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.

Cornelius by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (1903)

The unavoidable excellence of Pasture is her colour and clarity. This novel follows its three adult predecessors in being astonishingly lucid and brightly clear. She is a classic purveyor of what can be seen as typical Victorian and Edwardian schemes involving love, marriage, money and inheritance. Of course, what was Austen about other than these things?; this ur-story is much older. But where others of her era have shadows of their age across them, or spurts of greater or lesser definition, Pasture is a core storyteller in every inch of her bone. I can't help but feel that were she to receive a BBC adaptation, or a reading on Book at Bedtime, or whatever other popular-exposure method, her thirteen adult novels would find a very ready audience were they to be republished. In this Welsh Borders-set piece, the eponymous main character has a decision to make when it is discovered that he may be heir to a huge fortune. The real main characters are his affianced and her sister, orphaned returnees from a Belgian school, one a soft considerate beauty, the other a fierier artistic thinker. Their somewhat stifling family includes a ripely snobbish nervous aunt and a much more down to earth truth-talking one, a supremely wealthy and mother-coddled cantankerous ugly cousin as well as a smooth-talking ultimately generous good-looking one. The supporting cast are just as lively and ultra-delineated. The question of the fortune is disposed of in an honourable denouement - and the reader's pleasure in a satisfying story is almost physically palpable.

Commonplace Book

'"The best poets," said Lilias, didactically, "are those who never write verses, or, at all events, never publish them. Thus they can never be shrivelled up by the cold breath of criticism into ordinary cross human beings. They can enjoy every moment in peace, and think kindly of everybody. You can revel in your own opinions until you are foolish enough to write them down; but the moment you do that, somebody feels bound to contradict you..."'

from Cornelius by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (Chapter XXXI)

Commonplace Book

'O but i have begun - it's Old Age! - yes, I have begun - & in "my writings" as well as letters - to digress & forget to reach the Point! Do you ever do that? You see, my dear, all (without any exception) of the talent, gift, eloquence, insight, clairvoyance I possess is always digression - never anything else. But of course I do painfully, laboriously, lengthily build up (I speak of both my tracts and my long romances) a sort of foundation, and on top of that a sort of scaffolding, both very simple - including all the Main Characters & where they live, or all the main theses, propositions & contentions & where they end! Then I let the chance moment have its way - have its way with the characters, have its way with the ideas! In both cases I am absolutely irresponsible & unscrupulous &, at the best, Mediumistic, and at the worst both silly and dull!'

from a letter dated October 5, 1944 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

Commonplace Book

'...& I am glad (you can believe!) to be spared that emotion; for it wd. be a bit too direct for that labyrinthine system of hollow catacombs - full of girlish graves - that I call my Heart.'

from a letter dated April 25, 1944 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

Commonplace Book

'"...Old men are like children for falling in love with a new pleasure; but when it comes to losing it, they are not easily consoled like children. They become old men again and die..."'

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

Moonlite by David Foster (1981)

It seems that, unwittingly, Ruth Pitter had David Foster's number: 'The dirty demagogue, damned and out of date, / Howling the pains of fragmentary perception, / Horridly impaled on jagged spikes, / Teeth of the alligator-god, phenomenon / Acclaimed as actual and total.' (from My God Beholds Me). But I must come out from behind her. I cannot but acknowledge the prodigious invention on display here, and the almost chronic depth of implication drawn from that invention. Extraordinary, no other word for it. This seems to be widely regarded as a 'satire on colonialism' - the satire (if such it is) seems to me to be much more scattergun than that. I would call the space this inhabits by other names: the first 170 pages are experimento-gutturo-scientificised far Celtia. The last 50 pages or so are raucous-experimento-gutturo-scientificised-mythopolitic-Australiana. Foster calls for such explosions of nomenclature. Some of the great failures of this work are fascinatingly anticipated by the author in the work itself - two in particular: the fact that it presents limited purviews of Europeans (he has the crazed albino main character rattle off "All Irishmen aren't dunces, all Scotsmen aren't misers...") and the fact that emotion is detrimentally missing from the entire narrative (the same character admits near the end "I am a man utterly without human emotion of any kind! Nothing!..."). These appear like bandages in the text, in anticipation of exactly those criticisms, which I guess is minorly interesting metafictionally, and I suppose bodes well for my reading of Foster as his career progresses - he is at least aware of these weaknesses though kicking against the pricks of remedy. This is a fantasy, and a novel of ideas, and a warped kind of folkloric ritual-burning. But those three things can be so brightly accessible as to enrich a culture - I wonder if this book will be able to reach forward with enough universality to have the same effect? It's been thirty years at this writing - the case is well in doubt. (Just an aside - I believe it's possible that this book has an elder sister. Moonlite's potential sibling's name is Ottoline Atlantica. She's by Paddy Figgis (writing as Helen Wykham), and was published in 1980. She's the only one of hers I haven't yet read, but a quick examination of the first few pages confirms - lonely far western Celtic island, strongly experimental and tough-guttural approach, scientific tinctures, slipping in and out of paradigm and space-time. Oh hell, please save us from the Magic-Realist-Post-Colonialist comparative doctoral theses!)

Commonplace Book

'Then the darkness would be illuminated by the inward fire which gave him life, and his radiant vision would appear before him. In that ecstatic state he ceased to have the sensations of sleep or of waking. He dreamed with his eyes open, he saw with his eyes closed.'

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

Commonplace Book

'"It is much more important that Oliver's wife should be a nice, good, well-behaved young woman, than that she should take precedence of Adelaide, Susan," said Miss Philipotte severely. "I am surprised, at your age, to hear you talk such nonsense, and I must add, such vulgar nonsense. Although I am a single woman myself, I do not pretend to be ignorant of the fact that good health is far more essential to the future mother of our race (now so nearly extinct) than a mere title."

Mrs. Morrice did not dare to contradict her sister-in-law, but in her heart she thought the comparison great nonsense. She had enjoyed very poor health all her life, but she was certain that she would have enjoyed a handle to her name better still.'

from Cornelius by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (Chapter XXVII)

Commonplace Book

'"...Be assured therefore that it is not necessary to be a poet or a seer to be perfectly convinced of the reality of what you are pleased to call sublime dreams. To be sure, truth is sublime, and the men who discover it are sublime as well. But they who, having received it and touched it, conform their lives to it as an excellent thing, have not really the right to be proud; for if, when they have once understood it, they reject it, they would be nothing less than idiots or madmen."'

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

Commonplace Book

'"...Does it follow, because a majority of men still know and practise only what is wrong and false, that the clear-sighted man must follow the blind over the precipice?"'

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

Commonplace Book

'"Truth triumphs and pursues its way through whatever disguise one views it and in whatever disguise one clothes it."'

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

Commonplace Book

'"What would you say of a young priest who should deliver sermons at the dinner-table? You would say that he belittled the majesty of his texts. Communistic truth is as deserving of respect as gospel truth, since it is in reality the same truth..."'

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

Commonplace Book

'....Aye! but I say, isn't Dickens the master of all masters & the genius of all geniuses over his people's names? Who could beat him there? Doesn't the sound and smell & taste & look of "Uriah", just merely as a word, make you think of an open pustule on the nose (or cheek perhaps) of a dead undertaker's wife's underclothes-peddler?'

from a letter dated December 5, 1942 in Letters to Louis Wilkinson 1935-1956 by John Cowper Powys

Commonplace Book

"There are symbols on which a man should not dwell: zero is one, infinity another, the negative root a third. A man either knows he is real, or imagines he is imaginary; if he only imagines he is real, or knows he is imaginary, he has no business talking at all."

from Moonlite by David Foster (Act Three, Chapter 13)