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)

Commonplace Book

'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)

Commonplace Book

'...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

Commonplace Book

'"...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

Commonplace Book

'"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.

Commonplace Book

'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.

Commonplace Book

'...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.

Commonplace Book

'"...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)

Commonplace Book

'"...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)

Commonplace Book

'"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)

Commonplace Book

'"....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)