I always go as white as a sheet when I am bored" (which is true). She then went away.'

from a letter to John Lehmann, 15 June 1948 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell

Commonplace Book

'...Eugenia pointed out to Jasper the true chic of these posters which lay in the fact that no two were alike.

"Oh really, aren't they?" said Jasper, "but I thought they looked exactly the same - anyway, they all seem to have a picture of King Kong on them."

"How stupid you are," said Eugenia, angrily fingering her dagger, "can't you see that's a Union Jackshirt Comrade handing on the torch of Social Unionism to the youth of Britain?...."

from Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford (Chapter 16)

Commonplace Book

'A pilot, full of wheezy jokes, came on board and inserted the Chang-Shing into the Pei-ho river. Two Chinese mud-forts, proved futile by naval guns in the Boxer rising, still keep up the pretence of guarding that narrow mouth. The Chang-Shing ignored them and began feeling her way up a waterway which is like a puzzle founded on a tireless repetition of the last letter of the alphabet. The earth was no less golden than the sea; the world, cupped in a glittering pale horizon, was like an orgy of golden wine. Villages were built of yellow earth; even shadows were yellow; there was no colour but yellow in the eyeless streets of the softly-moulded villages. There were graves everywhere, cones of yellow mud varying in height and perfection of symmetry according to the importance of the occupant. It is a promotion to be dead in China, but the choice between a crumbling mud-house and a crumbling mud grave is a very small choice. The cities of the living and the cities of the dead are not divided. Movement in the land was chiefly provided by the salt-mills; like merry-go-rounds at a home fair they span and span, lacking only music and gaudiness and laughter. Sometimes mud-caked babies ran across a mud-beach to throw themselves down in the golden wave caused by the Chang-Shing's passing. In that wave the moored fishing-boats stirred uneasily; they were like dragonflies asleep; their nets were stretched on quivering bamboos at the tops of hinged masts.'

from The Little Journey, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor (1951)

This is my first Taylor in a long while, and in many ways it was worth the wait. I had grown increasingly dissatisfied as I read through the first four some time ago, but most particularly with the one which finally brought the journey to its halt. Now comes this, and faith is restored to a large extent. She has an almost classically mid-century English attitude to words and what they convey. They are carefully chosen; so much so that I expect many modern readers would find the tone almost pedantic and precious - at least those who are not prepared to allow her her time. In this novel of longing, spread over perhaps twenty years, Harriet and Vesey just scrape by in remaining in each other's lives, as their first attraction at 18 becomes complicated not only by ordinary vicissitudes but by their own lack of will. It is humour which most graces the early parts of this book - fresh humour in children's exploits and tart humour in Harriet's work in a dress shop with its ill-assortment of eccentric and laborious assistants. The element which had darkened her previous novel, a kind of stiffness and tightness, then briefly comes to the fore where this one touches similar subject matter - 'young marrieds'. But the resigned and limpid ending of this one is quietly moving, with the drab of austerity Britain almost palpable though never accentuated.

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'"...If cousin Poppy St Julien had the true principles of Social Unionism at heart she would return to her husband and present him with several healthy male children."

"Darling Eugenia," cried Poppy, "he wouldn't like that a bit. Why, when I think of all the trouble I've taken - "

"Is your husband an Aryan?"

"I really don't quite know what an Aryan is."

"Well, it's quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes."

"How about Siamese cats?" said Jasper.

"That's true. But Siamese cats can possess, to a notable degree, the Nordic virtue of faithfulness."

"Indeed they don't," said Poppy. "We had one last summer and he brought back a different wife every night. Even Anthony was quite shocked."

from Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford (Chapter 14)

Commonplace Book

'...As well as providing a complete distraction from the ordinary routine of her life he had shaken Mrs Lace in the belief that her friends were geniuses. He assured her that in London they were perfectly unknown, and his attitude towards their work, too, was distressing. For instance, after glancing at Mr Forderen's series of photographs entitled "Anne-Marie in some of her exquisite moods" which, when they were first taken a year before had caused the greatest enthusiasm in Rackenbridge, he had remarked quite carelessly that she ought to have her photograph taken by some proper photographer.

"Don't you see," Anne-Marie had said, "that these pictures represent, not me but my moods, this one, for instance, 'pensive by firelight', don't you think it rather striking?"

"No I don't," said Noel, whose own mood that day was not of the sunniest. "It is nothing but an amateurish snapshot of you looking affected. Frankly, I see no merit in any of them whatever, and as I said before, all those young aesthetes at Rackenbridge strike me as being fearfully 1923, and bogus at that."

As a result of this conversation the series was removed from the walls of Anne-Marie's drawing-room, from whence it had long revolted Major Lace, and consigned to those of a downstairs lavatory....'

from Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford (Chapter 13)

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'"...It appears that every year a few thousand totally unimportant persons are killed on the roads, and that lunatic Gunnersbury, supported by some squeamish asses on the Labour benches, brought in a bill to abolish all motor transport. These Socialists put a perfectly exaggerated value on human life, you know. Ridiculous. As I said in my speech, what on earth does it matter if a few people are killed, we're not at war are we? We don't need 'em for cannon fodder? Then what earthly good do they do to anybody? Kill 'em on the roads by all means, they come off the unemployment figures and nobody is likely to be any the wiser."'

from Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford (Chapter 12)

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'"Think if a man's killed," he brooded, "killed by violent means, what an outrage on the body. Blood spilt, that ran secretly and private in his veins. Bones, no one had ever seen. Entrails. What a bursting!"

She pictured his mind as a landscape ravaged by war, here a wreckage of stone and twisted iron, there a grave, here the stark Calvary of a stricken tree, there the bright blare of poppies striving for life amongst the rushes and rank weeds.'

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

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'"....you might remember that wretched Local Beauty is slaving herself to death over your dresses, and if she wants to take the part of the least attractive queen in history, I should have thought it would be a matter of ordinary decency to let her..."[...]

Mrs Lace, however, when approached[,] was perfectly firm. She listened calmly while the suggestion was being made, and then said that it was too unlucky, but Queen Charlotte's dress was now finished, and could never be altered to fit Lady Marjorie, as there were no means of letting out the seams on the hips and round the waist. Marjorie, who had never been spoken to in such a way before, was more surprised than angry, and took her defeat with the greatest of good humour. Poppy and Eugenia were furious, and said afterwards that Mrs Lace was a spiteful cat, and Poppy said at the time to Mrs Lace that as she looked exactly like Queen Charlotte, she was quite right to keep the part. Unfortunately, owing to its target's total ignorance of English history, this Parthian shaft went wide of the mark.'

from Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford (Chapter 10)

Commonplace Book

'Americans and Filipinos, as it seemed to me, live together in 50 per cent liberty, 49 per cent equality and 1 per cent fraternity. Politically, a great deal is said about brotherhood - personally, almost nothing.'

from Manila-Macao-Hongkong, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'"Why shouldn't you accept what comfort those two young things could give you?"

"It's weak," he burst out, "why not stand alone? why depend on another? Why shouldn't the strength of one suffice? Why all this need to double it? Love's wholly a question of weakness; the weaker you are, the more desperately you love. A prop...Love's the first tie for an independent man to rid himself of. It's a weakness that grows too easily out of all proportion. I want my mind for other things, not for anything so trite. So well charted. So...so recurrent."

"Another theory, Silas? Be careful," she lazily teased him; "what we most abuse, you know, is often what we most fear."'

from The Dragon in Shallow Waters by V. Sackville-West (Chapter X, Part 2)

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

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'...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

A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909 by Virginia Woolf (1992)

This collection of previously unpublished material is an uneven experience, but it's quite hard to pinpoint why. The earliest journal, when the author was a precocious and slightly difficult fifteen-year-old, is utterly fascinating. Its simple evocation of cultured upper middle-class home life in West London in the 1890s is punctuated with revealing episodes where she admits to having behaved rather badly - it's clear that nerve-storms and tantrums were not unusual, and the family tiptoed around them to some extent. It also has family politics, notable comings and goings, and a little bitchiness to keep its sap high. Subsequent sections are not as enthralling, apart from occasional insights. The 1903 essays are surprisingly flat somehow, even though they represent that famous ferment of mind at its very beginning. Her nostalgic visit to Cornwall in 1905 resonates, as it was source material for the last part of To the Lighthouse, and because it reveals strongly how she fed on the approval and fascination of the locals at the return of the famous Stephens after such a long break subsequent to her mother's death. The travel journals are sporadically beautiful; the absence of any comment on her brother Thoby's death after their Greek trip in 1906 tells the story of what wasn't communicable and indeed how partial this record is, as is its final effect.

Commonplace Book

'The American newspaper often consists of as much as half a column devoted to international affairs, an immense auto section, a financial section, a movie section, a society section showing Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West in sepia attending each other's weddings, and a scandal section describing the deliciously immoral practices of minor European princelings whom no-one has ever heard of before. These scandal supplements inspire and excuse such opinions as that with which one of my pupils in a California university once began his essay: All foreigners labour under crowned heads in dirt and immor[t]ality.'

from The States - II, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

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'American papers are meant to be read in one minute by people who have only two minutes of leisure during the day and spend them in an elevator on the way to the office. They have to atone for their garrulity by an extreme concentration of snappy news on their outer pages. For instance, the democratic American, wishing to know which of his social superiors is in town, can master at a glance this information in type three inches high at the head of an outside column - GEE THIS IS GREAT SAYS WOOL KING HOME FROM WILDS. Whereas the democratic Englishman on a similar quest would probably go all the way from Mornington Crescent to Elephant and Castle before he found the following treasure buried in the insignificant masses of the Court Circular: Mr. and Mrs. Marmaduke Woolley have returned to their town residence after a visit to the country.'

from The States - II, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'Theories! Theories are for the unknown and the unhappy. Who will trouble to theorise about Heaven when he has found Heaven itself? Theories are for the poor-devil outcast, - for him who stands outside the confectioner's shop of life without a penny in his pocket, while the radiant purchasers pass in and out through the doors, - for him who watches with wistful eyes this and that sugared marvel taken out of the window by mysterious hands, to bless some happy customer inside. He is not fool enough even to hope for one of those glistering masterpieces of frosted sugar and silk flowers, which rise to pinnacles of snowy sweetness, white mountains of blessedness, rich inside, they say, with untold treasures for the tooth that is sweet. No! he craves nothing but a simple Bath-bun of happiness, and even that is denied him.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book III, Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'Out of the deep dark ocean of life Love had brought them his great moon-pearl, and they sat on the boat's edge carelessly tossing it from one to the other, unmindful of the hungry fathoms on every side. A sudden slip, and they had lost it for ever, and might only watch its shimmering fall to the bottom of the world.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book III, Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'I should have no qualms about tightening the rope round the neck of some human monster, or sticking a neat dagger or bullet into a dangerous, treacherous foe, but to kill a dream is a sickening business. It goes on moaning in such a heart-breaking fashion, and you never know when it is dead. All on a sudden some night it will come wailing in the wind outside your window, and you must blacken your heart and harden your face with another strangling grip of its slim appealing throat, another blow upon its angel eyes. Even then it will recover, and you will go on being a murderer, making for yourself day by day a murderer's face, without the satisfaction of having really murdered.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book II, Chapter XII)

Commonplace Book

'Sometimes, when she had heard old people talking of their memories, of the landmarks in their lives, she was surprised at their public quality - the funeral of the Old Queen, Mafeking Night, the Armistice, the first motor-car, the last lamp-lighter. She thought they dissembled. It is never like that, surely? she wondered: not, at the end of a long life, to see other people's sadness and triumph as the key moments? Or do Mafeking Night and the rest stand in the place of the secret and personal, in the place of what cannot be told and must perish with us - moments when for no reason that we can understand - a warm evening, the scent of leaves, a cock crowing far away - all the air becomes distended with grief.'

from A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor (Part One, Chapter 2)

Commonplace Book

'...I believe that there is an opportunity for a new form of novel, in which the novelist, as well as the reader, will skip all the dull people, and merely indicate such of them as are necessary to the action by an outline or a symbol, compressing their familiar psychology, and necessary plot-interferences with the main characters, into recognised formulae. For the benefit of readers voracious for everything about everybody, schedule chapters might be provided by inferior novelists, good at painting say tiresome bourgeois fathers, gouty uncles and brothers in the army, as sometimes in great pictures we read that the sheep in the foreground have been painted by Mr. So-and-so, R.A.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book II, Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'The heart does not more love the heart that loves it than the brain loves the brain that comprehends it.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book II, Chapter V)

Once Again for Thucydides by Peter Handke (1995)

This is a volume of essays which are musings based on travel. Handke has the German knack of keeping to facts without making them boring. This is a harder thing to do than that simple statement might imply - these pieces have the feeling of a quiet man looking at things with wide eyes and trying to find the centre of them. Admittedly, this sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There are a few of these pieces which feel a little nowhere, as if the fire in one's mind doesn't quite catch. And there are some which are strangely good. So as not to give a false impression, it must be said that these pieces rarely reach poetry; they are not histrionic in any sense. They have the feel of being a dissection without the pointy nastiness. The German author who comes to mind as a comparison is Wolfgang Borchert - the quiet echo and sense of simplicity in his short stories finds a modern answer here. These essays are in a sense catalogues of facts, but presented with the interest inherent in the facts, and delicately put, and very carefully placed in space and time. Reading up on Handke, I find that he has been regarded as the enfant terrible of German literature - this is my first exposure, and I find that hard to believe. Further reading, which I am encouraged to by the reading of this, will no doubt elucidate......

The Laburnum Branch by Naomi Mitchison (1926)

This is the first of Mitchison's two volumes of published poetry, set so far apart at either end of her career. It is full of her classic brand of natural exuberance. What makes it remarkable is the fact that the poetry is occasionally technically quite poor, with bad overruns of line-length marring the rhythm and lack of finish causing fatal trailoff. Her inimitable enthusiasm saves it. Ranging through all sorts of subjects from history to childbirth to friendship to politics, she sometimes effuses in a unmeasured way which survives its own lack of foresight mysteriously. At other times the work is strongly fortified with rhyme and rhythm and just as affecting. The poems are divided into nine sections which are vaguely thematic. I remember reading, I think in one of the volumes of her autobiography, that she had loads of unpublished poetry in a bottom drawer at home. I hope that this has been saved following her death at the age of 101 in January 1999. And the reading of The Cleansing of the Knife, the extraordinarily-belated 1978 successor to this volume, will take on extra meaning. Mitchison is not known for poetry, or for poetry in her prose, but it's there. Just, in her usual and low-key way, it gleams from behind her emanations of stalwart personality.

Commonplace Book

'"I do think," Caroline was saying in her most reasonable voice, "that another time...of course, it doesn't matter in the least while we are alone...obviously, it's of no importance to me that you take the last rissole...I'm not the faintest bit hungry, and, if I were, could have had more cooked...but perhaps it would be a bad example to the children if they were here for you just to - without offering it, I mean - to take it as a matter of course. I hate having to say this, but it is a question, I suppose, of principle...after all, we were always agreed that this isn't one of those houses where the man is lord and master and boss and bread-winner, taking everything for granted..."

"He could certainly not do that," Hugo said, tipping the nut-rissole on to Caroline's plate.

She flushed. "My dear Hugo, surely you have not taken offence because I spoke frankly?"

"It is what people do take offence at."

"You know I couldn't eat another thing."

She returned the rissole to his plate.

"And now I could not either," he said, abandoning some spinach as well and putting his knife and fork together. The rissole was back on the dish where it had begun, among the shapes of the other rissoles which had been outlined by cold fat.'

from A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor (Part One, Chapter 1)

Commonplace Book

'It is often said that a man may be judged by his dog; it may be said with equal truth that a woman may be judged by her cat.

Musidora's cat was white, but of a fabulous white - whiter than the whitest swan; milk, alabaster, snow, all that has served for white comparisons since the beginning of the world, would seem black by the side of this cat. Among the millions of imperceptible hairs which composed her ermine fur, there was not a single one that was not as dazzling as the purest of silver.

Imagine an enormous powder puff, with eyes adjusted into it. Never has the most coquettish and affected woman had in her movements the grace and perfect finish of this adorable cat. She had incomparable undulations of the spine, curvatures of the back, tosses of the head, curls of the tail, and unimaginable ways of advancing her paws.

Musidora copied her as far as she could, but without attaining the success she desired. But though the imitation was imperfect, it had made of Musidora one of the most graceful women in Paris - that is to say, in the world, for nothing exists here below but Paris.'

from Fortunio by Theophile Gautier (Chapter III)

Cressida's First Lover by Jack Lindsay (1932)

I wasn't expecting a great deal of this and was pleasantly surprised. Lindsay was the son of the more famous Norman, and had a long career of 60 years or so where he never quite reached notability in the broader sense. This, his first novel, is a strange amalgam of the tone of a 30s romp and the setting of ancient Greece. Cressida is concerned that her life is going by and no lover is presenting himself. Caught while entering a tryst with a sentry, her sailor captors whisk her off into adventure. She kills their leader, roams a foreign land, meets and beguiles a young prince, amuses herself intriguing with his grotesque father, makes jealous a prospective princess and her interfering mother, fascinates an oily advisor who plans a revolt, and escapes when everything gets a little too hot! All the while, of course, manipulating like mad to keep everybody on side. Some of her inventions and twists on a sixpence are lovely. Lindsay makes this, with elegant, well-modulated prose, a pleasure, if a slightly guilty one. I shall be interested to see whether he returns to comedy in subsequent novels - he's good at it. There are one or two moments where the prose loses control and becomes efflorescent, but on the whole this is a joy. The stuff of which TV adaptations could easily be made.

Brothers and Sisters by I. Compton-Burnett (1929)

This is Ivy Compton-Burnett's third novel and very typical. The thing to reckon with in her writing is the unreality. These deceptively quiet novels are full of characters displaying their frustrations with tight circumstances, usually associated with family. In this case the core is, extraordinarily, incest. Though unwitting transgression it must be affirmed. Her people inhabit a seething world where speech is a swordfight and amused irritation and its harsher darker companion-feeling the instigators. But the way this plays out is not what can really be called realistic, other than in its essence, perhaps. The play of it is theatrical, over-stark - "not the way real people behave or speak". This, by rights, should make it ultimately unsatisfying, and to some extent that's true, but there is an odd pleasure to be gained, mainly based in fascination with Ivy's originality of craft. What an unusual effort these books are. I can see why they are not popular, and conversely why she is lionised among a tiny sector of the reading population. Certainly the feeling is that she deserves notice, but so do her faults - she has virtually no universality in the ordinary sense at all, the sense that helps a writer survive down the ages. But I can't help it - I'm intrigued..........

Commonplace Book

'".....I must go home to see about the party's being a simple one, to be in keeping with the parlour, and with your bereavement; though I don't mean that was a second thought. But I do want to be loyal to the parlour to the last."

"You had better leave us out," said Robin, "to be loyal to the size of the parlour, and to the desire of your guests to talk about us."'

from Brothers and Sisters by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter X)

Commonplace Book

'He presently disappeared as suddenly as he had come, but he had left me a companion, a radiant reverberant name; and for some little space the name of Shelley clashed silvery music among the hills.

Its seven letters seemed to hang right across the clouds like the Seven Stars, an apocalyptic constellation, a veritable sky-sign; and again the name was an angel standing with a silver trumpet, and again it was a song. The heavens opened, and across the blue rift it hung in a glory of celestial fire, while from behind and above the clouds came a warbling as of innumerable larks.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book I, Chapter XVIII)

Commonplace Book

'"...Cousin Christian is a man whom anything that came out, or might come out, would leave simply as he was. I declare that he is. I say that about him."

"It goes without saying, doesn't it?" said Judith.

"I am glad it didn't have to this time," said Julian. "I can hardly bear that sort of thing to go without saying."'

from Brothers and Sisters by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'A mad piper, indeed, this spring, with his wonderful lying music, - ever lying, yet ever convincing, for when was Spring known to keep his word? Yet year after year we give eager belief to his promises. He may have consistently broken them for fifty years, yet this year he will keep them. This year the dream will come true, the ship come home. This year the very dead we have loved shall come back to us again: for Spring can even lie like that. There is nothing he will not promise the poor hungry human heart, with his innocent-looking daisies and those practised liars the birds. Why, one branch of hawthorn against the sky promises more than all the summers of time can pay, and a pond ablaze with yellow lilies awakens such answering splendours and enchantments in mortal bosoms, - blazons, it would seem, so august a message from the hidden heart of the world, - that ever afterwards, for one who has looked upon it, the most fortunate human existence must seem a disappointment.'

from The Quest of the Golden Girl by Richard le Gallienne (Book I, Chapter III)

Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (1867)

This is a novel of mixed fortunes - it is over-exuberant, seeming to have been written when Broughton was particularly young. There are judgments she makes in the craft of its writing which seem quite ill-advised. The best example is a tendency to utilise quotations at far too many junctures; there is one early chapter absolutely littered with them. On the other hand it has many fine moments, and some sparkling wit, and has a brightness and resulting colour which cannot be denied. At the time of publication I believe it was regarded as quite racy, given that the heroine, Kate Chester, falls passionately for a married man, and a wicked one. Interestingly the crucial scene of their relationship is enacted in the now-destroyed Crystal Palace. Its tone now feels of course much more standard, falling somewhere between Jane Austen and Elizabeth de la Pasture - and comfortably so. It can be a damning thing to say but it's appropriate in this case: this is a novel which holds out promise. Her talent for the comedy in family is already obvious here, as is her capacity to keep a plot humming, though this element needs ensubtling (if there is such a word). The word which sums the whole book up is 'hothouse' I think - dangerous stuff in these young hands. I look forward to watching develop the ameliorations and the expansions of her growing maturity.

Commonplace Book

'...Women he carefully did not despise, regarding the precaution as becoming to an Englishman and a gentleman, and not considering whether it implied a higher opinion of women or himself. It was also true that no one had broken him in, if by this he meant that all had given up effort to improve him, few had loved him, and none were at ease in his presence.'

from Brothers and Sisters by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter I)

Mont Oriol by Guy de Maupassant (1887)

I call Maupassant one of 'the syphilitics' - and, yes, there is some disparagement tucked away in that. Those late 19th century French writers like Flaubert, Daudet and company are with him in that group for me. And obviously not just because of a medical reality, but an attitude as well. Mont Oriol is really no different to the other Maupassant novels I've read (Une Vie and Bel-Ami). A catalogue of selfism which no doubt passed at the time as harsh reality. The story of the abandonment of Christiane Andermatt by Paul Bretigny is a familiar one and not extraordinarily well-handled here, apart from a couple of set-pieces which I really like - one revealing many seemingly intelligent men's superficial attitude toward women and another more philosophical statement of the ineffable distance between people and the illusion of melding that happens in love. This story is surrounded by a more successful comic expose of spa culture and its attendants; the many 'doctors' cynically prescribing various 'waters' for diseases which are themselves highly spurious, as well as the businessmen offering them new springs to exploit. All set in the remarkable volcanic landscape of Auvergne, which provides occasional welcome relief.

Commonplace Book

'She comprehended that even in the clasp of this man's arms, when she believed that she was intermingling with him, when she believed that their flesh and their souls had become only one flesh and one soul, they had only drawn a little nearer to one another, so as to bring into contact the impenetrable envelopes in which mysterious nature has isolated and shut up each human creature. And she saw as well that nobody has ever been able, or ever will be able, to break through that invisible barrier which places living beings as far from each other as the stars of heaven. She divined the impotent effort, ceaseless since the first days of the world, the indefatigable effort of men and women to tear off the sheath in which their souls[,] forever imprisoned, forever solitary, are struggling - an effort of arms, of lips, of eyes, of mouths, of trembling, naked flesh, an effort of love, which exhausts itself in kisses, to finish only by giving life to some other forlorn being.'

from Mont Oriol by Guy de Maupassant (Chapter XIV)

Flemish Tales by J. Redwood-Anderson (1913)

This is a volume of five long poems, all set in Flanders. They have a definite group-feeling, a collective identity in that they all, in one way or another, involve landscape-entrenched buildings, the wide Flemish plain and it's intersections of water and fields, and also humble people in this milieu, trying to eke out an existence and cope with love, betrayal and lost passion. Redwood-Anderson's work is a revelation, given his complete obscurity now. I know John Cowper Powys thought a lot of him, and provided a preface to a volume in the '40s. He first published a volume of verse in 1904; his last was posthumous in 1971 - a long career. I think I can see why he hasn't lasted - sadly, it's the old bugbear: modernism. His work is traditional in style, but wildly effective and affecting in content. The darkly stormy brooding deep greyey-green mood of these pieces as each reaches its climax is strong stuff and very dramatic - I can imagine a reading of them going down brilliantly as these stories take hold of an audience. He's not afraid of a violent or confronting scene; he's also not afraid to touch on big themes, so, alongside love, his characters' morality is given an airing in a powerfully personalised and meaningful way, with retribution and the symmetry of fate a constant turbulent presence.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

Mixed feelings about this little novel. It is, on the one hand, an astonishing, idiosyncratically poetic piece of writing - no other style approached Crane's at the time of writing I'm sure, though there may have been imitators since. On the other, that style has its inbuilt windiness: a 'five words where one will do' quality. Like most deeply poetic writing, the sacrifice is crystal clarity - all the action seems to take place in a yellowy-greeny "loom" of almost fabular colour. The folksiness of the speech takes this a stage further, but I can't push that forward as a criticism - it seems quite accurate and factual from an outsider's point of view. His coverage of time is extraordinary - the sustained movement through the piece feels like being immersed in something resembling 'real' time, which is not a common experience for a novel-reader, and of course the fact that the experience is of a Civil War battle gives it strong power. His delineation of the emotional world of a young soldier within this atmosphere is stunning - Fleming's push-and-pull of feeling as he both stumbles and preens is memorable to say the least. My copy also includes the short story of Fleming's death, The Veteran: a little 'bitty' as it goes - good ideas not fluxing together in such an impressive way.

Commonplace Book

'...It was the same carriage; they were the same persons; but their hearts were no longer the same. Everything seemed as it had been - and yet? and yet? What then had happened? Almost nothing. A little love the more on her part! A little love the less on his! Almost nothing - the invisible rent which weariness makes in an intimate attachment - oh! almost nothing - and the look in the changed eyes, because the same eyes no longer saw the same faces in the same way. What is this but a look? Almost nothing!'

from Mont Oriol by Guy de Maupassant (Chapter XI)

Commonplace Book

'All very nice, and mildly exciting for the first five or six times - nay, perhaps I may say for the first seven or eight. But all worldly joys pall, say the moralists; I cannot say myself, because I have not tried nearly all.'

from Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XXV)

Commonplace Book

'...We spend so much of our time out of doors too, that we become sensitive to the various changes of temperature and aspect which mark the different hours of the day. If I lived here much longer I should get to understand the wonderful rise and swell and fall of the land. It is like some vast living thing, and all its insects and animals, save man, are exquisitely in time with it. If you lie on the earth somewhere you hear a sound like a vast breath, as though it were the very inspiration of earth herself, and all the living things on her.'

from Life in the Fields, a piece in the 1903 diary in A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals by Virginia Woolf

Commonplace Book

'She did not realize that he - this man - was one of the race of lovers who are not of the race of fathers. Since he discovered that she was pregnant, he kept away from her, and was disgusted with her, in spite of himself. He had often in bygone days said that a woman who has performed the function of reproduction is no longer worthy of love. What raised him to a high pitch of tenderness was that soaring of two hearts toward an inaccessible ideal, that entwining of two souls which are immaterial - all those artificial and unreal elements which poets have associated with this passion. In the physical woman he adored the Venus whose sacred side must always preserve the pure form of sterility. The idea of a little creature which owed its birth to him, a human larva stirring in that body defiled by it and already grown ugly, inspired him with an almost unconquerable repugnance. Maternity had made this woman a brute. She was no longer the exceptional being adored and dreamed about, but the animal that reproduces its species. And even a material disgust was mingled in him with these loathings of his mind.'

from Mont Oriol by Guy de Maupassant (Chapter IX)

Commonplace Book

'How was it that the tiny bagatelles of time present, from being held so close to the eye, obscured and shut out the huge bulk of things future? Why could not one always feel like this? Why could not one always stay in that state of mind? It was the only right state, the only wholesome state, the only sane state. All other states of mind were nothing but disease and madness. Why was one always like the dog in the fable - dropping the solid piece of meat into the water to snatch greedily at the reflection?(....)Why is it so hard to distinguish between what will grow bigger and bigger every day, and will last for ever, and what will each day wax smaller and smaller, and in a few to-morrows will be gone as if it had never been? Why do things not keep their shapes, but are always mazing and puzzling one by their shiftings and windings?'

from Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XX)

Commonplace Book

'"Kate's friendship," strikes in Margaret, with what may be called a pleasant acid in her voice, "always reminds me of a little poem I used to learn in my youth -

"'Will you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly;
'Tis the prettiest little parlour that you ever did spy!'

I'm not so sure that they do always find it such a pretty little parlour, do they, Kate?"

It is sweet, saith Lucretius, to sit on a bank, and see a good ship battered to pieces by the waves under your very eyes; but it is not sweet to sit in a comfortable arm-chair and watch your younger sister putting her hook in the nose and her bridle in the jaws of any man you come in contact with.

"I deny the justness of the metaphor altogether," replies Kate, with a shadow of irritation in her clear young voice; "and anyhow, the parallel is very incomplete; for if any fly does not like my parlour, he is more than welcome to leave it with his full complement of legs and wings; you see what a character they give me" (sorrowfully to George). "'Give a dog a bad name,' you know; and such an innocent-minded dog, too!"

She looks innocence itself, as she turns her great eyes[,] wide open in a sort of aggrieved surprise, limpid as wells of water in a limestone country, upon him. Flirting is ingrained in the blood and bone and fibre of some women. One can no more blame them for it than for having a cast in the eye or a stammer. Kate would flirt with the undertaker who came to measure her for her coffin.'

from Not Wisely, But Too Well by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XIX)

Commonplace Book

'...When I am listening to a work that I like, it seems to me first that the opening notes detach my skin from my flesh, melt it, dissolve it, cause it to disappear, and leave me like one flayed alive, under the combined attacks of the instruments. And in fact it is on my nerves that the orchestra is playing, on my nerves stripped bare, vibrating, trembling at every note. I hear it, the music, not merely with my ears, but with all the sensibility of my body quivering from head to foot....'

from Mont Oriol by Guy de Maupassant (Chapter V)

Under a Different Star - Biographic 2

I changed schools in 1973. From tiny Millbrook to tiny Paracombe. Millbrook was the school which had belonged to the village now underneath the waters of the reservoir - being higher on a hill it had survived. Paracombe was closer, tucked down a lane right in the middle of orchards and fields - no better location for a school. The experience was pretty similar though - dislocation and a strong feeling of not belonging.

The nasty teacher who had prompted my leaving Millbrook finally had the same effect on my best friend from the Millbrook days. Terry turned up at Paracombe in 1974. There were only seven of us in our year - the personalities loomed large and formed a whole world of understanding, at least for me. Archetypes is probably not too big a word, thinking back. This equivocal intensity was my world for the next four years. Memories of hot summers, birthday parties, pouring rain pounding on the roof, fear, nervous anticipation, agonized relief, headaches, chocolate. And of course easier memories like the signs for the change into kilometre measures being yellow and green, replacing the very old black and white ones - I still have misty memories of mile-signs in out of the way places with 1/2s and 1/4s on them in very old script. And the religious watching of Countdown for the latest pop, and the variety shows like The Two Ronnies on television; particular wrapping paper one Christmas; odd presents like a pale orange plastic electronic keyboard, and oddly a pale orange Pininfarina Matchbox car loom up far beyond their just deserts. Endless days spent in and around the old family Morris Minor which sat rusting away in a corner near the shed. Or in the shed tinkering in Dad's myriad bottles and boxes of this that or the other. Or in the pool in the baking heat, going brown over weeks which seemed like eternities in summer holidays. Making plans; designing a school, including report cards and names for all the students, with a friend Cindy from over on the next hill; making my books into a library with cards, gold stars and writing in the back; spending hours going through old sets of Knowledge magazines collected for my sisters in the mid 60s and carefully cardboard-bound by my Dad; How and Why books; plastic dinosaurs; constant fascination with stationery - new sets, new colours.........

Then loomed the greatest fear. High school. Thirty kilometres away in an Adelaide Hills town called Birdwood. Waiting for a bus full of potential conflict in the form of my fellow students at a lonely spot on the main road near our house. That sense of being lost in it all and subject to it all and trying to brazen it out within a small radius and hope it didn't notice me in the larger. The sense of intimacy in a small group gone and replaced with a wilder, more exciting, more baffling circumstance. The roughhouse ante was upped. We were growing older. I gravitated toward the quiet brainy ones of course, with always an appraising eye on the socially successful in this jungle of mixed intent. Thinking back to it now I see the signs of all sorts of things that weren't clear at the time - which of us were already having sex, which of us were probably just pretending to. What sort of kids we were to the adults around - which was not what we were to each other. The secrets hidden under bravado; the determination hidden in the unpopular and unwanted; and the emotional turmoil and pain hormonally swathing us all. Or was that just me?! There is a sense, looking back, that I opened up a little in those five years, my bones started to show, but also I was substantially still that frightened kid who first turned up in 1978. Those bones did their best to point outward and take on board the next coming change, little knowing what a liberation it would be....

More later.

Commonplace Book

'The neighbourhood of the Cathedral though is depressing. So much ancient stone however fairly piled, and however rich with the bodies of Saints and famous men, seems to suck the vitality of its humble neighbours. It is like a great forest oak; nothing can grow healthily beneath its shade.

All this is a form of heresy I know. A long walk in the sun, all along the valley too, leaves one little appetite to appreciate the value of the picture from an aesthetic point of view. A bare hilltop would have pleased me better than all the Closes and Cathedrals in England - '

from Salisbury Cathedral, a piece in the 1903 diary in A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals by Virginia Woolf

Pop Music - Talk Talk

This is in reference to the opinion that is commonly promulgated about Talk Talk - that those 'in the know' would have you believe. It is that there is nothing much to take in from them until the last two albums. That all they were in the period 1982-1986 was a grimly inferior label-mate of Duran Duran, modelled on them in fact, and that there is nothing much to them until Life's What You Make It, and that that was only a poppy start to the real stuff.

I can definitely see the fascination in Spirit of Eden (1988) and Laughing Stock (1991) - fabulous textures built up in lilting, long progressions. Well worth it. But for the life of me I wonder whether these commentators have listened to the earlier material, or if they have, whether they have the ears to hear it. Mark Hollis seems to me to be the definition, in this early period, of the maladjusted boy with enormous talent, just hitting the point where articulation breaks through his wordless rage. As such he ought to be the hero of many! The crucial part of that is the talent - the pop-wisdom of the first two albums is phenomenal, extending to greatness in the case of the second, It's My Life (1984). Where a lot of other material from the period now sounds twee or worn, Talk Talk are still speaking loud and clear.

The idea that they were some sort of imitation of Duran Duran is the most peculiar. I have no doubt that EMI would have liked them to soak up some of their label-mates' success and perhaps dressed them similarly, as of course did many a contender in those days. But the music is an entirely different matter. About the only Duran Duran song which gets near to them is the fab Careless Memories, and that only obliquely. Where this idea started I have no notion, but it seems to be one of those things that just keeps on and on, Chinese whispers-style, wrong as it ever was. Hollis' songwriting is completely different, the treatment is completely different, the result is......and on we go.

I was hoping there would be a considerable wake created by No Doubt's cover of It's My Life - that there might be a wholesale rediscovery and reappreciation of the early Talk Talk. It doesn't really seem to have happened, though it's great to see a newer generation taking an interest; maybe it just has to be one of those slow-burning events. I look forward to hearing what can be made of The Last Time, Call in the Night Boy or It's You from It's My Life by younger artists. And Today, Mirror Man and Candy from the first, The Party's Over (1982).

Not to mention, between the two, the fantastic My Foolish Friend, released as a single in 1983. I remember reading in music papers at the time that it was the first single from the new album, supposed to be called My Chameleon Hour. Then some months later came the news that the album had been scrapped. When its magnificent replacement finally came out the single was nowhere to be seen. That's always made me wonder. As has the fact that I can clearly hear Hollis singing the lyric

'And my chameleon hour
has already started..'

in the song. All the lyrics around on the internet, and therefore I presume in the published song, have a completely different pair of lines at that point. Mmmmmmm, what does it all mean? Mark must be laughing into his cornflakes......