The Child-Stealer by Penelope Shuttle (1983)

This is Shuttle's second volume of poetry, to the volume publication of which she came only at a later stage of her career. She seems to me to have two modes here: firstly the poems of emotional description, and secondly the poems of metaphoric mystery. Many of the first type are really impressive in their broad-visioned examination of relationships, particularly between mother and daughter, scything in slowly all manner of pictures, concatenations and moods. Shuttle's usual sloe-eyed careful teasings-out serve these well. The other group, the metaphoric-mystery pieces, are often I think poems of menstruation, a favourite Shuttle-subject. But somehow here the communication loses its bite. Maybe that's my maleness talking. They seem slippery and vague, not to put too fine a point on it! They cover other subjects too, though, equally dissatisfyingly. The sense of a blurred background of landscape pervades all these pieces, with the points of reference and clarity being emotional. When those are lead up to sequentially and with open vision a kind of balance results. When the blur wins out, the reader is left effectively sargassoed.

Commonplace Book

'...I stood in speechless, loveless admiration, as Dolly daintily descended, fresh and trim, as if she had been travelling in cotton wool and silver paper in a bandbox, instead of in dusty railway and mouldy chaise.

"Well, Nell," said she, presenting her cool peach cheek to me, "how are you? Much the same as usual, I see - hair arranged with a pitchfork, and dress with a view to ventilation."'

from Cometh Up as a Flower by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XI)

Commonplace Book

'Not Germans, not human beings against us, around us, he thought. But IT. Behind everybody's face all the time. I met it first at B echelon on the way up; then it increased. Everywhere - by netted vehicles, in men sitting under hedges watching us pass, by low tents, and guns in stalls of earth poised for that uncatchable instant of concussion and departure, from the top of boulder-like turrets of metal, in spite of earphones and procedure - IT. And in the eyes of horses, mules and peasants moving slowly among rubble like ants, IT looked out - even from inanimate objects - from a patch of ground - signed by IT - with M and V tins, winey shit, and foul webbing. And in the sky IT whispered lusciously, hummed, intoned, moaned, whistled, crackled, sobbed, breathed, rushed, howled, shrieked, banged, erupted, rent, or with a little limited cough, underfoot, sufficed. And at night IT sometimes had a look in an isolated lake of lapping yellow light under a falling star, hushed with eyes, wobbling to make the silhouettes frolic.

And then like this IT chose someone, dropped a pencil on the great telephone-book of stockbrokers and shopwalkers, adolescents and middle-aged regulars and miners - the Guys and Johns and Boys and Corporal Murrays - sent you away with your face covered with a rough blanket or with pulp for a joint, mauve, calling out mother Christ morphia or some stored obscenity for relief.'

from A Share of the World by Hugo Charteris (Part One, Chapter 3)

Commonplace Book

'...What I really feel is that, in my blundering chaotic way, I am nearer to the great fermenting vats of the elemental world than these curled darlings of wilful fancy. It is, I suppose, this rude earthy realism in my composition that makes it so hard for me to appreciate the elaborate overtones and rhythmic suggestions of the Futurist and Cubist schools of painting.

Post-Impressionism, on the contrary, I love and admire; and hold it a great and invaluable experiment in the history of Art. This is because Post-Impressionism has a fine barbaric sense of the splendid magic of the surface of things - that surface of things where I habitually live; whereas those others go digging away at what to me are profoundly uninteresting "Mathematical Harmonies" of a very doubtful "World-Beneath."

As to what is called Free Verse, I am quite friendly to it, as long as it deals, in realistic bitterness and earthly tang, with the essential ironies and insults of Fate's common ways with her mortal children. It is when it launches out into mystical abstruseness, and recondite occultism, into symbolic mythology and images drawn from fairy-land, that I detest and despise it.'

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

Commonplace Book

'...I have come to the conclusion that the heaviest load under which man groans is poverty. By poverty I do not mean comfortable, decent poverty, which pays ready money, which keeps a parlour-maid instead of butler and footman, which walks instead of drives, buys cotton gowns instead of silk dresses for its wife, which sends its sons to Cheltenham and Cambridge, instead of Eton and Christ Church; but the bugbear I have before me is poverty such as ours was - the poverty of living in a wide house - not with a brawling woman - but worse, with a very narrow income; the poverty which dares not look on from month to month and from day to day, before whose inner eyes bum-bailiffs are ever present; the poverty which steals away our cheerful spirits; which renders us envious, and spiteful, and sordid, which makes our days a long torture, and our nights a long vigil; which saps the springs of our life, and sometimes ends by making us cut our throats to escape it!..'

from Cometh Up as a Flower by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter VI)

Plaque With Laurel by M. Barnard Eldershaw (1937)

For a novel which is quite so forgotten to be quite so good seems a crime. I'm guessing the reasons why: one would be that this work is counter-intuitive as far as expectations of Australian literature of the 1930s goes. It isn't larrikin-like, it isn't easy-going, it isn't cheerfully everyday, or historically so. It is astonishingly poetic, philosophically commanding, serious in intent, and modern. Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw really are unsung heroines, but it can be understood that this novel is very unpromising in summary: it's a novel about a writers' conference in Canberra in the 30s! The rich portrait of a couple of dozen denizens of the Hotel Australasia, their interplay, personal histories, attacks on one another, love for others, insecurities, thoughtless and preening confidence, political jockeying, moments together and apart of joy and desperation, really gives the lie to the notion that any scenario can be fundamentally dull - all it takes is brilliance to illuminate it. And these two have that. It can be said that there are too many characters; some of the lesser ones meld together a little. It can also be said that the coolness of the nevertheless fecund, inquiring imaginations at work here could be another factor which mitigated against stronger popularity. But strong this definitely is.

Commonplace Book

'..."I don't think anybody could have helped him, not at the last. Every one is shocked and sorry because it was dramatic, like something in a novel; but it isn't a greater tragedy than what is happening all around us, happening slowly, not dramatically, so that very few people notice or care. People are being squeezed out of life, humiliated in their deepest feelings, robbed of their most natural rights, through no fault of their own, but because there is no place left for them in this artificial life we lead. If they resist society is angry. If they kill themselves every one is horrified. But if something worse happens - if they become broken-spirited, resigned, a dead weight - no one notices. It is too commonplace and uninteresting a tragedy to evoke sympathy or sorrow. It has become just a casual part of life..."'

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

Commonplace Book

'"...Tournebroche, our feelings are made up of a thousand things which escape us by their very minuteness, and the destiny of our immortal soul depends sometimes on a breath too light to bend a blade of grass..."'

from At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque by Anatole France (Chapter X)

Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki (1914)

Another superb collection by the master of deft comedy and potent satire in the Edwardian era. Most of these stories involve deception in one way or another - many of them are about story-telling, either from the point of view of trying to get one over on somebody else, or with the idea of avoiding a bore's bashing-post or an idiot's obsession. There are some standouts - Fur's ultra-delicate handling of the savageries of female loyalty; The Lumber-Room's just deserts for a haranguing aunt; The Elk's proof that determination in staying your course often wins in the end, especially when a charming German governess is the opposing factor; A Defensive Diamond's perfect last line; The Stalled Ox's brilliant concoction of bad art and bulldozed drawing-room; the list could go on. There are a few of these which sing a little more ordinarily, but all of them share at the very least Saki's trademark barbed wit. This was the last of his books to be published during his lifetime, and confirms that it is in the stories that his claim to fame is most firmly established. The two novels are distinctive and interesting, but not as sure overall. Now I have the two posthumous compilations to look forward to, which apparently include plays and other unusual pieces. Can't wait.

Babel by J. Redwood Anderson (1927)

The relief engendered by this slender volume is out of all proportion to its size. I have been waiting for Anderson's return to the form of early pieces like The Legend of Eros and Psyche and Flemish Tales, and here it is. He subtitles this A Dramatic Poem, and indeed it is a hammering out of his themes in the mesh of a play, the poetry being that of succinct and sweeping rhythmic statement, rather than rhyme. But what exhilarates about this is the fact that he's recaptured a directness and fire, a naming of names and doing, which seemed lost. This is the fascinating story of Nimrod, Babylon's king, to conventional eyes a maddened fool, lost in his own grandeur. But here he is examined with enormous wisdom, and some sympathy. His mind strains to encompass his own spirit, and to understand himself in relation to God or gods. He comes to some original and challenging conclusions, and sets about trying to put his new philosophy into action. His motives are very human and human-loving, but, just as life incessantly teaches us, the best laid plans....His eight-storey tower is almost complete when the world deserts him. There is a last scene, seen from the point of view of the populace below, as vultures circle the tower-top wisped with cloud, which grimly completes a history of Shakespearean proportions.

Commonplace Book

'...It was a sign, a chance. It was a little chink in the scheme of things into which he might thrust himself. If only he could save this one small creature from the cruelty of nature, stave off its danger, let it go. If only for once the dark powers could be forced to let a victim go. Man, who had conceived the forlorn hope of justice and love, man was on trial in this waste land knotted with growths, the site designate of a cathedral. Sale had no plan. He ran and doubled as instinctively as the dogs, was as primitive in his fierce desire as they. He tried to throw himself between the hunted and the hunters, but in the darkness and confusion he headed, not the dogs, but the rabbit. More frightened of this greater pursuer, it doubled away from him towards the dogs. They caught it in a little clearing almost at his feet. In an instant the bull-terrier had ripped it to death, and his shaggy mate had joined ecstatically in the carnage. Sale stood for a moment, the blood singing in his ears, a black horror rising through his veins. Then he fled in wild, zigzagging, uncalculated flight as if from all the legions of darkness...'

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