The Heir by V. Sackville-West (1922)

This is Sackville-West's first compilation of short fiction, and represents a departure in more than just form. Her first two novels were 'Hardyesque'; the tone here is a lot more intimately immediate, closer to home. I'm not sure whom she has been influenced by, but the intention is clear - she wishes to find a truer, more revealing homecoming in her development as a writer. This works...and it doesn't. The longer pieces, The Heir itself, The Christmas Party and Her Son, are strong on detail and narrative; the intention early on in them is clearly one of sensual explication of a close scene. But The Heir hinges on an impossibility - an owner bidding on their own property at auction; The Christmas Party builds and builds and then sputters to a disappointing nothing; Her Son also ends slightly drably, but here that is more appropriate to the sad misunderstanding which is the centre of the piece. The shorter pieces, the sketchlike and elegiac Patience, and the fabular and elegiac The Parrot, are much more soundly effective as works of art. This volume is Sackville-West branching out and exploring new territory; the experiment is typically involving, and expectedly mixed in its results. I'm waiting for her to hit her mark more absolutely.

Commonplace Book

'"And if the green things fail, then the beasts die,
And if they die, can man pursue his road?
He must perish, nor can he save himself
Except he save all Nature..."'

Nimrod speaking (Act Two, Scene One), from Babel by J. Redwood Anderson

Commonplace Book

'"Is matchmaking at all in your line?"

Hugo Peterby asked the question with a certain amount of personal interest.

"I don't specialize in it," said Clovis; "it's all right while you're doing it, but the after-effects are sometimes so disconcerting - the mute reproachful looks of the people you've aided and abetted in matrimonial experiments. It's as bad as selling a man a horse with half a dozen latent vices and watching him discover them piecemeal in the course of the hunting season..."'

from The Forbidden Buzzards, a piece in Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki

The Cleansing of the Knife and other poems by Naomi Mitchison (1978)

This was Mitchison's extremely belated second volume of verse, following The Laburnum Branch in 1926, and I have to say that, largely, it wasn't "worth the wait". There is a quality in this work of vagueness and inattention to detail which pushes the reader to one side. This is most evident in terms of rhyming schemes - they are wandering, variable, and sometimes inept. It's also evident in her treatment of the subject matter, but this reveals itself in a complex way: any given small set of lines reads reasonably, but the overall hit in the memory, the picture-making and emotion-revealing, seen as a whole, is limp and pale. There are some concessions to greater beauty; three poems from deep inside the Second World War entitled The Farm Woman: 1942, The Farmer and Her Cows and The Burial of Elie Gras (the last a translation from Diamant-Berger) are more strongly coloured and pinpointed in their telling. But that war also produced the most disappointing piece, the long title poem, which unfortunately palely stutters on about Scotland and its future, and vaguely mumbles over its harsh past, with short sequences here and there being much more effective.

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'"The trouble is," said Clovis to his aunt, "all these days of intrusive remembrance harp so persistently on one aspect of human nature and entirely ignore the other; that is why they become so perfunctory and artificial. At Christmas and New Year you are emboldened and encouraged by convention to send gushing messages of optimistic goodwill and servile affection to people whom you would scarcely ask to lunch unless some one else had failed you at the last moment; if you are supping at a restaurant on New Year's Eve you are permitted and expected to join hands and sing 'For Auld Lang Syne' with strangers whom you have never seen before and never want to see again. But no licence is allowed in the opposite direction."

"Opposite direction; what opposite direction?" queried Mrs Thackenbury.

"There is no outlet for demonstrating your feelings towards people whom you simply loathe. That is really the crying need of our modern civilization. Just think how jolly it would be if a recognized day were set apart for the paying off of old scores and grudges, a day when one could lay oneself out to be gracefully vindictive to a carefully treasured list of 'people who must not be let off'..."'

from The Feast of Nemesis, a piece in Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki

Commonplace Book

'Nature may have her own mysterious purposes, or she may not; in any case our role is bound to be, in a dramatic sense, that of the fly upon the wheel; or to use a more organic metaphor, that of the lice in the hide of the rhinoceros.'

from Confessions by John Cowper Powys (Chapter IV), in Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys

Commonplace Book

'His hair and forehead furnished a recessional note in a personality that was in all other respects obtrusive and assertive.'

from Cousin Teresa, a piece in Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki

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'I have suffered at different times from the presumption of three distinct "possessions." Under the influence of one, I become insatiably "wicked," and have the illusion of wickedness as a thing of infinite horizons and possibilities. My sceptical reason mocks at this formidable nonsense, and hints satirically that the whole thing is due to some trifling chance of pre-natal warping.

Under the influence of another, I become preternaturally "noble," and have the illusion of "goodness" as a thing of infinite horizons and possibilities. My sceptical reason mocks at this too, and points to the atavistic presence of some blind race-instinct which would fain submerge the selfishness of the individual in the loftier selfishness of the tribe.

Lastly, and most curious of all, I have a splendid and transcendental "possession," under the influence of which I feel conscious of an invincible courage and an unconquerable contempt; a courage ready to look all accidents, all chances, all circumstances, in the face, with calm indifference; a contempt that rises magnificently above both good and evil, and feels itself the initiated accomplice of the abysmal mysteries of life and death.'

from Confessions by John Cowper Powys (Chapter III), in Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys

Commonplace Book

'"But hang it all, my dear fellow," said Blenkinthrope impatiently, "haven't I just told you that nothing of a remarkable nature ever happens to me?"

"Invent something," said Gorworth. Since winning a prize for excellence in Scriptural knowledge at a preparatory school he had felt licenced to be a little more unscrupulous than the circle he moved in. Much might surely be excused to one who in early life could give a list of seventeen trees mentioned in the Old Testament.'

from The Seventh Pullet, a piece in Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki

Commonplace Book

'There is a very widely spread view, current in educational circles, that what we call "introspection" is a dangerous and immoral thing, a thing from which our youths and maidens ought to be protected. "Let them look out upon the world;" such pedants protest. "What have they to do with analyzing and dissecting their own minds? Let them study the works of God, and cultivate their bodies, and be sensible and happy." This is all part of that unfortunate craze for what is called being "healthy-minded." Introspection and analysis are supposed to be a prerogative of degenerate natures, of natures that spend their time in useless brooding because they are inefficient in action. It is a grotesque mistake. One does not read that Socrates was less courageous because he had the habit of falling into introspective trances, nor does it at all appear that, in the present war, all the daring and efficiency is monopolised by the healthy-minded.'

from Confessions by John Cowper Powys (Chapter II), in Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys

Commonplace Book

'"It's all right about the proposal," she announced; "he came out with it at the sixth hole. I said I must have time to think it over. I accepted him at the seventh."

"My dear," said her mother, "I think a little more maidenly reserve and hesitation would have been advisable, as you've known him so short a time. You might have waited till the ninth hole."

"The seventh is a very long hole," said Jessie; "besides, the tension was putting us both off our game..."

from The Brogue, a piece in Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki

Commonplace Book

'It is the little thing, the unrehearsed gesture, the catch in the breath, the droop of the lip, the start of surprise, which really reveals. We may analyze ourselves in volumes and remain undiscovered; and then - by a yawn, a tilt of the head, a sob of exhaustion, a flash of hate - we are betrayed and unmasked forever.'

from Confessions by John Cowper Powys (Chapter I), in Confessions of Two Brothers by John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys

Place and Power by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (1903)

Fowler, by modern standards, is an absolute joke. How could a writer have thought that it was possible to be both avowedly Christian and Wildeanly witty? Of course, she did, and her first novel sold in the hundreds of thousands. This later one is still in that mode, though the feeling of retreading old paths is beginning to dominate. The first half particularly is sluggish and a little uninspiring, but there is a sense that she may have recognized this; the second half benefits as a result, with the repartee much more evident and as sparkling as ever, and the plot hammering along much more soundly. My other criticism is in the arena of believability - never a major consideration in appreciating Fowler, but the reader's disbelief is not easily suspended in this one. The twist at the end, the results of an election in the last part, and, particularly, a plot-vital medical procedure earlier on, utterly strain credibility. This story of destiny and how it plays out across two generations of British family and politics in the late nineteenth century is underpinned by Fowler's Christianity and the moral background to the characters' decisions. In this she is on safe ground, though, I assume, this may be the most objectionable part to modern minds.

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'"...The public man who chooses the ideally right rather than the conventionally popular, must be prepared for misunderstanding and misrepresentation and disappointment and personal failure; the truth will prevail in the end, but not each separate preacher of it. Nevertheless his life will not be wasted; he will have served as a sign-post upon that upward path..."'

from Place and Power by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Book III, Chapter XII)

Haunted Islands Part II by J. Redwood Anderson (1924)

I wanted a different experience of this volume, because its predecessor had felt a little dull-edged. I decided to read it aloud, and something clicked. Some of my criticisms of Part I still stand, but approached this way this volume got me going on many occasions. The quiet drama of Anderson's post-war work can be brought out by taking a good amount of time over each line, and savouring them to the full. Still sometimes when a line is a single word it's too much, or when a rhyme is just that amount too obvious it still jars, but a good number of these pieces impressed me quietly. A favourite is The Goat, a twin-engined meditation on those that head beyond the standard life to live in rarefied air, with its increased vision, which utilises both a goat metaphor (he escapes his twisted rope and heads for precipitous climes) and more straightforward human description. Another fine example is The Shed, a softer and richer piece of impressionism about a farm shed and its smells, quiet, dim light and animal residents. I am interested to find out if Anderson, having abandoned to some extent the more strong-voiced narrative poetry of his early period which was so effective, is here following a new master or mistress. Yeats, perhaps? Another reading-path beckons....

The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano (1973)

This volume in the original Italian was called something like The Solitude of the Satyr, or, in a play on words, The Solitude of Satire. In any case, the most famous part, essays surrounding the making and genesis of La Dolce Vita, gave the volume its English title. They are a less effective part, leaving an aftertaste of ennui and world-weariness. Flaiano's main theme in all these 'essays' is the degeneration of society and its current tragic absurdities. After The Via Veneto Papers comes the main bulk of the book, and its finer part. These are the Occasional Notebooks, where his humour and belief in life is allowed much more sway, and the sparks of his mind really ignite. Musings of all sorts from zingy fictionalised satires on current mores to heartfelt journeys into the damage we are doing to our spirits in modern life give the true measure of his thought. Finally there are the few pages of his last interview (with Giulio Villa Santa of Swiss-Italian radio) in 1972. It has to be said that there are revelations in this which are not terribly complimentary - his interview responses sometimes show up a kind of blindness, a lack of vital goat- vs sheep-sorting. He still, however, with his faults accounted for, provides a strong-winded and robust cultural commentary.

The Spirit Watches by Ruth Pitter (1939)

The accent here is on contemplation of the gentle and the natural, and on personal reflections which arise from that. Some of these poems are a little low in impact, but many of them are truly inspiring, and more than a little heartbreaking, or perhaps, more accurately, heartstretching. The standout which brought tears to my eyes is The Stockdove, a typically Pitterian examination of a creature seen as a victim of human brutality and greedy thoughtlessness. The gentle rubbed out by the gross. Almost equally as affecting, but very different modally, is The Fishers, about two boys, gently described in their landscape and different personalities. Pitter's reflection includes the realisation of its own limitations - if these two had 'had a kill' her dream of them would have been destroyed - she revels in the peace and silence of their idyll and yet recognizes the pain in her wish for it to remain so. There are poems here about all manner of animals and plants, but they are in what might be called her serious manner. The contrast between these and the more skittish and humorous pieces on these subjects in other volumes is an expansive one. This volume is seemingly in the centre of Pitter's heyday, and I love her soft, sad spirit.

Commonplace Book

'"I wonder," continued Eileen thoughtfully, "if in teaching a woman to be wise, a husband acts as an example or a warning?"'

from Place and Power by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Book III, Chapter IV)

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'"He would stoop in order to conquer - he would compromise in order to command: which is politics rather than statesmanship. But I go deeper than this. I hold that a statesman ought to do what is right, irrespective of whether it is popular or not: but I also believe that the two are not in opposition; and that, as a rule, the people would prefer the right course if only things were made clear to them and they were allowed, with their eyes open, to choose for themselves."'

from Place and Power by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Book III, Chapter III)

Commonplace Book

'...Everything we do is conditioned by the attitude of mind we bring to it. This is true in some degree of all human activities, not merely of works of art, though here the phenomenon is most easily isolated. An athlete may succeed, not because he has a better physique or is better trained than other competitors, but because he has more heart in the figurative sense. It takes a very passion of will to liberate the final reserves of the body, and a similar fierce desire on the emotional and intellectual plane to express from the mind its final achievement.'

from Plaque With Laurel by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part III, Chapter III)

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'...To part the house and the lands, or to consider them as separate, would be no less than parting the soul and the body. The house was the soul; did contain and guard the soul as in a casket; the lands were England, Saxon as they could be, and if the house were at the heart of the land, then the soul of the house must indeed be at the heart and root of England, and, once arrived at the soul of the house, you might fairly claim to have pierced to the soul of England. Grave, gentle, encrusted with tradition, embossed with legend, simple and proud, ample and maternal. Not sensational. Not arresting. There was nothing about the house or the country to startle; it was, rather, a charm that enticed, insidious as a track through a wood, or a path lying across fields and curving away from sight over the skyline, leading the unwary wanderer deeper and deeper into the bosom of the country.'

from The Heir by V. Sackville-West (Chapter VIII)

Commonplace Book

'The naive painters are finished, done with. There is no longer a painter so ingenuous that he is unacquainted with the tricks of the naive trade. But by way of compensation we have naive collectors. Those who buy everything. It is well known that these collectors, for the most part people concerned with investing capital, are not content with the lesser figures, they want the best signatures, the best periods of such and such an artist. And they buy a little of everything, to make up for one painter's decline with the rise of another. In his pamphlet on Belgium, Baudelaire said: "Here, when they talk about prices, they believe they are talking about painting." Today the whole world is a Belgium, and Italy the worst. "What do you think of my Ottone Rosai?" my host asks me with a smug expression. And I don't know what to reply. He doesn't know that Ottone Rosai painted three thousand pictures, of which four thousand are in Rome.'

from a note in the 1969-1972 section of Occasional Notebooks, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano

Commonplace Book

'...There was here a rhythm which no flurry could disturb. The seasons ordained, and men lived close up against the rulings so prescribed, close up against the austere laws, at once the masters and the subjects of the land that served them and that they as loyally served. Chase perceived his mistake; he perceived it with surprise and a certain reverence. Because the laws were unalterable they were not necessarily stagnant. They were of a solemn order, not arbitrarily framed or admitting of variation according to the caprice of mankind. In the place of stagnation, he recognized stability...'

from The Heir by V. Sackville-West (Chapter V)

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'"There is no denying," said Mark, "that the experience of one's married friends points to the conclusion that Purgatory is only Paradise in excess."'

from Place and Power by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Book II, Chapter VI)

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'...There is a current idea that when men or women give up all for the sake of conscience, they are respectively warmed and cheered by the flames of their sacrifice and the light of their haloes; but experience teaches that this is rarely the case. When human beings have put aside their humanity for a moment and allowed the Divinity that is inherent in every man to settle their affairs for them, the humanity which they have temporarily suppressed is apt to take it out of them sooner or later; and in consequence there is considerable reaction, accompanied by no small amount of irritability. As least this is generally the case in modern times; and it is doubtful if even the martyrs of old - between the turns of the thumbscrew - were really pleasant company. In this world people are never all white or all black; we are most of us merely grey, or, at best, shepherd's plaid, so that there are both black and white places in us which come to the front in turn, unless we happen to be women - in which case we are made of a shot material, and so are actually both black and white at one and the same moment.'

from Place and Power by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Book II, Chapter VI)

Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier (1835)

At last I find out why Gautier has lasted. Anyone reading many or most of his other works would naturally wonder. They are supernaturally-tinted pieces of jewelled exquisitry; worthy, but reasonably light. This is not supernatural at all, and much more substantial, and makes one wonder why this first novel did not dictate the tone of much more of his ouevre. It begins appallingly, suppurating in the amorality of d'Albert's bleared and grisly attitude to love. It appears that Gautier approves. But then he introduces a new angle, that of Madelaine de Maupin herself, and all sorts of renewal results. She's much more of a believer. Their comedy of disguises moves through a variety of stages. She disguises herself as Theodore, in order to see men from the inside and know more surely who is worthy of being her lover. As Theodore, at a country house, she meets d'Albert. He is struck by Theodore, much more than he would like, and worriedly and disgustedly begins to think he may be homosexual. Of course, it's the 'real woman' in Theodore/Madelaine showing through! They become involved in a private performance of As You Like It, where Theodore must play Rosalind, and d'Albert his/her Orlando. Seeing her/him playing Rosalind, d'Albert suspects that he may be 'healthy': Theodore may be a woman after all! After a few more twists and turns, all is revealed as he suspects. Along the way, Theodore has charmed a mutual friend, Rosette, and inspired a passionate devotion in her, all unknowing. The playfulness of this is wrapped in Gautier's luxuriated prose, which can be a little windy. The difficulty of the main proposition that Madelaine would see d'Albert as a better choice than many other men is a major flaw. But this is still fascinating, and this sort of subject matter at this early date is pioneering.

Commonplace Book

'So, the Flaubertian method would have had to be applied by the adapters, not to yesterday's idiocies, but to those being spread about today as unshakeable truths. And in that case we would have had Bouvard and Pecuchet busy testing the truth of mass culture, of the cultural revolution, of liberated eroticism, of scientific delirium, of the collage as novel, of global confrontation, of the theater of the cruel, of total mechanization, of the space race, of the disalienation promised by the political parties, of art as therapy and therapy as art, etc. What a marvelous series of chapters and themes! And what a catalogue of unbearably chic ideas! Everybody do his thing.

For today's truth Flaubert would either have rewritten his novel or forbidden the theatrical adapters to use it. For the simple reason that they don't believe in the improvement and incessant variation of stupidity. Which today is no longer so much bourgeois, rationalistic and Voltairean as it was in the time of the pharmacist Homais, as it is oriented towards the future, full of ideas. Today's idiot is full of ideas.'

from a note in the 1969-1972 section of Occasional Notebooks, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano

Commonplace Book

'...That which I demanded before all was not physical beauty, it was beauty of the soul, love; but love as I feel it is perhaps not in the human possibilities - and yet it appears to me that I must love thus and that I give more than I exact. What magnificent folly! What sublime prodigality! To deliver yourself entirely without caring anything for self, renouncing the possession of yourself and your freedom of will, placing it in the hands of another, to see no more with your eyes or hear with your ears, being one in two bodies, to melt and mingle your souls in such fashion that you would not know if you were yourself or the other being, now the sun, now the moon, to see all the world created in one being only, displacing the center of life, to be ready at all times for the greatest sacrifices and the most absolute abnegation, to suffer in the bosom of the person loved as if it was your own, oh, wonder, to double yourself while giving yourself!..'

from Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier (Chapter XV)

A Story of Doom and other poems by Jean Ingelow (1867)

Ingelow's reputation had virtually died even before her death in 1897. She is a classic of mid nineteenth-century poetry. This was her penultimate volume of verse, before abandoning it until later life in favour of fiction. Variety is the key. Much of the longer material here, the love-meditation of Laurance, the deepened Biblical re-telling of A Story of Doom itself, the comic and fantastical Gladys and Her Island, are in blank verse and tend to the tangential, with quite esoteric wandering. Rhymed verse ties her down somehow and the sense is of a tighter vision and more rousing sentiments - Winstanley, right at the end, about the seventeenth century builder of the first Eddystone lighthouse, is the finest example. There is also striking rhymed work in Songs of the Night Watches. Interestingly, at one point here she combines her two modes. Songs with Preludes are fascinating examinations of five states; wedlock, regret, lamentation, dominion and friendship, with broader blank introductions and tapered, concentrated rhymed bodies. In all her moods, and their myriad subjects, she is a thoughtful and rich-hearted poet.

Commonplace Book

'"...it's untried affection that lasts the longest, as the clothes wear the best that you never put on."'

from Place and Power by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Book I, Chapter VII)

A Song and Dance by PJ Kavanagh (1968)

This is to some extent a novel in Eastmancolor. There is a strong sense about it of yellowed sixties-ness. But where other novels with similar takes don't add a lot to that, and feel pretty flat, this one has a whole extra plane brought to it by Kavanagh's beautiful sense of poetic observation. This relatively simple story of a transgressive love affair which very soon reveals itself as a transformative experience for both partners is graced by the author's love of love, mordant and wry explication of life's puzzles, filmic sensibility and light touch. Though Beatrix and Colm's affair is illicit in the sense that it occurs outside her marriage, her honesty with her husband about it is both honourable and empathetic. These are civilised people without being stiffened by it. There are some great subsidiary characters - one in particular, Margaret, the wife of Colm's boss, is a fine study of an unconventional woman of great wisdom. I'm looking forward to seeing if his subsequent three novels can capture more in the way of freshness and immediacy - the slightly crackly soundtrack of this one is its only real failing.

Commonplace Book

'For, in its mythomania, the Crowd today only worships itself. It wants a Hero, but from him asks for a guarantee of absolute mediocrity. Hercules doesn't have to exert himself, nor does he have to prevail. Take a crowd and give it a toss, when it falls it will be in a circle, in order to worship whoever has landed in the center and who ipso facto represents it. Or it will settle down into a pyramid, acclaiming whomever chance has placed at its top...'

from a note in the 1956-1960 section of Occasional Notebooks, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano

Belchamber by Howard Overing Sturgis (1904)

This is a substantial late Victorian-Edwardian story, with many qualities of what used to be called the sensation novel - a frisson of the slightly dark, of the undercurrents beneath polite society. In this instance it is a sexless marriage and the illegitimate offspring born to it. There is nothing particularly unusual about that; what is unusual is that it is Sturgis who is its author. His published novels, now that I've read them all, fill me with suspicion. His first, the classic of hero-worship-bordering-on-homosexuality, Tim, and his second, the obscure and quite inconsequentially quiet All That Was Possible, were novels with forms of spareness in them and yet vastly different from each other. Now comes this fulsome, conservative, rich family tapestry, with echoes of grand tragedy ringing through it. In other words, if I didn't have the title pages to tell me, I would never believe that these three novels were by the same author. Now, the question is: was Sturgis an extraordinary mimic or chameleon? Did he shift perspective most absolutely with each effort, right down to style? Or are some of these books other people's work? If so, whose? His life-companion, William Haynes Smith? Was one or another of them heavily revised by one of his literary friends? Henry James or Edith Wharton? But, at the end of the day, this is a beautiful, sad book, and its main character a movingly flawed man brilliantly portrayed.

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'Ah, if I were a poet, it is to those whose existence has been a failure, whose arrows have not reached their mark, who have died without uttering the words they had to say and without pressing the hand destined for them, to all who have loved without being loved, who have sufferred without being pitied, that I would consecrate my verses; it would be a noble task.'

from Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier (Chapter II)

Commonplace Book

'The distress and suspicion normal persons give rise to in a world where only the Exceptional arouses interest, in all its varieties. Thus it comes about that in the upright man one is obliged to see the scoundrel of tomorrow, or a scoundrel who's concealing himself, while in the scoundrel of today one discovers inspiring qualities. Abel's brain is subjected to an autopsy, Cain is invited to write his memoirs.'

from a note in the 1956-1960 section of Occasional Notebooks, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano

Men and Wives by I. Compton-Burnett (1931)

This accomplished novel has all the hallmarks I am beginning to associate with the author. It has a severe, biting, theatrical small scene where a group of very intense characters have a tendency to bounce one another with surprises, be they lies or truth. The characters in this instance almost flay one another with home truths, all expressed infinitely politely, or at least with an infinite gloss of politeness. Compton-Burnett's theme here is suicide and murder on the outside, but it's really about means of control. This is realised in contrasting ways and exemplified by two main characters, Harriet and Godfrey, who, though married, and well aware of each other's frame of reference in the world, are also at odds temperamentally. While Harriet is weak externally, and prey to nervous tension, she is able to control forcefully a lot of what goes on around her. Godfrey is externally hale and voluble, but temptable and dithering within, and a consistent changer of the story to suit his intentions - he always seems to know that some wholesale change of fortune or interpretation was what he had been thinking all along. The standard Compton-Burnett caveats apply - this book is no more easy reading than the Dalai Lama is a bullfighter.

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'This was our moment of greatest closeness so far, absurd and true - not telling each other how much we loved and so on, but here in this crowded expense-account restaurant counselling each other to be careful. It was a childish joy to me that so much was so different from all I'd been told. It was like a guarantee that we were on the right track, not inventing. If he'd swept me off my feet, shown me a new world, king-like, with one of those expansive map-unrolling gestures that some men are fond of, I'd have been forced to play the beggar-maid, wrapped in my pretended admiration like a false fur. As it was we were both the same size, small and surprised. This was how I'd always wanted it to be: the smallness of me, the largeness of it, and the chance of both of us growing.'

from A Song and Dance by PJ Kavanagh (Chapter 7)

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'"Nature is for painters, Art is for crackpots."'

'Bartoli' (Matteo Bartoli?) quoted in the 1956-1960 section of Occasional Notebooks, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano

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'...Theater is based on the strength of a society which rejects the accusations of the comedy writer or at least ends up being scandalized by them. Shaw's success was founded on the hypocrisy of his audience. Nowadays, our good society isn't hypocritical, on the contrary, where it comes to itself it pushes sincerity to the most bare-bones naturalism, its professed instincts are reproduction and self-preservation. The most ferocious satire leaves it cold because on the stage it always turns out to be inferior to reality, and is consequently flattering...'

from a note in the 1956-1960 section of Occasional Notebooks, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano

Commonplace Book

'"....Somehow I cannot throw it off, that her being away should make so little difference. I could almost feel a little disappointed."

"Of course, it is awful to see human happiness," said Rachel.

"I think you know that was not my meaning."

"That is what I always mean."

"It is not always safe to judge other people by ourselves."

"I have always found it absolutely reliable."

"I think you are in jest," said Agatha with a forbearing smile, "or at any rate between jest and earnest. Your sense of humour is too exuberant."

"Is it? I had hoped it was subtle."

"Well, at any rate it runs away with you."

"Runs away!" said Rachel. "It must be exuberant."

"Are you two quarrelling?" said Geraldine.

"No, it takes two to quarrel," said Rachel.

"Well, what are you so deep in discussing?"

"My sense of humour. Your sister is describing it."

"Oh, sense of humour! I agree it does not make one popular," said Geraldine.

"A sense of humour need not be unkind," said Agatha.

"Doesn't it have to be just a little?" said Rachel.

"One may point one's shafts without realising it," said Geraldine. "When one has a selection of them, it is difficult to remember which are the sharpened ones."

"All the great instances of humour are mingled with tenderness and tolerance," said Agatha.

"Yes, that is what I meant. Only mingled with them. Just a little unkind," said Rachel.'

from Men and Wives by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter XVI)

The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson (1945)

I read some Moomin books in my childhood but the memories are extremely fuzzy now. Obviously this wasn't one of them - it is the first in the series and wasn't translated until 2005. This first visit to the Moomin mind is a rolling series of adventures taken part in by Moominmamma and Moomintroll himself, starting in a great forest where they team up with a little creature, who is never known as anything but that, and has a waspish but fearful personality. Jansson's illustration of him is delightful in its typical cheekiness. Along the way, during a wade through a great dark swamp which, like the forest, is lit with luminous flowers, they use one of these, a tulip, to light their path. From it emerges, to their surprise, a beautiful girl with long blue hair; her name is Tulippa (I'm guessing if Finnish's usual modes are followed, this will be pronounced Tulip-pa). They reach the base of a huge mountain disconcerted and sad, longing for sunshine in this gloomy place. A door opens up in the rock face, and an eccentric man invites them inside, to his specially constructed world of incredible colours and sweets. If this isn't a good part of Roald Dahl's inspiration for Willy Wonka I don't know what is - the echoes are phenomenal. Did he read Swedish or Finnish, being a Norwegian? The man's sunshine is artificial, made from a huge lamp, so they move on, taking a switchback railway (Indiana Jones, anyone?) through the mountain and out to the shore of a huge ocean. A boat ride with Hattifatteners ends with a sea-troll guiding them into the harbour of a land carpeted with meadows of flowers and owned by a bright-red-haired boy who falls headlong for Tulippa, and whose admiration is returned. The boy recalls to Moominmamma that Moominpappa had passed that way very recently, taking the road to the south. Leaving Tulippa with the boy, the original trio immediately start on a search for the lost Moomin, but it starts to rain and doesn't stop for days. In the end their world is almost drowned in the huge flood. All that is visible are the tops of the trees and the very high parts of hills. By discovering an old marabou-stork's lost glasses, Moomintroll ensures his help. He flies the three of them on his back in a last ditch search for Moominpappa, whom they fear has drowned. Of course they finally spy him, lodged at the top of a tree, and their mutual joy is unbounded. He is sad; he had been away from them building them a house which has now been swept away. As the flood dissipates and the sunshine they've been searching for floods the world in its place, they start wandering around. Coming upon a beautiful valley with a meadow at its bottom, what do they see there? Moominpappa is elated: his house has landed in the perfect spot. In typical Jansson style, they almost live there happily ever after - except for the times when they go wandering for a change. A stunningly gentle story, full of humour and odd twists.

Commonplace Book

'"It's like religion. And Beefeaters. People see a church service carried on by an octogenarian who hasn't had a spiritual insight since Toc H and from that conclude that God is Dead. Those men in flat hats at the Tower of London presenting halberds look pretty funny so the idea of tradition is baloney. Polite people listening to bad poets read bad verses in a religious hush is boring so let's have everybody as impolite as possible. That's real. Start from scratch. Shake the dice all over again." He groaned and rubbed his eyes with both hands. "Why must people be such whole-hoggers? It's always either/or."'

from A Song and Dance by PJ Kavanagh (Chapter 4)

Commonplace Book

'"...I am sure I feel as kindly towards my fellow-creatures as most people do; but I approach them with invincible terror; and there is no such sure way of making a dog bite you as to think he is going to."'

from Belchamber by Howard Overing Sturgis (Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'"....it is essential that politics should not be left to inferior men, or what becomes of the nation? Look at America with her venal professional politicians, and see what it has brought her to. Depend upon it, it is the intellectual element in parliament that leavens the lump..."'

from Belchamber by Howard Overing Sturgis (Chapter IV)

The Caravaners by 'Elizabeth' (1909)

'Elizabeth''s career has always to some extent existed behind the veil of her name, to the point where her capabilities have been shadowed a little by it I think. She could be Elizabeth Beauchamp, or von Arnim (which she has turned out to be at present), or Russell, or Frere, depending on whether one chooses her own name or those of her three partners through life. "The author of Elizabeth and her German Garden" or simply that first name is how she was known in her lifetime. All of which obscures the fact that she is one of the great comic writers of the twentieth century. The Caravaners, in terms of the skill and depth with which it is written and its ultimate resulting success, can quite legitimately take its place beside the greats. This veiled picture of a typical Prussian Junker baron, our narrator, with his fatuous prejudices, snobberies, chauvinism and unchallenged self-opinion, is carried through with subtlety and true mastery. A character like that, put on an English caravaning holiday in the Edwardian era, with a growingly rebellious wife and an assortment of (for him) quite challenging travelling companions, from a wiry Socialist to raffish sons of nobility, from elegant free-spirited German ladies to glaring astonished English schoolgirls, with no idea at all of how he comes across and how desperate they all are to get away from him, completely convinced of his own correctness and charm, is devastatingly and almost cruelly funny. The awkward fact which one suspects if a little of her biography is known is that the baron is probably at least a partial picture of her then husband, Henning von Arnim, if not a more substantial one! And this provides perhaps the book's only down-point: every now and then the comedy is too obvious and mocking - the actuation of intense dislike is too palpably clear. The veil is lifted just a little too much, and bitterness shows through. A brilliant example, nevertheless, of the comic art.

Commonplace Book

'"I don't dare to think what your father would have said."

"I don't know why, as he can't say it."'

from Men and Wives by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'"In the exceptional cases, the director is an artist, a temporary poet, who is never sure that he won't lose his job. The true poet, the true artist, advancing in years, getting older, improves his production, rarifies it, refines it, rids it of dross, enriches its spirit. This is possible because he works by himself, and his experience with life inevitably brings him to an intuitive understanding of ever new mysteries. A director on the other hand declines after a certain age, because his art has an immediate need of public approval, the basis for which has in the meantime changed. That reality which he believes he is portraying is no longer operative, it's over with, it no longer has customers. And now the problem arises: at what age does it become necessary to kill a good director?"'

from an entry, dated March 1960, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano

Commonplace Book

'"...Mellicent, you must make up to Jermyn for being told that poetry is not worth a sacrifice, that his mother ought not to be sacrificed to it, when of course she ought. It is trying in such subtle ways to be told that you must not sacrifice your mother."'

from Men and Wives by I. Compton-Burnett (Chapter II)

Wedding Day and other stories by Kay Boyle (1930)

This collection was first published in Paris in 1929, entitled simply Short Stories, in a limited edition - this is the subsequent trade publication. It was Boyle's first book, and shows her as an American under the influence of modernism in Paris in the twenties. Her strength is in spirit. It is a fighting one. These stories boil (what a superb surname for this writer) and rumble with suppressed anger and biting passions. She has a penchant also for interest in unusual circumstances; the situations here are intriguing and tasty. Some of the stories read reasonably straightforwardly and are marked in their originality and success. Her weakness shows in the others. It is in the ungrammatic and self-indulgent abrupt stops and massive disconnects - the excesses of modernism. One can almost see her, too young and flaming-eyed, at Parisian cafe tables, exclaiming in that all-too-familiar way of the indulged 'rebel'. What it does in terms of meaning is deflate; after the initial "Wow!" of many of these phrases comes the wrinkled forehead of wondering what she actually meant - the "Wow!" is revealed as a superficiality. I'm really looking forward to reading into her long career, especially watching that phenomenal fire and energy become disciplined out of these extravagances.

Notre Coeur by Guy de Maupassant (1890)

The major stumbling block with Maupassant is attitudinal. Instead of investigating his favourite subject as women, the human beings we all know, he investigates them as exemplars of a pedestalised ultra-symbol, Woman. Fateful coquettes is what most of them are. And it is no different in this, his last novel. Michele de Burne and Andre Mariolle have a meeting of hearts but with very different modes and expectations. We follow their changeable path through demi-monde Parisian society with Michele keeping her cool and Andre wanly obsessive. There is a beautiful sequence in a surreptitiously planned meeting at Mont Saint-Michel, where the whole landscape sings and the Mont is fabulously impressive as a place of exploration. Then things begin to complicate: Andre's obsession warms as Michele's cool is maintained. My reaction ran counter to Maupassant's intention I think - I had a lot more time for the 'cold' woman than her 'adoring' man. Maupassant's unknowing heartlessness is exemplified in his treatment of Elisabeth, a woman to whom Andre turns when he becomes dissatisfied. She is brushed aside miserably. My copy also includes six short stories, most of which are relatively standard fare, though vivid. The exception is Revenge, a masterly revelation of heartbreak, and the awful consequences when the mind can no longer cope and the world goes black.

Commonplace Book

'Menzies-Legh got up and went away. It was characteristic of him that he seemed always to be doing that. I hardly ever joined him but he was reminded by my approach of something he ought to be doing and went away to do it. I mentioned this to Edelgard during the calm that divided one difference of opinion from another, and she said he never did that when she joined him.

"Dear wife," I explained, "you have less power to remind him of unperformed duties than I possess."

"I suppose I have," said Edelgard.

"And it is very natural that it should be so. Power, of whatever sort it may be, is a masculine attribute. I do not wish to see my little wife with any."

"Neither do I," said she.

"Ah, there speaks my own good little wife."

"I mean, not if it is that sort."

"What sort, dear wife?"

"The sort that reminds people whenever I come that it is time they went."

from The Caravaners by 'Elizabeth' (Chapter XII)

Commonplace Book

'Now we will have to give this photographer an exemplary name, because the right name helps a great deal and indicates that the character will "live on." These semantic affinities between characters and their names drove Flaubert to despair. He spent two years finding Madame Bovary's first name, Emma. For this photographer of ours we don't know what to make up until, stumbling upon that golden little book of George Gissing's titled By the Ionian Sea, we discover the prestigious name "Paparazzo." The photographer will be called Paparazzo. He will never know that he bears the honoured name of a hotel-keeper from somewhere in Calabria, about whom Gissing speaks with gratitude and admiration. But names have a destiny of their own.'

from an entry, dated June 1958, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano

The Poet Assassinated and other stories by Guillaume Apollinaire (1984)

I was ready to be thoroughly irritated by this, but was somehow charmed. The main piece, occupying half the book, is clanking surrealism, and has all the concomitant irritants - meaninglessness, half-bakedness, terrible lack of direction and fullness, but also conversely a few inspiring mind-spurts, and cheeky playfulness. The remaining fifteen pieces are characterised much more by eccentric whimsy, and are only sporadically surreal. Some, like The Moon King (a Ludwig of Bavaria dream) and Saint Adorata (a faux-archaeological Passion) are fascinating slow bursts of soft colour in the memory. Some are a little nastier or duller. The surprise was the last story, The Case of the Masked Corporal. The title has a sub-clause: That is, The Poet Resuscitated. It acts as a summary coda. One sees it initially as standard, replete as it is with bits of concrete prose. Then it opens out into the story of the poet in the Great War, avatar of Apollinaire himself, experiencing a return of many of the characters from the stories in the book, themselves resuscitated and carrying on where they left off. It ends with the sense of the end coming; will the poet be killed in the War, or was Apollinaire aware of his own coming demise? Here he touches the frizzled edges of emotion, albeit in code.

Commonplace Book

"...She felt herself setting out in thought, reticent and proud, and bitter in a small clean way like a cat selecting its paws. But she wanted to believe that there was something fresher and deeper that came of the mind, some force of which she would demand nothing if it would only be. She wanted to believe in a language that burned black the tongue of the one who spoke and scarred the one who listened. She would demand nothing of it, but to serve it, and be humble before it. She was ready to be humbled, but adequately humbled, not by the hate that beat all night at her pillow, nor by the love that slipped off down her cheeks at night acrid into the corners of her mouth."

from Summer, a piece in Wedding Day and other stories by Kay Boyle

Commonplace Book

"'May I ask where we dine?' I inquired, endeavouring to free the skirts of my new mackintosh from the door, which had swung to (the caravan not standing perfectly level) and jammed them tightly. I did not need to raise my voice, for in a caravan even with its door and windows shut people outside can hear what you say just as distinctly as people inside, unless you take the extreme measure of putting something thick over your head and whispering. (Be it understood I am alluding to a caravan at rest: when in motion you may shout your secrets, for the noise of crockery leaping and breaking in what we learned - with difficulty - to allude to as the pantry will effectually drown them.)"

from The Caravaners by 'Elizabeth' (Chapter III)

Commonplace Book

"Truly it is an excellent thing to be able to put down one's opinions on paper as they occur to one without risk of irritating interruption - I hope my hearers will not interrupt at the reading aloud - and now that I have at last begun to write a book - for years I have intended doing so - I see clearly the superiority of writing over speaking. It is the same kind of superiority that the pulpit enjoys over the (very properly) muzzled pews..."

from The Caravaners by 'Elizabeth' (Chapter II)

Rome For Sale by Jack Lindsay (1934)

This novel stands in sharp contrast to its predecessor, which was a sprightly inventive comedy. Here Lindsay shows his mettle in historical terms, with a complex and well-tensioned understanding of the conspiracy of Catalina to overthrow the corrupt Senate in ancient Rome, and establish a dictatorship in the name of the masses. With a vast array of characters, and his very fine understanding of the workings of their minds, and the tangents of thought brought about by the historical context, one would imagine that this second novel would be a surefire amplification of his credentials. But something perhaps in his passion for the material stymies this book, or perhaps the fault lies elsewhere. The effect is a becalming. The entire first half feels like a hopping from tile to tile and back again in a vast mosaic - the narrative drive is disturbingly missing. So while there is grandness of intent, vastness of scale, depth of vision into humanity, this enormous vehicle stalls nevertheless. Only when we reach the election, intended by Catalina as the catalyst for his actions, does the fire of onward energy match the huge intent. For a good portion of the last half he keeps this up, and then a tailoff begins. The final scenes of Catalina's death in battle are, though, stirring and beautiful.

Commonplace Book

"...All at once he felt rising with gathering strength within him the stern determination to end this torturing subserviency. She had nailed him upon a cross; he was bleeding from every limb, and she watched his agony without feeling for his suffering, even rejoicing that she had had it in her power to effect so much. But he would tear himself from his deathly gibbet, leaving there bits of his body, strips of his flesh, and all his mangled heart. He would flee like a wild animal that the hunters have wounded almost unto death, he would go and hide himself in some lonely place where his wounds might heal and where he might feel only those dull pangs that remain with the mutilated until they are released by death."

from Notre Coeur by Guy de Maupassant (Chapter IX)

The Princess Sophia by EF Benson (1900)

This novel is Benson's attempt at his own spin on Ruritania, which had been made popular, to put it mildly, by the phenomenal success of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda earlier this decade. It is Bensonian in that it is light in tone, lacking what I take to be (haven't read it yet) the serious historical element in Hope's work. Sophia is reigning in Rhodope, which roughly coincides with the bottom third of Albania, and is an inveterate gambler. After foiling a pretty unbelievable plot by her dashing but rather limited prince and her prime minister in a delightfully dramatic way, she realises that her son Leonard needs to be protected from the gambling instinct prevalent in him through simply being her child! He is sent off to Eton and then round the world on improving travels, she resumes her frequent trips to Monte Carlo on her royal yacht, and also gambles at the club she has established in the gardens of Rhodope's royal palace. One stormy night in Monte, an incognito Leonard proves himself a force at the tables, reveals himself, and manages to win the throne of their country from his mother as their highest stake! Fantastic madness, followed by an epilogue describing his benevolent reign which returns Rhodope to its former brilliance (by banning all gambling), which had been dulled by Sophia's introduction of the fascinating but morally enervating games of chance. Enormous fun, even though, in its confusion over the attractions and attenuations of gambling, it really doesn't know whether it's Arthur or Martha.

Commonplace Book

"'...Nowadays you persist in suppressing everything that has any savour of sentiment and poetry, and in its stead give them only naked, undeceiving realities. Now, my dear sir, the more love there is in books, the more love there is in life. When you invented the ideal and laid it before them, they believed in the truth of your inventions. Now that you give them nothing but stern, unadorned realism, they follow in your footsteps and have come to measure everything by that standard of vulgarity.'"

from Notre Coeur by Guy de Maupassant (Chapter VI)

The Black Dwarf by Sir Walter Scott (1816)

This smaller piece was the first emanation of a series of stories called The Tales of My Landlord. There is a definite feeling of rusticity to its first part, where Scott was perhaps slowly making his way to a country tale with supernatural elements; I wonder if something Gothic was on the hustings. The dwarf arrives on Mucklestane Moor and without any leave sets up his stony habitation in an eerie spot, encountering wondering rough locals and spraying all comers with his misanthropic but intelligent barbs. After a contretemps in which Hobbie of Heughfoot's homestead is burnt to ashes and his girl is kidnapped by a ruffian and eventually returned to him unharmed, the story is lifted to more traditional Scott territory. In a deft twist he turns to the parallel story of the Veres and the Mauleys and a planned Jacobite uprising. Isabella Vere is betrothed against her will to Sir Frederick Langley, one of the uprisers, by her father. It is only through the interpolation of the Black Dwarf, who had befriended her earlier in the piece, that this dastardly union is avoided. It is revealed that the Dwarf is the long-lost Sir Edward Mauley, thought dead, and Isabella's good sense has awakened his abuse-hardened heart. This piece is lifted by Scott's insight into the mind of the dwarf; his humanity, and the broader comment about our society's response to the physically unbeautiful and the misery it causes, lend texture and emotion to a simple story.

Commonplace Book

'"At last I feel irresponsible. Nobody can do anything which concerns me, except to leave the door open when I prefer it shut. Really, if one has to be somewhere, to be on a death-bed is one of the very best places. Nothing can touch one; it is like getting out of a tunnel full of jarring noises."'

from The Princess Sophia by EF Benson (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'"When a thing is done, it is done, and things for the most part do not produce any consequences at all, though people who have addled their brains with trivial thinking tell us that they do. Moralists and philosophers are the most shallow people in the world, for argument is ever less sound than conviction..."'

from The Princess Sophia by EF Benson (Chapter IV)

The Man Who Missed the 'Bus by Stella Benson (1928)

There is no question about it - this story is a classic and deserves a place it does not currently occupy. It should be in any respectable anthology of the best of the twentieth century. Herbert Robinson is a typical Benson creation - enormously fallible, cranky and sweet by turns, full of contrasting confidence and squashedness. His experience at an hotel in Provence, in a little white hilltop village, unfolds magnificently under Benson's startlingly able control. It begins with his frustrations with others, his virginity and fascination with things rather than people. It develops with a lovely trope of never being able to see, through too much shadow or too much blinding light in every situation, the faces of anyone around him, analogising his groping search for the meaning of humanity, which he sees as metaphorically and literally always having its back to him. It runs to a point of diversion, where he sits in a wood above the hotel, communing in the half light with a mouse family between some tree-roots. It ends in a calamity. All these elements are fused with prose which is tender, personal and delicate, and then eerie, dramatic and poetic by turns. There are wonderful observations hidden in these relatively plain sentences, filaments of gold woven through a narrative which is masterly.

Commonplace Book

'"...We only have to think impersonally enough, and even death - well, we are all either nearly dead or just born, more or less, and the balance of birth and death never appreciably alters. Personal thinking is the curse of existence. Why are we all crushed under the weight of this strangling ME - this snake in our garden....?"

from The Man Who Missed the 'Bus by Stella Benson

Commonplace Book

'"Stone walls may have ears,' returned Ellieslaw, eyeing him with a look of triumphant malignity, "but domestic spies, Mr Ratcliffe, will soon find themselves without any, if any such dares to continue his abode in a family where his coming was an unauthorized intrusion, where his conduct has been that of a presumptuous meddler, and from which his exit shall be that of a baffled knave, if he does not know how to take a hint."'

from The Black Dwarf by Sir Walter Scott (Chapter XIII)

The Sixth Sense by Stephen McKenna (1915)

As is usual with this author, this novel makes the reader feel that they are in safe hands. McKenna is one of the links between Oscar Wilde and Michael Arlen in terms of literary history. He was applauded as Wilde's successor on the publication of his first novel in 1912, which was indeed laden with wit and tart aphoristic prose. The subsequent two have travelled on from that, into the post-Edwardian mindset, where manners are still important but not so mannerism. This third one deals with the return to England of Toby Merivale after many years of world-wandering. He is caught up in London's current political machinations in the form of militant suffragism, and with his old friends now in much more influential positions in British politics. Most are not supportive of Joyce Davenant, one of the main campaigners, but Toby falls for her. Unfortunately she is involved in a series of kidnaps, and her elder sister is the bad party in a notorious divorce at exactly the same time. The Davenants' social stock falls disastrously! The sixth sense of the title is in the mind of Toby's best friend Aintree, known as The Seraph, who finds, through its agency, one of the kidnapped. This is a standard story of love, energised by fine elegant writing and cool stylish worldliness.

Commonplace Book

'...The difference between eccentricity and madness may be measured in pounds sterling. A rich man is never mad in England, unless, of course, his heirs-at-law cast wistful glances at the pounds sterling...'

from The Sixth Sense by Stephen McKenna (Chapter XII)

Commonplace Book

'...Do not men receive even my benefits with shrinking horror and ill-suppressed disgust? And why should I interest myself in a race which accounts me a prodigy and an outcast, and which has treated me as such? No; by all the ingratitude which I have reaped, by all the wrongs which I have sustained, by my imprisonment, my stripes, my chains, I will wrestle down my feelings of rebellious humanity! I will not be the fool I have been, to swerve from my principles whenever there was an appeal, forsooth, to my feelings; as if I, towards whom none show sympathy, ought to have sympathy with any one. Let Destiny drive forth her scythed car through the overwhelmed and trembling mass of humanity!..'

from The Black Dwarf by Sir Walter Scott (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'I have always found the man who demolishes a religion only one degree less tiresome than the man who discovers religion for the first time.'

from The Sixth Sense by Stephen McKenna (Chapter IV)

Sanguinaires Lighthouse and other tales by Alphonse Daudet (1929)

These tales form 'Volume III' of a one-volume edition published in 1929. I have never seen the 'volumes' included published separately. These stories carry on the more traditional strain of Daudet's output - they are contes, in the sense of being short pieces, fictional or not, which have the quality of sketches; drawings from life. There are nine of them, ranging from a haunting burst of gloom in the title piece about a Corsican lighthouse, to wry comedy about human frailty in The Drummer, to little exclamatory slices of life expressed poetically like Ah! Paris, Paris! My favourite is the pastoral and dreamy Protected by Stars, about a young shepherd and his fascination for the daughter of his master, who is marooned with him on a dark stormy night. These, at least, are not syphilitic Daudet, whose more worldly and harsh elements had forefronted in a previous volume. The remaining sections in this compilation consist in part of three of Daudet's novels, only one of which is popularly known in English, that being Sapho. I look forward to it and the far lesser known Kings in Exile and A Passion of the South with interest. He doesn't as yet strike me as a writer I can be passionate about, but perhaps the novels will force a change.

The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (1897)

This is a serious change of direction. Hobbes' first four novels were short, Wildean aphorism-fests. Then she broke into more tragic territory with her fifth and sixth, still retaining something of the lighter tone. This seventh one is not only historical and serious, but running I think in the wake of Anthony Hope's phenomenally successful The Prisoner of Zenda in its Ruritanian qualities. Perhaps in the aftermath of Oscar Wilde's trial, perhaps feeling she had exhausted her Aesthetic vein, she embarks on a political tale enlivened by intrigue, Catholicism, and pan-European events and characters. The lead is taken by Robert Orange, a young gun in the Disraeli mold, who slowly realises politics is his game whilst also gaining an appreciation of the fair form and spirit of Brigit, an illegitimate archduchess of (fictional) Alberia, whose mother had been his first taste of love. Her Catholicism moves him to convert and, having just gained a seat in parliament, he heads off to Spain to help her intrigue in Don Carlos' cause! I can feel Scott in this, and Sand is surely an inspiration too, and possibly Dumas. It is the strange backwards step of it in literary terms which is the most intriguing. Not many 'decadent' period wits stepped back into augustitude and the mid-Victorian. Where will she go next?

The Adventures of Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett (1753)

This novel is quite different to its two predecessors. While they were shambolic and variable accounts of the lives of young rakes, those rakes were often charming and likeable. This young Ferdinand is a hell-boy with no remediation. He is uniformly manipulative, selfish and unfeeling, and woe betide anyone who comes under his spell. And a spell is what it must be, as he manages to convince all and sundry of his being on their side, only to rip hell out of them on the quiet. Oddly this lively roast is not so flavoursome, because it is so unremitting. Finally in the last few chapters we leave him in gaol (not for the first time) and our attention is taken up by his ruined adopted brother and his ruined adored girl, her ruined father and some other well-had former well-wishers coming together and realising his perfidy. A few extraordinary co-incidences later we find that much of what Fathom has 'engineered' has come unstuck and that all their lives are freed of his blight. Right at the end they discover Fathom in a miserable state of destitution as the power of his ruses has finally dried up. As he lies dying, he realises the misery he has caused, repents, and engenders their forgiveness, which gifts him back his life. Perhaps Smollett had too many complaints during the original serial publication about Ferdinand's character and the bleakness of the unending catalogue of misery he causes. Whatever, the last few chapters save this from weighing too heavy.

Commonplace Book

'"...Men now have neither gods nor kings nor idols. They have sunk lower than the heathen - for the heathen has never yet bowed down in adoration before his own individuality. He chose something which at least seemed to him more powerful than himself. Prayer has recently been defined as a reference to one's higher self! But one's 'higher self' is the soul, and the soul belongs to God..."'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Book II, Chapter XXIII)

Commonplace Book

"Come hither, ye whom the pride of youth and health, of birth and affluence inflames, who tread the flowery maze of pleasure, trusting to the fruition of ever-circling joys; ye who glory in your accomplishments, who indulge the views of ambition, and lay schemes for future happiness and grandeur, contemplate here the vanity of life! behold how low this excellent young man is laid! mowed down even in the blossom of his youth, when fortune seemed to open all her treasures to his worth!"

from The Adventures of Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett (Chapter Sixty)

C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life by Sean Day-Lewis (1980)

This biography is remarkable for the fact that it is a family piece - a son's biography of his father. Day-Lewis says in his introduction that he was warned off it as an enterprise, because of the heroism/destruction dualism of many father/son relationships, at least from a psychologist's point of view. But I think the results speak for themselves: it is a portrait from the inside (at least to some extent) and therefore has a unique message. There is a sense throughout it of insight, of febrile knowledge tingling close to the source, which is invaluable. Day-Lewis is a sympathetic biographer without being in any sense hagiographic. He is quite happy to intensely document, for example, the adverse reaction to his father's work in the last 10 or so years of his life in many quarters, but also to reveal quite objectively where he thought that was governed by malice rather than insight. Every now and then one gets a sense of being too close to some subject which pinches, where the author reveals a peculiar reaction to some event which still obviously hurts or confuses. But the very few of those are more than balanced by a simple and straightforward prose style and its contrastingly rich and moving portrait.

Commonplace Book

"Just freedom in the abstract, general freedom, means anarchy, which may be an ideal state of things but is not a possible state of things."

Cecil Day-Lewis, quoted in C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life by Sean Day-Lewis (Chapter 5)

Commonplace Book

'"...Might may win many battles; Might and Right together can win most battles; Right by itself - without money and without friends - counts for nothing."'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Book II, Chapter XII)

Credo by The Human League (2011)

Well, it's been out a while, and the dust is settling. And a fair amount of dust was kicked up! Wildly divergent views abounded, from the howls of 'worst album ever' to awards of five stars out of five and adoration. I suppose what I'm interested in, true to my form, is the wider view. I'm interested in what I can divine in this group of 11 songs which has pop-forever qualities in it. There is a lot on Credo which is not forever, material which is very much of the now, and will make us wonder 'Why did they do that?' in time to come. Particularly there's a lot of "robo-disco" (and I use that phrase only because I read it in a review somewhere) deadening repetition, a slightly noughties-electro-clique retro which is a bit disappointing. Probably from anyone else a lot of this material would still be fairly impressive, but from a group which can really hit the heights of pop, if not belt through them, it's not quite enough. That said, the I-Monster production is very savvy in other much more alive ways; some of these songs have minor texturing and rich layers of sound which are an absolute joy.

Phil's lyrics are preponderantly good on this one. Gone is the slight lyrical awkwardness of songs like Love Me Madly? from 2001's Secrets, where an inspired notion was spoilt in tads by word-mashes which didn't quite hold up. Not the crazedness, however. Night People's talk of houses and rhyming mouses, let alone the extraordinary freezers, cheeses, Caesar's, pleases combo of the second verse is carried off with such gorgeous deadpan aplomb I, for one, couldn't be happier. Where he seems let down on this album is with the choruses - I think his weakness with them really shows up the need for the right sort of co-writer to help the League really explode to their fullest. Too many of these songs feel just a little deadened where that point is reached. Verses which have all the promise in the world are not followed up on.

It's interesting to rearrange this album on your machine of choice. I tried it in alphabetical order and all sorts of stuff came out of it. How much better the poorest song, Single Minded, sounds straight after Privilege, revealed as its bedfellow in a darker more experimental feeling. Breaking the Chains as an opener is a revelation. And so on......

The likening which is still working for me about this one is that of Body Language after Fever for Kylie Minogue. It was a slinkier softer-edged album with great interesting elements but the contrast could not have been greater in the standout-track analysis. Fever had a tranche of spectacularly pop-wise and radio-squelching tracks, Body Language none, really, or none on anything like the same level. Credo is Body Language after the Fever of Octopus and Secrets. Lots of stunning small elements and a few songs where pretty much everything comes together well, and because it's The Human League, that's a great experience. But, I don't want to say it but I will because it's true, NO absolute killer songs which will blast any listener away like Shameless could have done, or Liar, or Reflections, or Cruel Young Lover, or Never Again, or........ Night People is the closest possibility: the more I hear it the more I like it, but I still can't quite get past my first reaction. The chorus is too needly. It rips little shreds off you in a way that is just past stunning and heading toward niggling. But it's a close run thing, there are plays of it where I'm off in the clouds and dreaming it...lovely old club-voguing, late 70s retro in a good way.

Well, bloody good luck to them, even if Credo is a 'minor' HL album. They're still here after all this time. There are 'stories' circulating saying that Phil is thinking of one more album only where all old members of the group will have the opportunity to take part. I'm less interested in the old members and a lot more concerned about ONLY ONE MORE ALBUM! Aaaaaargh. No way. While you're still alive Phil, Jo, Sue, don't leave us without. You provide a soundtrack to our lives that we would sorely miss.

The Aeneid by Virgil (19BC)

This was an exercise in getting a classic under my belt. Many of those are an unalloyed pleasure. This was not quite that. It is a story initially of wandering - the Trojans, post-Iliad, trying to find a new place in the world, led by Aeneas. An experiment with Dido in Carthage turns sour and the wandering begins again. They end up on the site which will later become Rome and encounter the Italians, just a small tribal group at this time. There occurs the phenomenal battle which will see the Italians under Turnus defeated and Aeneas victorious - and crucially the Roman Empire established. For this story is Rome justified, and many of the players must have been ancestors of notable Romans of Virgil's time. They are woven into the heroic myth in huge numbers. The other obvious element of note is the work of the gods - great Jove, Aeneas' mother Venus, and Turnus' champion Juno. A myriad of minor deities flit through the story, influencing on one side or another. The most satisfying parts are those in the midst of the battle, where spears fly poetically, or swords penetrate with fire in their thrust, and heads are sheared off, or sides split open, or throats gouged, or brains run through! This prose translation by JW Mackail may, I think, not be the ultimate experience of this material. I think a poetic translation may be called for.

Commonplace Book

'...There are thoughts which are companions having a language, and there are other thoughts which rest in a painful sleep upon our souls till the dumb weight of them brings us to dust. Grief, despair, the desire of beauty, the sorrow of partings, the thirst of ambition, the attachment to friends are not small contemptible weaknesses [...] A strong man has living blood in his veins and he shows his character not by despising - still less in denying his emotions - but in exalting them. And that is no light achievement...'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Book II, Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'"I cannot help thinking that Flaubert will as little influence your views as he would mine. He has the morals of a sick devil and the philosophy of a retired dancing-master!"'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Book II, Chapter III)

Commonplace Book

'"...Often do the Days and varying change of toiling Time restore prosperity; often Fortune in broken visits makes man her sport and again establishes him..."'

from The Aeneid by Virgil (Book Eleven)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs David Ogilvy 1849-1861 (1974)

This volume not only collects the 38 remaining letters which Browning wrote to Ogilvy, but also Ogilvy's biographical essay on Browning, a group of Ogilvy's poems which were mentioned in or covered the time of the letter-exchange, and a short excerpt from Mary Russell Mitford's recollections about Browning. The letters are effusive and classically 'bohemian' and 'upper middle chattering class' in the period before either of those terms really existed. My exposure to Browning is limited to a few poems, so her political leanings and fascination with children came as a surprise. Their children are a major talking point between the two women, and the portrait of Pen Browning in particular, with his delicacy and bright outspokenness, his strange clothes and very mixed Anglo-French-Italian vocabulary, is intriguing. These letters were almost all written from Italy, many from the famed Casa Guidi in Florence, and are bathed in sunlight and generally radiant with Browning's improved health as a result. Ogilvy's poems in Appendix B are really moving and strong pieces. We also get a sidelong view of Robert Browning and other literary and political figures of the time (Browning was an enthusiastic supporter of Louis Napoleon, Napoleon III) which lend more colour to an already full picture.

Commonplace Book

'Hope is the heroic form of despair.'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'...The faults of those who love us are more acceptable than the virtues of those who treat us with neglect...'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'...There is perhaps no strength so great and abiding as that which follows from a resisted temptation. Every dangerous allurement is like an enchanted monster, which, being conquered, loses all his venom and changes at once into a king of great treasure, eager to make requital...'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'...Politicians are now of three kinds - the sugary, the soapy and the feathery. The first cover their vile opinions with sweetness; the second affect to keep other people's opinions clean; the third make their opinions so light of wing that they can fly away at a moment's warning...'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'...few indeed attain the grandeur of madness. To be seriously mad is a fine thing; it shows that the gods have had somewhat to say to you...'

from The School for Saints by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter III)

Santal by Ronald Firbank (1921)

This is a puzzling piece. It has much that is characteristically Firbankian - that sense of a very camp, slightly bitter, slightly flighty personality celebrating violent or victim-like natures in its characters; the love of an odd flourish of prose wrapped in simple but quietly decadent narrative. I hesitate to say that it seems like an initial enthusiasm of which he quickly bored. The north African-Arabic atmosphere in which it is suffused is alive and energetic in the long opening chapter, where the scene is fully set. The four which follow it, though they are not completely lacking in enthusiasm, are more elegiac and intrepid, as Cherif, the young main character, starts out on his journey toward the holy man he wishes to visit across the plains and desert and few oases and lush places. The fact that the story stops at the end of Chapter Five with Cherif simply imploring Lord Allah to show him compassion, and the feeling that he will go on searching for his goal even though he has been stymied thus far, seems to suggest that Firbank didn't think of this as a narrative at all, but rather something different - an allegory for the state of his life, perhaps? There is always that sense with him of the layer of the personal (and the acting out of it) underneath his overt narratives. Maybe this one took it one stage further. If so, it has to be said that it is beautiful but very unsatisfying.

Commonplace Book

'...The gradations towards vice are almost imperceptible, and an experienced seducer can strew them with such enticing and agreeable flowers, as will lead the young sinner on insensibly, even to the most profligate stages of guilt. All therefore that can be done by virtue, unassisted with experience, is to avoid every trial with such a formidable foe, by declining and discouraging the first advances towards a particular correpondence with perfidious man, howsoever agreeable it may seem to be. For here is no security but in conscious weakness.'

from The Adventures of Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett (Chapter Thirty-Four)

Commonplace Book

'...plausibility and confidence are faculties really inherited from nature, and effectually serve the possessor, in lieu of that learning which is not to be obtained without infinite toil and perseverance.

The most superficial tincture of the arts and sciences in such a juggler, is sufficient to dazzle the understanding of half mankind; and, if managed with circumspection, will enable him even to spend his life among the literati, without once forfeiting the character of a connoisseur.'

from The Adventures of Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett (Chapter Thirty-Two)

Commonplace Book

'...Slogging away at the Aeneid: the race and the boxing match are extremely funny - athel, bugger it I will spell it right, athletes have evidently behaved all through the ages with the same mixture of exhibitionism, hysteria and unscrupulousness.'

Cecil Day-Lewis, in a letter to Jill Balcon, 1950, quoted in C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life by Sean Day-Lewis (Chapter 4)

Commonplace Book

'...There is an affinity and short transition betwixt all the violent passions that agitate the human mind. They are all false perspectives, which, though they magnify, yet perplex and render indistinct every object which they represent. And flattery is never so successfully adminstered, as to those who know they stand in need of friendship, assent, and approbation.'

from The Adventures of Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett (Chapter Thirty)

Helene by Mrs Arthur Kennard (1883)

This is a novel of some contradictions. Many elements of it are standard for their time - it's a story of love, set in society in London and in great houses in the country. The heroine is beautiful and a little unaware of it, and her humility leads her into allowing a love to develop that her wariness would otherwise have prohibited. But there are more unusual elements here: the heroine is a French Catholic who adheres quite strongly to her faith; she is very badly off, and has to work as a reciter to get by. There are also some infelicities of style here: there is a sense of unevenness whereby some parts read a little flatly, whereas some are quite intense and fascinating. There is also a sense that Kennard intended that the society surrounding the main couple would be, at least in part, a comic chorus, and more urbanely portrayed. She doesn't quite set this adequately firmly in place; there are moments where it jars. With its sad final scenes set in the wilds of 1870s Canada and in the countryside surrounding a French convent, this slightly unusual piece is satisfying in much that it attempts. Kennard's career was slight - only four main pieces of fiction - I look forward to the others to see if she can iron out these rough spots.

Commonplace Book

'"...Go to Italy or to France. I myself don't think there is any place like Rome or Naples to "cure the mind diseased." Live there some months, impregnate your soul with the peace and stillness that reigns amongst her temples and her treasure-houses of painting and sculpture, and I will wager my reputation as a wise man and a philosopher that you come back cured in body and soul. Things in that serene atmosphere assume their just proportions. We see the extreme smallness of our own interests and sufferings, and we learn the insignificance of our own imbecile personalities."'

from Helene by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Volume II, Chapter XIV)

Commonplace Book

'"...follow we fate's ebb and flow, whatsoever it shall be; all fortune may be overcome by being borne."'

from The Aeneid by Virgil (Book Five)

Commonplace Book

'We never acknowledge the reality of our fate until it is inexorably decided. We always think a miracle will be worked to avert its decrees. The stream will run backwards, the sun will stand still in our case. It is only when we find the stream rushing impetuously onward, and the sun shining with brilliant indifference while our hearts are breaking, that we acknowledge how powerless we are to stop the relentless advance of forces beyond our power and ken.'

from Helene by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Volume II, Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'....I cannot look back to any month or week of that year without horror, & a feeling of the wandering of the senses. Places are ideas, and ideas can madden or kill...'

from a letter dated July 13, 1850 in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs David Ogilvy 1849-1861

Commonplace Book

'"It is a disease that attacks people when they find they cannot reconcile the economy of the world with their preconceived notions of what it ought to be. At your age, weltschmerz ought to be cured by copious doses of "iron". At mine, it cures itself; for I can afford to acknowledge that it is a hard, miserable world, and yet that I love it. It has done me plenty of bad turns, and yet I take an interest in it and its fortunes. I once wished to show it its errors, and tried to reclaim it from some of them; but it left me sitting by the roadside and went its way. And so I gave up trying to improve it mentally, but I do so physically whenever I get a chance, hoping that moral improvement may come after..."'

from Helene by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Volume I, Chapter XII)

Eating Out Again and other stories by Natalie Scott (2001)

Scott's prose is characterised by its poetic concision. It's a very particular world she portrays, tinted with disappointed intelligent women, or oblivious dullard ones, or nervously extreme uptight ones, or those who are looking out at their world through coloured glasses of one kind or another. Every now and then it is a man she depicts, and they have some of the same attributes, tending toward the fussy. Her other men are subsidiary characters who have often brought about the intensities of her pointed women through neglect, or lack of understanding. Rarely there is a positive combination too, a second relationship perhaps, where past miseries are forgotten in a flush of new possibilities. The first story here (the title story about a homeless woman) is a partner to the last of the previous volume (about a homeless man). Many in the last half of this collection are brilliantly observed zesty slices of well-heeled Australian life, occasionally brutally funny (Happy Ever After) whilst remaining subtle, otherwise poignant and moving (Totem, The Queen of Disorder). Her major fault surfaces early on with the second story and keeps appearing in at least the following eight: it is the putting of poetic flights into mundane mouths. When down to earth characters emit utterly poetic phrases all semblance of reality is lost. Other than that, and a couple of flat endings, a fine collection.

Commonplace Book

'...Nothing is more liable to misconstruction than an act of uncommon generosity; one half of the world mistake the motive, from want of ideas to conceive an instance of beneficence that soars so high above the level of their own sentiments; and the rest suspect it of something sinister or selfish, from the suggestions of their own sordid and vicious inclinations...'

from The Adventures of Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett (Chapter Five)

Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

The eccentricity of Powys is the overriding factor I think. Of course the verbal eccentricity: the wild arabesques of digressive sub-clauses, the clatter of childlike playfulness and invention. But also the emotional eccentricity: the unexplainable pet hates, the opposing overweening predilections, the fears and bravura in odd circumstances. Some of it is I'm sure actorly - he is at pains to point out that he is an actor at heart, which he feels aided his long years of lecturing. But he is also quite honest about his incapacities, often trying to detect their genesis, and coming to sometimes wild, sometimes believable conclusions. I feel that he had quite an accurate view of himself; that something unerring within him kept his eyes to his own magnetic north, and that that quality inevitably extended to the members of his family also, being a Powys. This element gives an extra level of revelation to this collection - the view at one remove of Theodore and Llewelyn, let alone the lesser known brothers and sisters, is salutary and instructive. The intimate portrait of his life with Phyllis Playter in both Corwen and Blaenau Ffestiniog is endearing, and the side portraits of literary and personal figures who came into their lives, and indeed the books that fascinated them, provide a richness that intensifies the deep pleasure of his company.

Haunted Islands Part I by J. Redwood Anderson (1923)

This slender volume is a little worrying. Anderson's last collection was a trifle mixed in the effect stakes, and this one continues and amplifies the diminution. Many pieces here are what might be called quietly effective. There is a strong sense, comparable to his earlier work, of his muse going through a quiescence. They are often evening-set nature pieces, softly contemplative, but lifted with his trademark strength of eye. A tendency to repeat himself is becoming more obvious, where often a first verse will also be a last, as though that was to his mind 'a song', but the effect is frankly a little flat. One poem particularly stands out from this crowd - An Old Man. Much tougher and more harsh initially, bristling with pig similes (!), and then rising to poignancy in a stare out to sea and a thought of lives lost, it satisfies in a way many of the others can't. Similarly, the longer The Island of the Stones uses drier, stoic language to build a picture of a St Kilda-like isle of barren windsweptness and stone-walled rocky fields and paths. This too has a greater power and somehow a deeper voice. Although this is overall a slightly disappointing volume, there are compensations. I'm pulling at the bit, though: roll on the renaissance in his craft.

Commonplace Book

'"Towers are measured by their shadows, and great people by their calumniators."'

Eastern proverb, quoted in Helene by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Volume I, Chapter VI)

The Sin of Monsieur Antoine by George Sand (1859)

This has all the hallmarks of classic Sand with one addition. It has the wide landscape, through which the characters ride, walk and conjunct typically. It has the big love affair, challenged in the Sandian way with philosophic implications, which are won out over. It has, though, a new political twist. Here we have Sand discovering her interest in communism versus capitalism. My knowledge of the literary exposure of these ideas is fairly incomplete, but it seems like an early outing for this contest. Young striving Emile Cardonnet and aged misanthrope Monsieur de Boisguilbault discuss their common interest in communism in a romantic way which I'm guessing mirrored Sand's at this time. By contrast, Emile's father is a convincingly presented closed-minded capitalist, whom Sand has also be a potential fool; a local village wise-man knows that his scheme for a factory is doomed to be consistently flooded by an unruly river system. This doesn't eventuate, giving the impression that Sand didn't have an overall plan for this novel, and it was one of a few possible outcomes. Sand is almost always a passionate pleasure, and this is no exception, with great subsidiary characters and bright colour, whilst not being on the level of a great novel like Consuelo, for example.

Parties by Carl Van Vechten (1930)

This is most noticeably the novel of an alcoholic. Drink is the main returning motif, it is the currency of this novel. Set in the time of speakeasies, bootleggers and Harlem Nights for wealthy young white New Yorkers, it is perhaps the novel of all of Van Vechten's which tips its hat to Ronald Firbank, one of the author's fascinations, the most. One character, Roy Fern, is almost definitely a kind of warped celebration of him, with his strange intense effusions, glittering eyes, love of men, and waspish slenderness. The opening chapter is very Firbankian, with its short blasts of conversation and event in quick succession, leaving the reader to fill the narrative. Thereafter it settles into a more classically Vechtenian mode, with the sweet young things of the Jazz Age bouncing off one another in a variety of moods. The purity of the eccentricity of this one is new - notably in the character of the wild Simone Fly, whose standard drunken utterance, "Blaaaa!", and tendency to drop and smithereen her glass in her excitement while exclaiming at odd angles on barstools or on the floor is really fine. The open discussion of drugs (Roy Fern loves 'uppies', some call it snow) is also new. A novel which, while it hardly uplifts the spirit, is markedly clever, super-ready for a film adaptation, and only suffers from a rather whimpery ending.

The New Dawn by Romain Rolland (1912)

This final volume in the massive Jean Christophe sequence shares the feeling one gets from all the others, namely that this gigantic work is of the nature of an ecstatic tirade. It is heightened, rolling and flowing in a poetic swirl which, given its musical subject, may be likenable to a particular musical form of which I'm not cognizant. There is an immensity to it which I think may deafen the reader to some of its weaknesses, while at the same time engendering a kind of wonder. A problem is psychology: there is a manner in which Rolland gets up too much steam, his engine is too supremely primed, in describing the moods and tensions of the characters, that he becomes capable of intra-character contradictions. I'm sure he could poetically claim that red was blue, and up, down; he does seem to claim that his people have a guiding mainspring of a particular kind, only for us to find a few pages later that some quite opposite influence or tendency is inspiring them. Because the matter of which he is dealing is humanity in all its colours and shades there are 'escape routes' in simply saying that he's showing both faces of the human dualism, but I think the truth is probably a lot more prosaic: he gets lost in the ecstatic poetry. But there is no doubting the enquiring intellect and great beauty here. His management of Christopher's last illness is fascinating and reaches high. The portrait of late nineteenth century Europe in flux, the winds of history blowing over it, is rich and fascinating. The whole work is terribly underrated in its standing in world literature.

Commonplace Book

'...How can one renounce the faith for which one has lived? That is to renounce life. What is the good of labouring to think thoughts other than one's own, to be like one's neighbour or to meddle with his affairs? That leads to self-destruction, and no one is benefited by it. The first duty is to be what one is, to dare to say: "This is good, that bad." One profits the weak more by being strong than by sharing their weakness. Be indulgent, if you like, towards weakness and past sins. But never compromise with any weakness....'

from The New Dawn by Romain Rolland, part ten of his Jean Christophe sequence, translated by Gilbert Cannan (Part III)

Commonplace Book

'"...You laughed at me when, at the beginning of my general studies, I said to you that all branches of human knowledge seemed to me to be inter-related, and that one must needs know almost everything to be infallible on any given point; in a word, that no special work could dispense with synthesis, and that before learning the mechanism of a watch it would be well to learn the mechanism of creation..."'

from The Sin of Monsieur Antoine by George Sand (Chapter XXVI)

Commonplace Book

'The book we've just finished is Sartre's Novel translated, called 'The Age of Reason'. You ought to read it --- It's a Peach! - a lovely soft rotten Peach! whose juice keeps running down your chin as if down Aaron's beard! and you have the lovely liquorish taste long after it's done & down!'

from a letter dated June 7, 1947 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

A Trophy of Arms by Ruth Pitter (1936)

This volume won the Hawthornden Prize and, in so doing, established Pitter on a new level among her contemporaries. It is not hard to see why. Very, very rarely does any piece among these strike a false note. (In fact, there are times when the perfection of the pieces appears almost like the gloss of mother-of-pearl on the clouds of some ineffable Heaven! Some are almost registering in an undetectable octave such as only animals can hear! I think I've been reading too much John Cowper Powys lately.) It is in her small, solitary fight against depression, against worldliness, in her dive into the healing dark spaces striving for contrary unity, that she achieves most. These poems are truly transformative and great. I am assuming that the tart whimsicality of her previous volume has not disappeared; that perhaps this is a kind of holiday-mode for her which will be expressed at irregular intervals. Volumes such as this one, by contrast, are the mainstay; they are her working at the core seam. These first signs of absolute greatness, no matter how minor the key, are inspiring. All power to her gentle toughness, and her standing apart from the crowd.

Commonplace Book

'"...Of all men the Italians seem most utterly to have lost the sense of harmony [...] Must a stranger once more reveal to them its work?...And what man shall teach it to our musicians? Music has not yet had its Raphael. Mozart is only a child, a little German bourgeois, with feverish hands and sentimental soul, who uses too many words, too many gestures, and chatters and weeps and laughs over nothing..."'

from The New Dawn by Romain Rolland, part ten of his Jean Christophe sequence, translated by Gilbert Cannan (Part I)

Commonplace Book

'...reading two Books that I wd. give a lot to know your reaction to - both by the same bloke or chap or fellow or partner or Mr or Johnny - I don't know what he looks like. But he loathes humanity & retches at the common man's common ways, he vomits at the rampaging spectacle of the human zoo and at the horrors of the concentration camp of all human relations! And Nature (that patient Rest Home for the Maniac-Monkey-Magnons of the Powys family's Cave) is no help to him. He doesn't cotton to it. He sees spiders, he scents skunks, he fears snakes, & he is watched by Vultures.

Where therefore does this high-minded distinguished intellectual artist look? I mean whither does he wander? He drifts in among the little secret pleasures of (no, I must not blaspheme) of the Blessed Trinity; & there finds peace. I speak of Mr Graham Greene - not of the other two or three Greens of this epoch. The literary world seems to be only too green - "They must have their greens" as a Major-General once said to me, referring to the copulations of his troops...The books I refer to are 'Brighton Rock' and 'The Power & the Glory'. Now this Greene - whether he be a Greene you could call "old fellow" or wd. speak of as a matey pard - is clearly a Catholic, and by the Mass none of that bunch has fascinated, allured, infuriated and HORRIFIED me as he in these two books. They find my spot, they get my goat, they tickle my gizzard, they reach the place of the little me that's inside the inside of my Master Johnny Start-Up...'

from a letter dated September 15, 1945 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

Commonplace Book

'...Any sort of competition stimulates vulgar minds, but a refined mind suffers from an unworthy rivalry. An exalted nature will infallibly be disgusted with the being who takes pleasure in the homage of stupidity; the mere fact that the object of his adoration tolerates such homage too patiently may be enough to cause him to blush and take himself away...'

from The Sin of Monsieur Antoine by George Sand (Chapter XXII)

Commonplace Book

'I dunno, said King Swan. There's a girl up there now you oughta hear. She does her hair so her head looks like a wet seal and when she pounds the piano the dawn comes up like thunder. Say, she rocks the box, and tosses it, you can bet, and jumps it through hoops, and wait till you hear her sing Subway Papa and then go back to the farm and tell the folks and your pappy'll hitch lions to the plough instead o' mules.'

from Parties by Carl Van Vechten (Chapter Three)

What I Was by Meg Rosoff (2007)

Rosoff is a fairly ordinary writer - there is a sense of lack of finish in her craft. Often I had the unmistakable feeling taking me back to my days of reading manuscripts while reading this. That is not to say that, on rare occasions, she is not capable of pulling off a quiet reach up to some adroit profundity. The next thing to say is that this story has the makings of something magical: the 16-year-old boarder-schoolboy near the Suffolk coast in 1962 finding down winding paths a way to the lonely beach; finding a lost colony of fishermen's huts on a sandy island beyond the marshy extremities of a small estuary; finding there, in his erotic confusion, a very attractive boy about his own age who lives alone in the last inhabited hut, almost completely separated from society; befriending the stern, almost wordless boy, who fishes, fixes the hut, lives an active, masculine life; wanting, in his mixed desire and naivety, not to have the boy, but to be him; the interior of the hut worn but warm; the feeling of being out at the edge of the world, windswept, water-suffused and very alive, contrasting his miserable school existence. The part of Rosoff which 'found' this almost dreamlike delicate ideal-come-real and was able to write about it is the part I want to see more of. And there is a bit of quiet humour and the grimy everyday which balance this well. Then there is a twist in the story which, without giving it away, I can confirm as vastly silly. Rosoff has the boy, looking back in later life, call himself 'stupid'. Well, yes, he is. And so would we be to believe it. A novel banjaxed, in one fell swoop.