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.

Commonplace Book

'"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

Commonplace Book

'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