Monday, December 23, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"...All the same, it would be extremely amusing to bring it off. Fancy awaking in the morning with about three hundred pounds standing to one's credit. I should go and clear out my hostess's pigeon-loft before breakfast out of sheer good temper."

"Your hostess of the moment mightn't have a pigeon-loft," said Clovis.

"I always choose hostesses that have," said Rex; "a pigeon-loft is indicative of a careless, extravagant, genial disposition, such as I like to see around me. People who strew corn broadcast for a lot of feathered inanities that just sit about cooing and giving each other the glad eye in a Louis Quatorze manner are pretty certain to do you well."'

from Fate, a piece in The Toys of Peace by Saki

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Cronus' Children by Yves Navarre (1980)

I have two opposing reactions to this novel. One is a delighted celebration of its poetic elegance, and the plangency of its intense descriptions. The other is irritation with its typifying Frrrrrench pseudo-philosophic contrarieties. This is the story of the Prouillans, a French family, through a good part of the twentieth century, concentrating in the main on the period after the second world war. The central figure of the family is Henri Prouillan, a quiet, controlled, knowing man; a government minister at one time, respected by the public, looming large in his family as someone who can't be denied. His children also play a large part - Luc, following in his footsteps (sometimes without realising it); Sebastien, rebelling a little, and becoming a sailor; Claire, rebelling a fair amount, artistic and feminist, and raising three children; and, most crucially, the youngest, Bertrand - the most intellectual, slightly unstable, and homosexual. These four feel crushed by their father's certainties and his unvocalised sense of superiority. There is invested in them a sense of constant tussling with their father's need for position and decorousness. The core drama of the piece comes when a fix is purposed for Bertrand's instability. It is a lobotomising operation to be conducted in Barcelona, and there is a strong undercurrent that in fact Henri intends it as a fix also for Bertrand's homosexuality, given that his son's increasingly wild and eroticised behaviour could be embarrassing in his respectable circles, and could jeopardise any return to the ministry. The fact that Bertrand himself agrees to go ahead with the operation, presumably in the hope of getting better, is a complicating factor. Most of the action of the novel is seen from after this time, looking back on the events. The other children blame themselves for not stopping the operation, and therefore for the hugely compromised Bertrand who returns from Spain. Much of this is magnificently realised in prose of superb tone and rolling beauty, revealing lives of realistically fractured intent and interrupted flow. There are moments, though, when Navarre shows the marks of his time, in "poetic" statements like 'The time for amorous gestures has nothing to do with human time' - seemingly pregnant with meaning, but actually nonsense - very emblematic of the 60s and 70s and their slightly loose-brained gestural emptiness paraded as philosophic-poetic 'riffing'. But those elements aside, a fascinating book.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"But the suffragettes," interrupted the nephew; "what did they do next?"

"After the bird fiasco," said Sir Lulworth, "the militant section made a demonstration of a more aggressive nature; they assembled in force on the opening day of the Royal Academy Exhibition and destroyed some three or four hundred of the pictures. This proved an even worse failure than the parrot business; every one agreed that there were always far too many pictures in the Academy Exhibition, and the drastic weeding out of a few hundred canvases was regarded as a positive improvement..."

from The Threat, a piece in The Toys of Peace by Saki

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"Come, Teddie, it's time you were in your little bed, you know," said Luke Steffink to his thirteen-year-old son.

"That's where we all ought to be," said Mrs Steffink.

"There wouldn't be room," said Bertie.

The remark was considered to border on the scandalous; everybody ate raisins and almonds with the nervous industry of sheep feeding during threatening weather.'

from Bertie's Christmas Eve, a piece in The Toys of Peace by Saki

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

This is a book of two halves. The recurring signpost of it being a satire is really only fulfilled in the second half. While the accounts of his visiting Lilliput and Brobdingrag (not Brobdingnag - a letter attached to the end insists that the foolish typesetters got it wrong!) may have a slight wash of satire backing them, they are mainly and effectively fantasy. The satire kicks in with the third journey, the one to Laputa, and reaches an apogee in the last, the stay in Houyhnhnmland. So, what comes up immediately for me is - what happened? I wonder if there is a documented history of the writing of this book, and an explication of exactly what turned Swift a little curdled halfway through and completely sour near the end? It definitely has that feel; the reader can sense a Smollettian (before Smollett) rage with many or most of the 'professions' as they were then practiced, a disgust with charlatanism, and what it reveals about us philosophically. But also in the story of the Houyhnhnms the rapier goes deeper - it's misanthropy, pure and simple. The typification of humans as Yahoos, and the use of the term as a biological grouping, giving it that sense of distance and scientific quiescence, is splendidly damning. We are all just incapable, voracious, ignoble filth to Gulliver's mind by the end, and I'm reckoning a goodly quantity of Swift's. It's also really interesting to think about what concentrated his attention on horses as a perfect contrast. It smacks of a kind of depressed desperation somehow, a grasping in a state of misery. But it makes for a striking book.

Monday, December 2, 2013

Commonplace Book

'From that day Bois-Dore wore a wig; eyebrows, moustaches and beard painted and waxed; chalk on his nose; rouge on his cheeks; fragrant powders in every fold of his wrinkles; and, lastly, perfumes and scent-bags all over his person; so that, when he left his room, you could smell him in the poultry-yard; and if he simply passed the kennel, all his coursing dogs sneezed and made wry faces for an hour.'

from Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Dore by George Sand (Chapter V)

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (1864)

The dominating comic notion of this novel is Finer Shades and Nice Feelings, which add up in Meredith's mind to something called Sentiment. This is not sentimentality in the modern sense. It is rather an idea along the lines of what might be called 'received fancy' or 'cultivated emotion'. That this concept has no clear definition is indicative. It is not only the comedy in this piece which is riddled through with febrile searchings. A simplified summary might be: 'Complex People involved in a Complex Plot written about in a Complex Manner'. Meredith's many characters here are full of misguidance or secrecy or self-deception or double-mindedness. The plot revolves all of these (and there are a lot of directions of impulse, like a forest of arrows in multitudinous tangents) in a tempest of storylines. Of course, though, the big thing about Meredith is his style. So this melee of attributes and angles is presented on the page with no facile attention paid to clarity. One sees for example what might be a crucial matter at one remove, or behind a veil, hinted at by a couple of things someone else says, or only explicable once something else has been said (or uncovered) a chapter later. Other elements are even less clear - the reader is still not quite sure, even after the event is done and dusted. But Meredith is nothing if not fascinating; the decoding challenge is one I relish. Ostensibly, this book concerns the trials of Emilia (nickname Sandra) Belloni, as she is taken up by an upwardly mobile Surrey family. She is an Italian, and has the beginnings of a fine singing voice. The comedy is mainly housed with this family, the Poles, as they skirmish socially with a rival family, take on lovers, angle for good marriages, put up with socially awkward incomers with varying degrees of patience and puffed-upness. Around them is a set comprised mainly of the well-to-do whose lives they aim to emulate. When a Greek associate wants to take Emilia to Italy to study for a life in opera, a subtle series of events begin rolling, in which politics, the swings of fortune, love and love's shadow, revenge and Sentiment all play a part. If there is one major criticism that can be directed at this book it is the insubstantiality of its eponymous heroine. Emilia is a strange vacancy in many ways, almost a cipher, but of course a Meredithian one: a cipher saddled with endless mysterious implications.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"...Fortunately, I didn't go to any place of devotion, though I did get mixed up with a Salvation Army procession. It was quite interesting to be at close quarters with them, they're so absolutely different to what they used to be when I first remember them in the 'eighties. They used to go about then unkempt and dishevelled, in a sort of smiling rage with the world, and now they're spruce and jaunty and flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions..."'

from Louise, a piece in The Toys of Peace by Saki

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (1904)

This novel is a progression in two ways: it is written by Fowler with a collaborator (her new husband) for the first time; it is also her first novel not to have overtly Christian themes. The sense I get is that it was Felkin's idea and possibly also his first draft, which Fowler then 'improved' with her professional skills, particularly her sparkling wit. If so, it's seamless and a great success. Certainly its lack of overt Christianity would be an inducement toward reprinting nowadays, and I would say that this may even have applied back then. Were Hutchinson salivating at the idea that their 'hampered' author would finally break free of her beliefs and gain even more popularity than the significant reputation and sales she already had? The story is a tale of a fiery and difficult young aristocrat, Kate, whose father, the dufferish Lord Claverley, is rapidly losing control of their beloved family castle and estates. When a wealthy Scots relative dies, leaving Kate her estate, they wonder if all can be saved. But there is a catch: in order to inherit Kate must marry within six months. She isn't exactly amenable to the idea! Men have driven her mad in almost all instances. If she doesn't marry the money goes to other relatives, the Pettigrews, who are nasty unpleasant grasping people. Thereafter several suitors try their luck, encouraged by her parents in various stages of desperation. Living with them is Sapphira Lestrange, Lord Claverley's niece, whose father had been a louche reprobate who is not mentioned unless absolutely necessary. When he sneaks back onto the scene, Sapphira is entangled in a game of cat and mouse. Kate has finally, at the eleventh hour, accepted George Despard, a man she thought she hated even more than all the others for his seemingly insulting behaviour. He was the agent and personal assistant of the aunt who has provisionally left her her fortune. Sapphira's father, the wily and evil Aubrey Lestrange, decides that he wants a piece of the action, teams up with the Pettigrews, cons Sapphira into providing him with information, and is successful. The last minute marriage between George and Kate is prevented by foul means. Then comes an extraordinary conclusion. In the misery of the denouement, when the Claverleys believe all is lost, Despard reveals that because of vows made by he and Kate during play-acting in Scotland, vows which included them claiming each other as husband and wife, that under Scots law they are already genuinely married! Apparently as long as either or both want to claim such a state, having voiced these things among company, and been in Scotland more than three weeks, Scots law allows it. No idea whether or not this is true, or a Fowler and Felkin invention; nevertheless it simultaneously stretches credibility and lends theatrical charm to a bright and witty piece.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...He seemed to her as good as a circulating library: with him she would never lack something to interest her - something to instruct. She had not yet learnt that when a man is as good as literature to a woman, that is friendship: but when he is as good as music to her, that is love. It is not when he has the same effect as a library that he is dangerous, but when he has the same effect as an oratorio. Until then he is a luxury rather than a necessity: and it is a mistake for any woman to tie herself for life to a mere luxury...'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter XXII)

Commonplace Book

'"...I once knew a man who, in a moment of inadvertence, married a woman with convictions."

"And what happened?"

"The poor fellow hesitated for some time between the hangman's rope and a lunatic asylum, and finally decided in favour of the lunatic asylum."

Kate laughed. "I wonder he didn't decide on that at first as the least of two evils."

"He was so afraid of meeting his wife there."'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter XXII)

Friday, November 1, 2013

Commonplace Book

'Often, in November, December and January, after dinner, Sebastien would put on two pullovers, a parka, an oilskin overcoat, a pair of wool gloves and another of leather, a hoodshaped hat and, armed against the cold, without notifying the others, as the Firebird's master, he would go up to the forecastle to see, to 'fore' see, to dream, to dream just a little. At 20 degrees below zero the cold, in order to take hold, sets about it warmly. You do not believe it but it invades you, filters in and flows quickly into the veins, ice like fire, if you do not move. Sebastien would feel the night sparkling from every part, on each side and in the depths of the fjord, the snow night suspended on the fir summits, the night of white ink...'

from Cronus' Children by Yves Navarre (Chapter 2)

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"Claverley, I don't know what to make of that young man," she began; "it seems to me that he is very nervous and excitable, and talks a great deal of nonsense."

"Believe me, my dear Henrietta," Lord Claverley replied, "it is the fashion - quite the rage, in fact - nowadays to talk nonsense; and all the clever people of today are nervous, and what is called highly strung."

"They'd be strung still higher if I had my way," said her ladyship grimly.'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter XXI)

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini (1728)

These memoirs are justifiably famous for their braggadocio. Cellini was, to all accounts, an amazing sculptor and metalworker with an era-eclipsing depth of style and capability, to which he was not afraid to own up! From his earliest days trying to evade his father's wish for him to be a musician (and being brilliant at it; the music and the evasion) he takes us onward into his in-depth relationships with various Italian noblemen; these are essentially the same warlike dukes, popes and princes of which Machiavelli spoke. Cellini describes himself being offered commissions, diddled out of payment, betrayed by rivals, adored by the influential when the works are finally displayed. The works themselves he describes in some detail - it would be very interesting to find out how many of them are still extant. He also describes with great assiduity many of his personal relationships, from the innumerable apprentices who were either grateful fine young men or mean, lazy dolts, to the various nobles and fellow-artists who either betrayed him evilly or were loyal and kind supporters. Added to this toward the middle of the book are several instances where trouble came gold-plated; word-fights which led to fist-fights which led to knife-fights which led to deaths. He is quite open about the facts. And this leads me to one main question: this book is always celebrated as the work of a braggart, with wild exaggeration and delusive avoidance-skills well in use. But what might be more interesting is not how much of this is false, but how much is true? The one, it seems to me, seems to outdazzle the other. There are many quieter sequences here where I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that he was sailing very close to the truth. This was written from 1558 to 1566 and then apparently went the rounds of renaissance libraries and scholars in manuscript form for a couple of centuries. It was finally published in a defective edition in 1728 from a copy of the manuscript. The real thing was rescued from an antique-dealer's shop subsequently and truer editions resulted. Whatever its faults, a deeply involving and fascinating glimpse into an artist's life in those times.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"...To my mind the very expression, 'a happy marriage,' is a contradiction in terms. You might just as well talk about a square circle or a flat mountain or a sensible man."'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter XIV)

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...There are people who can keep the facts that front them absent from their contemplation by not framing them in speech; and much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself...'

from Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (Chapter XLII)

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...At this Kate would fiercely remark that she hated men, and she would like to see the man whom she would swear to honour and obey. With a mournful shake of her head, Lady Dunbar agreed with her; men were by no means better than they should be; it was no doubt a ridiculous thing to put such a word as obey in the marriage service; no nice man would ever expect such a thing from his wife; still Kate was no doubt right in thinking that husbands as a rule were queer creatures, and the less a girl had to do with them the better.'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter XII)

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Commonplace Book

'Kate walked to the door, her head in the air. "Nothing will induce me to marry, so I tell you so once for all. I hate men, and I'm not going to have one always dangling from my chatelaine to please anybody."

"Tut, tut, my dear, you are endowed with the capacity of making any man supremely miserable. It is a pity that so much talent should be wasted."'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter VIII)

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...she was not yet old enough to have discovered that a man's eye rather than his tongue points out the way which his heart will probably take. When a man talks to one woman and looks at another, the former need not trouble herself to scintillate: for she may rest assured that her most brilliant remarks are irretrievably foredoomed to oblivion.'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter VI)

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Commonplace Book

'But Sapphira was inclined to argue. "Quite nice men eat walnuts," she said.

"Well, all I can say is, that if they do, they won't be nice for long; for there is nothing so upsetting to the digestion as walnuts, and nothing so upsetting to the temper as the digestion. It is not the slightest use telling a man to love his wife and not be bitter against her, as long as you allow him to eat walnuts: because it isn't in human nature that he can obey you."'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter II)

Friday, September 27, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...Fortunately for herself - and still more fortunately for Lord Claverley - she was married before it became the fashion for a woman to regard her husband merely as an interesting and instructive social problem, requiring a purely intellectual solution; she belonged to that blessed generation of women who regarded their husbands in very much the same way as men of science regard the great forces of nature - as dimly comprehended powers, mighty and terrible when uncontrolled, but capable, under proper guidance and management, of being adapted to the most ordinary and domestic uses.'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter I)

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Baldwin by Richard Barham (1820)

This was published under a pseudonym, namely 'An Old Bachelor', and considerably anticipated Barham's great success with The Ingoldsby Legends. So much so, that it has generally been completely forgotten, as has his other novel, and he is regarded as a one-trick pony. On the basis of this, that verdict seems very unfair. This novel is an unusual amalgam, though less so given its era, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has not only the flavour of its own post-Napoleonic era, but also that of Smollett and Fielding. It begins with the discovery one morning in the snow of the body of a lonely man who'd left a coach near his home the night before. Then his lawyer discovers that his fortune is not as has been reputed; his young son and heir is nowhere near so well off as expected. These parts are marked with some ramshackle humour. Then the story progresses into one of love in the local village, where an almost Austenian tone prevails of gentle farce. There is also in this part a diversion to Oxford and the university, and some more rumbunctious wit. The endgame comes with an assignation in a summer-house, and a belatedly discovered murder in which young Baldwin, the heir, is almost uncounterably implicated. Barham takes the reader right up to the point of his hanging before a last minute reprieve in the form of the confession of an as yet unknown other. He then slowly relates a backstory to explain how the murder occurred, and to fully flavour young Baldwin's history and the reason for his diminution of fortune. Moments of wit and satire punctuate the good majority of all this, making a colourful feast of variety and event. The print-on-demand edition I read has the usual faults of very poor photocopying and so on; there are also a few missing pages. One can only hope that this book will get a proper republication, and Barham's reputation a boost which it thoroughly deserves, sooner rather than later.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Commonplace Book

'The two men composing most of us at the outset of actual life began their deadly wrestle within him, both having become awakened. If they wait for circumstance, that steady fire will fuse them into one, who is commonly a person of some strength; but throttling is the custom between them, and we are used to see men of murdered halves. These men have what they fought for: they are unaware of any guilt that may be charged against them, though they know that they do not embrace Life; and so it is that we have vague discontent too universal. Change, O Lawgiver! the length of our minority, and let it not end till this battle is thoroughly fought out in approving daylight. The period of our duality should be one as irresponsible in your eyes as that of our infancy. Is he we call a young man an individual - who is a pair of alternately kicking scales? Is he educated, when he dreams not that he is divided?..'

from Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (Chapter XXX)

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...the mistakes committed by ignorance in a virtuous disposition would never be of such fatal consequence to the public weal as the practices of a man whose inclinations led him to be corrupt, and had great abilities to manage and multiply and defend his corruptions.'

from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (Part One, Chapter 6)

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (1983)

A slightly bowdlerised version of this was first published in 1947 as Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but the full version was only published in 1983, with the original title restored to it. It is one of a very small band. It comes from a time when Great National Novels were discussed, and that idea was current in terms of its achievability. This is definitely a contender for the title of the Great Australian Novel. It has an outer self set in the 2300s in a kind of super-controlled, super-fertile Australia, like the Ord region of Western Australia has spread around the outer part of the entire continent. At a 'Centre' a young man, Ren, his father, Knarf, and various other members of the local community think about this supercontrol in different ways. Ren is a bit revolutionary and wants, with a friend, to "suggest" a more liberty-driven agenda for the whole country, achieved by means of popular vote. His father is also concerned about it, but his bent is Art. He writes a novel, ostensibly about the period 400 years ago when the world went through its last big convulsions before the change which brought about this more placid, inert but peaceful society. That happens to be the period of the 1930s and 1940s. This work of Knarf's is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow's inner self. It occupies the great majority of the space, with moments spent in the 2300s as Knarf reads it to an old friend and sparring partner, both of them commenting and thinking about it. The 1930s story is set around Harry Munster, a WWI veteran, and his family of wife, two older daughters and younger son. They survive a move to the city of Sydney from a farm Harry loved, endure the Depression, cope with failed love, struggle, want, disparate politics among friends and of the country. Then WWII arrives, and having lost a lot, gained a little, bewildered, they struggle on, and are subsumed into history in a variety of ways. Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw wrote this in 1940-1942, so there comes a point where the narrative must become prospective. Here it happens eerily, with a strange section reporting a kind of plague on board a US ship in the Pacific arena, which has picked up Japanese survivors of an attack. How frightening it must have been to be writing this mid-war, and trying to predict what might happen. The Barnard Eldershaw 'what if' takes us to Japanese surrender and realignment, to further realignment where Russia is recognised to be not an ally but the enemy, and to a revolt within Australia which is led by an anti-elitist element partnering up with socialist elements, all of whom are sick of war, know it not to be an answer, and know that Australia will be further bled dry by the renewed effort expected of it in the new war on Russia. Those elements win out with a tired people, and, incredibly, they destroy Sydney, causing a mass exodus and the beginnings of a completely revolutionised new system. That skeletonised plot is extraordinary enough, but what it doesn't take account of is the magnificence of Barnard's sweeping prose. This pulses in waves of astounding, visionary and yet supremely human strength. Exactly what Eldershaw's contribution was is not clear. Apparently she usually edited, strengthened where necessary, provided alternative plot options and so on. But they were living much further apart by the time this was written; I'm not sure if the to-and-fro of ideas was a little stymied and staled by distance - she is the one who was supposed to be the more tight and concentrated of the two, but she is also an elusive mystery, a little black hole in Australian literature. I'd like to know more. The fact that this book is currently out of print is an indicator I think of where Australia's at, in terms of its national literature. This is one of its great emanations, and Marjorie Barnard in particular needs celebrating as a top-notch wordsmith, and a great figure of her nation's artistic expression.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...Lady Delaval, sooth to say, could as soon have constructed a cathedral as a syllogism, and it is a doubtful point if she had ever drawn an inference in her life; nevertheless nature had been so liberal, and had bestowed on her such a rare talent for argumentation, that the necessity for the assistance of art was in a great measure superceded: so great indeed was her unsophisticated genius in this respect, that it may be questioned whether the redoubtable Aldrich himself, with all his formidable battering train of majors, minors, and consequences, would have been able to force her to capitulate, and admit herself vanquished.'

from Baldwin by Richard Barham (Volume One, Chapter III)

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...For the first time Ren was aware of sympathy, not as an impulse or as a need within himself, but as a genuine human contact. Illil had told him nothing, but he knew what ailed her, body and spirit, not through clairvoyance of love or pity, but in the full poignancy of imagination. In this intensification of living, everything in his mind, the day's crisis, the ferment of ideas, awareness of himself as a social being, the semblance of the future, were all illuminated. Two figures on a hillside dwarfed by lonely distance, life simplified to a moment.'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part V)

Thursday, August 22, 2013

The Pastor's Wife by 'Elizabeth' (1914)

The biggest surprise must have been this book's size, to the author's fans, when it was first published. A good third bigger than her longest book to date, the main question must have been whether the author's wit could stand, extended to 500 pages. And, as they read, they must have been deeply gratified - it undoubtedly could. In many ways, this is her 'standard' story: young Englishwoman, rather green, goes romantically to live with new German husband on the piny plains of Pomerania, and gets an education in what a variety of experience she hasn't yet sampled. But what 'Elizabeth' manages to do this time is to focus our attention on the woman rather more thoroughly than her erring man. And, as predicated by the length, she takes it slowly, savouring many of the perhaps painful and emotional lessons Ingeborg has to learn with gentle wit that has a concomitant swift stab to it. That deepens the picture. This definitely has a more gentle slope to its topography than The Caravaners, its predecessor, which was rapier-like and a truly grand example of comedy. I wonder whether the death of Henning von Arnim, her husband, in 1910, caused a reflective reflex in the author, where she wanted, for the last time, to visit the theme that had made her famous, to make a final statement upon it. Whatever, this gently humorous novel is a joy comprised of one part sympathy and two parts schadenfreude; Ingeborg's daffy, stumbling realisations of the harsh realities of life form a counterpoint to a vision of compromised content in her life with a very faulty husband. A cynical outlook at its base perhaps, but likely a true one, and transformed by the author's talent.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...Suffering was nothing, bought nothing, brought no compensation, it was a byproduct, and even when it destroyed it was of no account in the logic of event. The people would not be purged or saved by suffering, they would only be selected, freed of the weak and the irresolute, reduced at last to a sticking point. For those who died, for those who despaired, for those who suffered too much and were destroyed in their heart or courage by it, there was no redress. No future could give them back what they had lost. They and their pain would be as meaningless as grains of dust...'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part IV)

Monday, August 19, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...No ridicule knocks the strength out of us so thoroughly as our own.'

from Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (Chapter XV)

Friday, August 9, 2013

The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman (1904)

The now-forgotten Carman is a New World variant of the 90s aesthete. The key difference seems to be a sense of Arts and Crafts washing through the high language. I can imagine him togged in 'artistic' clothing wandering windswept Canadian beaches, taking in the implications on Art, and his art, that Nature inspired. Not at all a dandified, tailed aesthete of the London type. But many of his preoccupations in these thirty-two essays are those we might expect. Beauty rules supreme, and casts her spells through the seasons, writing, and personal philosophy. There is a strange two-speed quality here, too, though. Some essays are pointed, clear, resounding searchings. Others are a little lost in their own verbiage, or in half-ideas. Apparently he lived in a menage-a-trois with a couple and dabbled in early examples of mind-body-spirit alternative philosophies, but there is no sense of revolution in this work, just an endearing dedication to simple principles. I've not yet read his poetry, which was apparently the crowning achievement of his career. As an example of the art of essay-writing, this is a flawed and yet engaging pleasure.

Commonplace Book

'...he must enlist the sympathetic help of words by using them kindly and rightly according to their nature and genius, and as they belong, and not antagonize them by misapplication. I have known writers who established a reputation for great cleverness simply by the misuse of words. Their style was called original. It was. For pure unmitigated cruelty to our tiny, long-suffering servants, these patient words, it was unmatched. Now a man who will mutilate his mother tongue merely to display his own agility is no better than a heathen. It is so needless, too. For to the generous and sedulous master, what revelations of undreamed beauty, what marvels of import, will not words impart?'

from Atmosphere, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...No sentiment, only a sharp pain, a pain incredibly naked and real. In the last conscious second of the fatal spin, in the moment when the flames covered him or the hot bullet got him, or when his nerve broke like an over-strained rope, parting strand by strand, the pilot's brain clicked, "This is it." Always that flash of recognition, the knowledge that the thing long awaited had come. The spirit can be shorn away by a thought sharper than a bayonet. The one sure thing was that the moment would come, death within death, the moment before the crash. It wasn't the crash you thought of, but the split second when you saw it leap at you, the echo before the event. It came, it always came, one way or another. Either you stuck it and went out on mission after mission till you were killed. Or you didn't stick it and the mainspring broke. Whichever way it was, your fate stood beside you like a visible presence. The Bridegroom. The Master of the House.'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part IV)

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...An unflinching observance of duty, unmodified by any other idea, by mercy, by love, by gentleness, by generosity, might readily lead to almost inhuman hardness. The devotee of duty may become an unlovely and pestiferous monomaniac, a burden to himself and an infliction to others. We all know how angular and sour and uncomfortable a fanatic can be. It matters not whether he is a religious fanatic or a free-thinker, his inordinate devotion to his one conception of life is a nuisance. He is so stiff-necked that he cannot see anything outside of his own pasture. The beautiful plasticity of human nature at its best seems to have been left out of him.'

from The Debauchery of Mood, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Friday, August 2, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...Good fortune, true success, is the indwelling radiance and serenity that comes and goes so mysteriously in every human tenement. Expect her not, and she arrives; seek to detain her with elaborate argument or excuse, and she is gone. Yet must the door ever be open for her coming, and the board spread for her entertainment...'

from Good Fortune, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Commonplace Book

'...He had seen the great inverted miracle of the dry spell worked upon that undefended earth, and it had become one of the master images of his mind just as the Brooding Anzac had. In some odd way they were connected like strophe and antistrophe, question and answer, the filament of their relationship so fine that any explanation must break it. That country had the look of eternity in good years or bad. When it was in good heart you could only believe that it was inexhaustible; under drought you could not believe that it would ever live again. It was absolute, it went beyond eternity because it cast eternity like a vestment..'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part IV)

Commonplace Book

'...And let the young men of our generation mark the present chapter, that they may know the virtue residing in a tail-coat, and cling to it, whether buffeted by the waves, or burnt out by the fire, of evil angry fortune. His tail-coat safe, the youthful Briton is always ready for any change in the mind of the moody Goddess. And it is an almost certain thing that, presuming her to have a damsel of condition in view for him as a compensation for the slaps he has received, he must lose her, he cannot enter a mutual path with her, if he shall have failed to retain this article of a black tail, his social passport. I mean of course that he retain respect for the article in question. Respect for it firmly seated in his mind, the tail may be said to be always handy. It is fortune's uniform in Britain: the candlestick, if I may dare to say so, to the candle; nor need any young islander despair of getting to himself her best gifts, while he has her uniform at command, as glossy as may be.'

from Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (Chapter VII)

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...It was not so much an epic - as a towering image of the world in conflict, of man and the mystic vine whose fruit is Life and Death. It was the black mass of the Spring, the anguish of renewal when the unfurling bud was the signal for death, when the soft winds reopened the stench of last year's dead, and the lovers' moon led the way to destruction, when the rising sap, the terrible inevitability of spring, filled every heart with fear, when love died in hunger, when beauty was destroyed at its source in the eye, when everything the heart treasured was buried under the weight of metal, when every hopeful flower that broke the sod was a candle for a lost generation...'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part IV)

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Commonplace Book

'But noble, generous, wise, and modest pride is not a virtue much in vogue in our day. Are we not apt to think that democracy consists in making ourselves no better than our neighbours? Whereas true democracy implies only the free and fair chance to each man to be his best. The capacity for being one's best remains unchanged; and the duty of being one's best stands as obligatory as ever. I believe in freedom for all (the wise man might say), because I believe in it for myself, in order that I may realize my better and greater self. And to do this one must have pride, - pride that keeps one erect and unflinching to the last, - pride that insists on scrupulous manners, admirable breeding, deep culture, and impeccable self-control, - pride that preserves for ever the beautiful and radiant illusions of the soul. For without pride in ourselves, in our work, and in each other, life becomes sordid and vulgar and slovenly; the work of our hands unlovely; and we ourselves hopeless and debased.'

from Concerning Pride, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Pathetic Symphony by Klaus Mann (1935)

This one sits at a crossroads. It's a biographical novel about Tchaikovsky, with an author known for his reaching into psychological states. But it's a piece from his earlier career, and shows a species of timidity not only for that reason, but also because of its time. Tchaikovsky's homosexuality is discussed, but in quite guarded terms. So much so, that one wonders whether Mann hasn't himself rather underimagined it. All of the alliances, mentorships and deep friendships in this life could have had a much more overt sexual aspect. As it is, the composer's leaning is described as "THIS!", a kind of code for the act and its unsayability. Times were moving on, and Mann caught this subject just as it began to be publicly broachable. The aspect he is able to cover quite distinctively is Tchaikovsky's mindscape. This book ripples with melancholic nervous irritability. Nervestorms are common, as is morbid nuzzling of death and paranoia. These punctuate a formal portrait of the not-quite-Russian-enough composer as he wanders the Europe he is perceived by many Russians to belong to, feeling criticised from every angle, weeping in hotel rooms, suffering seemingly endless lack of sleep, and encountering both snubs and wild approbation as he conducts performances of his work with notable orchestras and attends soirees with fellow grandees. All of this, coupled with his melancholia and morbidity, draws a strong picture of a man tortured and running the gamut of madly enthusiastic highs and hell-plumbing lows. And I guess, to be fair, the formality of this piece is its acknowledgement of the era in which its subject lived. It leaves a vivid picture of the man, which is what ought most to be expected from a biographical novel.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...if we are not to devise means to better nature, if we are not to use our intelligence for purposes more benign than those of the pre-human and sub-human creation, I can form no notion of the proper use of mind at all. You may tell me that the inexorable law of nature has provided for progress by the simple means of preserving the fittest to survive, and that in human society we merely follow the same methods. But I say that the laws of nature can offer the soul no criterion for conduct. I only exist to temper the occurrences of nature, to deflect them to my own needs, and to alter my own human nature continually for the better. I do not know what the soul is, but I know that it exists; and I know that its admonitions form a more beautiful sanction for conduct than the primitive code of evolution taken alone...'

from The Courtesy of Nature, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Friday, June 28, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...One may question whether it were not better largely to forsake our habit of questioning and live more like the creatures. If wisdom lies inside the door of studious thought, madness is also sleeping there; and the mortal who knocks does so at his peril. We may become as gods to know good from evil; but are we sure that happiness inheres in that knowledge?'

from Careless Nature, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...The ancient immemorial joy of a thousand departed Aprils stirs from its lurking sleep in those placid veins of yours, and would lure you away beyond the limits of the town. It is the old spring fret that moved myriads of your fellows long before, and will move others when we are gone. But for the ample moment, the large sufficient now, our glad elasticity of spirit, our rapturous exhilaration of life, are as keen as if they were to be eternal. Indeed, they are the eternal part of us, of which we partake in these rare instants of existence.'

from April in Town, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...Most of all he hated the big bosoms. He took them up and he brought them down, load after load of self-satisfied  big bosoms. They puffed scent and powder at him, the smell of armpits and rubber corsets, and a smell like candles he could not identify. Another thing, they moved slowly, they paused half in, half out, of the lift, they stood in the middle and wouldn't let people in or out, they took their time. He spent all the time shoving big bosoms along, which was hard work because, of course, he must not ever on any account touch a passenger. They didn't mind touching him. They lolloped against him, nudged him with parcels, trod unconcerned on his feet. His brain was hard and tumescent with prolonged exasperation.'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part II)

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...if marriage did not readjust the upset incidental to its preliminaries, what a disastrous thing falling in love would be. No serious man would be able to let himself do it. But how interesting it was the way Nature, that old Hostility, that Ancient Enemy to man's thought, did somehow manage to trip him up sooner or later; and how still more interesting the ingenuity with which man, aware of this trick and determined to avoid the disturbance of a duration of affection, had invented marriage.'

from The Pastor's Wife by 'Elizabeth' (Part I, Chapter III)

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...A beautiful idleness requires temper and genius; and though people of means may fancy they can compass it, you will nearly always find a discordant restlessness somewhere in their leisure. It is only the artist in life who can afford to be an idler, and you may take it as sober earnest that he is no debauchee of inactivity.'

from At the Coming of Spring, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Commonplace Book

'...Man's creation had gone past him, he was bound on a mechanic wheel and the wheel was due to plunge downward, carrying him with it. All were sated and none satisfied. Civilisation was loaded with an insufferable burden, the wrong sort of plenty. The shoddy replica of everything the heart can desire in the bargain basement. The simulacrum of every human emotion on sale in the cinema. Man's greed enlarged out of all proportion by constant stimulus. The swollen belly of an undernourished child. Competition from being a means become an end. Man building his life in repetitive images from bargain sale to war, from competitive breadwinning to competitive nationalism. Man, shamed and impotent, making sacrifice to the pitiful god of luck, ikon of the hopeless...'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part II)

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Six Common Things by EF Benson (1893)

Although this was published in Osgood McIlvaine's 'Short Stories by British Authors' series, most of it isn't really short stories at all. The majority of these are essays, philosophical musings, some of them with vaguely fictionalised backgrounds. There is a small group which are more directly fictional. The overwhelming theme is melancholy and loss. This second book must have been quite puzzling for readers of his first, which had been published earlier the same year, and was a tearingly successful society comedy - Dodo. The pieces range around between loss of a child, loss of a wife, the terribly pathetic conditions of the poor and personal losses seen at a greater distance, those of others in our lives. There are a few which also incorporate a little humour, mainly involving children and animals, which lighten the load considerably. The few true short stories included tend to character study: one of a nurse-governess missing the welcome of a former charge returning home from school, and two of another governess being squashed flat by society's prejudices in the dining room and then later gaining her revenge when she marries well. The big puzzle is the title. I can't find a good reason for it. The phrase is mentioned in the last story as covering the ground of the fifteen which have gone before, so it's obviously not a bibliographic numerical reference. If it's thematic, I'm darned if I can find a clear group of six anywhere. Is it a reference to the seven ages of man, with the last story representing Death, the final one? It's definitely about that, but it's difficult to assemble the others into even vaguely coherent summaries of other stages. The only other option is that the phrase was more commonplace in 1893 than it is now, and refers to - what? A line from a hymn? A song? A poem? A proverb? Anyway, the twenty-first century is unlikely to fall in love with this sad little deeply Victorian book, in fact is likely to dismiss it out of hand. It is minor, but not so dismissable.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

The Opinions of Jerome Coignard by Anatole France (1893)

This volume of fictionalised essays forms a companion piece to the author's famous novel of the same year, At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque. The novel's main characters, Abbe Coignard and Jacques Tournebroche, return in a group of pieces which retail philosophical discussions had between them and various interlocutors, usually taking place in a secondhand bookshop in their quarter. Boiled down, Abbe Coignard is the representative of Resignation in its dualist fight with Aspiration. And the reader's response to him will depend largely on their position in that philosophical slipstream. As I tend to the Aspirant side, I find him pretty irritating on the whole. There is an extra dimension lent to this by France's making him the eternal wise answer (no doubting which side he's on!) to all contretemps. The strange infallibility of Abbe Coignard! On the other hand there is no questioning the fun of the journey in terms of the liveliness of the writing - it's light and enjoyable and balanced in pace, and humorous elements are drawn out spiritedly. And the questions raised are involving and tasty. Because the philosophy given creedence by the author through his partiality is not to my taste, I wasn't feeling all that well-disposed toward this... that is, until the last few essays. These form a group of five around the topic of Justice, investigating the issues of wrong and right and how they are conceived societally, the faulty forms we use to distribute ethical power, and, most tellingly, the means we utilize to understand and deliver justice in terms of our ethical conclusions. France uses Coignard as a mouthpiece for purely Christ-ian encapsulations of morality - the attitude of universal forgiveness as it could possibly be applied in this world. I think perhaps what he misses is that Christ wasn't of this world entirely and this huge and constant forgiveness is a very difficult ask in human terms, let alone having humans build it into their worldly systems of justice. The best pieces in the book though, by far.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Commonplace Book

'The art of life, then, is to make life and art one, so far as we can, for ourselves and for others, - to find, if possible, the occupation in which we can put something of self. So should gladness and content come back to earth. But now, with the body made a slave to machinery, and the spirit defrauded of any scope for its pent-up force, we have nothing to hope for in the industrial world; and the breach between art and life will go on widening until labour is utterly brutalized and art utterly emasculated.'

from The Art of Life, a piece in The Kinship of Nature by Bliss Carman

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...History is a creative art, a putty nose. You can make what you like of it. Event, immediately it is past, becomes a changing simulacrum at the mercy of all the minds through which it must seep if it is to live, memory passed from hand to hand, coloured with prejudice, embroidered with fantasy, flattened with pedantry, and finally served up in all seriousness as history.'

from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by M. Barnard Eldershaw (Part I, Chapter I)

Friday, May 24, 2013

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Suitably Edited (1825)

Bowled over by this. The main body-tumbler was the insight into how society functioned and how people thought three hundred and fifty years ago. There's no replacement for reading the words of those who were there and experiencing at the time; no 'history' can do what this does. Admittedly, Pepys was quietly connected to those in power at the beginning and very well connected indeed by the end of this diary, but the picture is still commanding and fascinating in its familiar unfamiliarity. The reader can feel the fresh air in London created by fields just a short ride away (an astounding notion in this age), can feel the woodenness of the housing of the city (totally unfamiliar now), can feel the busyness of the Thames as Pepys goes up and down by water to appointments from Chatham to Fulham (apart from the unsung riverbuses, unknown now). The picture, also, of the changing attitudes toward Charles II as his reign unfolded, the power machinations behind his relationship with parliament and the lords, the sizing up all the players undertook of their rivals and friends in the various camps vying for positions and influence, is intriguing. Further, the revelations of Pepys' more private life - his playgoing, bookbinding, coach-building, portrait-commissioning, wife-organising, servant-tagging self is revealed here in intricate detail, along with his responses to many a sermon - a good number of which were dismissed as uninspiring! The constancy of his to and fro of business is extraordinary - the mention of  "To White Hall, and spoke with the Duke of York about..." or "To the Park, and spent two hours walking up and down with Sir X X, much good talk about..." signifies the tenor of life for someone in his position (a secretary for the Navy, later Treasurer for parts of it). Lastly, of course, there are the really unfamiliar things which lend it even greater spice, little details of life, or names for things, which have passed into oblivion; ultimate proof that the past is another country.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

The Outlaw Album by Daniel Woodrell (2011)

Mixed feelings about this one. One story stands out as brilliant; there are a number of very good ones, within certain boundaries; two are a bit poorer. These stories indicate that Woodrell's world centres around the Ozarks in mid-America. An almost typically 'backwoods' place. A majority of his people are the sort of person an outsider would have come to expect if that terminology is used, apart from the fact that they are darkly modern in their failings: they're not lonely and crazed, they're drug-addled and crazed. They're not tormented by the rampages of "Indians" or bears, but rather their own war experiences, or a medicated madness from within. His style is poetically documentary; this is where one criticism occasionally rears its head: there can be a tryhard quality to some of the phrasing. An example: 'A damp virtuosity of misshapen reflections on the street...' That virtuosity pushes it too hard. But those times stand out because, relatively speaking, they're rare. The poetry in the prose often works well. I think the quality these stories lack for me is exhilaration. The thrill which goes through me at the best writing is somehow missing here, there's an inert quality which I can't avoid. There's something in the straight out documentary approach, some spark of deep inspiration, which doesn't catch. The exception is the splendid 'Black Step', a story of a young soldier on loan back to his family farm after unspecified PTSD, and of his coming to some new understandings about love, death, self and family in the small break before he is summoned back, which soars to greater heights and sets the brainstem fizzing. Others are often quietly impressive but lack the fizz. I'd be interested to read a novel, to see whether he can reach places cumulatively that he might not in the short form.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...the absurdity of chance and the caprice of fortune, are, in reality, but the revenge taken in sport by Divine justice on the counsels of the would-be wise...'

from Academies, a piece in The Opinions of Jerome Coignard by Anatole France

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (1931)

This novel was originally published in America the year before, under a different title. It was Benson's apparent apogee, winning the Prix Femina. It is most definitely graced with her incredibly original point of view in spades. The characters are strange mixtures indeed of obsessions, oddities and verbal and psychological tics, the grace point being Benson's capacity to see into those states, reason them out, feel sympathy and empathy for them, and relate them to ordinariness - to her mind, we're all odd, really, as much as we are predictable, that is! This is the story of Seryozha Malinin and his family, dispossessed Russians in Manchuria after the revolution (called White Russians) and their struggle to survive, communicate, thrive in a locale where they don't quite exist legally. His father, Old Sergei, is recently blind. His mother, Anna, a woman of strange unconsidered intensity, rules the uncertain roost. Seryozha meets up with Wilfred Chew, an Anglo-obsessed Chinese lawyer with a layer of inherited Christianity from his time in the Temple in London and his wanderings chaperoning petty British officials subsequently. They head off into Korea on a mission to retrieve an old debt of his father's, but get waylaid along the way by meeting the Ostapenkos: a blustering and wordy father, Pavel, a dutiful and buckled-under mother, Varvara, and, most particularly for Seryozha, a beautiful, original, and fascinating daughter, Tanya. Tanya, it seems to me, is most like Benson herself. She has been growing a reputation as Death itself, having had seven suitors who have all been rejected for one reason or another, a couple of whom have killed themselves, the others going into voluntary exile to get away. She has an intense fear of physical touch, little empathetic response where the usual channels should be followed, and loads of it where her original mind leads her, for animals, and for people and even circumstances in strange ways. She puzzles people, and scares them. Somehow, and it's a bit of a sore point that we don't really know how, Seryozha wins her over. There is comedy by the bucketload by the waysides of this crazy progress, and poignant observation, too. As a revelation of just how widely coloured and multifarious this world of ours is, as a delineation of Benson's deeply original understanding of the human mind, this is as intriguing as ever. There is what appears to be an editing error in the logistics of the final scene as Seryozha and Wilfred arrive home with his new bride which is quite glaring - Wilfred reports on events which, to all appearances, he hasn't been present at, to Anna, who was there. He is mentioned in a very offhand way in one sentence as having been around. It feels wrong, almost like Wilfred was cut out of the action and then sellotaped back in. A minor downer on a nevertheless typically fascinating journey.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"...Under popular government, ministers will become so impotent that even their wickedness and stupidity will do harm no more.

They will receive from the general assemblies only an uncertain and precarious authority; unable to indulge in far-flung hopes and vast schemes, they will spend their ephemeral existence in wretched expedients. They will grow jaundiced in the unhappy effort to read their orders on the five hundred faces of a crowd, ignorant and at cross-purposes; they will languish in restless impotence. They will become unused to foresee anything or prepare anything, and they will only study intrigue and falsehood..."

from The New Ministry, a piece in The Opinions of Jerome Coignard by Anatole France

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

The Searching Light by Martha Dodd (1956)

I haven't read many propagandist novels before. Or novels with a strongly particular political point to make. So reading this has been a lesson in what the costs are, and what can be achieved. Dodd, it needs to be said, is a strong writer without being extraordinary. But she's no klutz, stuffing nonsense down our necks badly. The writing here is sometimes very sensitive and human and quietly moving. This is the story of a university professor on a small but prestigious campus in the Appalachians, and his fight against a loyalty oath at the time of McCarthy. It's also the story of his demanding wife, who has a heart condition; she believes in him, but doesn't want to lose her comfortable life. He is also deeply in love with her, and worries about the effects of his fight with the authorities on her peace of mind and therefore her fragile health. Several times in periods of tension her health fails almost fatally, and the lurch toward disaster is deftly pictured. It's also about their daughter, an aspiring artist living mainly in New York, who comes down to them from time to time, falls for one of his younger colleagues, struggles to get her work off the ground, and supports him in defying the regents of the university who are pressing for the signing of the oath. Their tense family relationship is one half of the action, and the different groups of staff at the university, their views, conflicts, alliances and tactics are the other. The limitation imposed by being so in thrall to a particular political angle works its way mainly in terms of a sense that all relating to it needs to be explained clearly and reinforced often. So discussions are very well explicated by all; the sense of messiness in humanity is somewhat absent. There is a feeling of all of it occurring under a glass dome - or as a diorama. It's a tribute to Dodd that even though this is the case it is not a dull book at all. She's done the best job that she could at what she was after; what she was after is a limited thing. Limited, but with quite a bit of entertaining space in it all the same.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...Men, she had always found, were such a clumsy piece of work compared with animals. They were so flawed, so pitted with pores and discolorations, so smoky, so hot, so shiny bald or sticky-haired - like a child's stitching on canvas, whereas any animal was like Chinese embroidery on silk. One had only to compare the face of a Korean beggar-dog - crawling with ticks, yet honest, finished and sinless - with that of a Korean beggar-man - rotted away with mean and complex depravity...one had only to compare the fine eager beam of a thirsty horse bending to drink from a pool, with the leer of a Russian approaching his glass of beer - to see the essential golden rightness in an animal's face and to admit the spoiled spotted thing man is...'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter X)

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Challenge by V. Sackville-West (1923)

What a peculiar book - in one sense. But a familiar one in another - which is the author's singlemindedness in pursuing the story. There's no sense here of cynical manipulation. Her previous three books of fiction have included two Hardyesque novels and then a collection of stories which seemed to indicate a move toward the more immediate and intimate in terms of style. How wrong I was! This novel is a throwback to begin with - to the Ruritanian stylings of Anthony Hope and even E. F. Benson. It is set in a fictional tiny republic in or around the Greek coastline given the confusing name Herakleion - which is actually a town in northern Crete. Off the coast of Herakleion are the Zachary Islands which have an on-again-off-again relationship with it in terms of belonging. There is a large thrust in the first two parts of this novel toward describing the diplomatic community in the tiny capital, partly at least in mildly humorous terms - the various emissaries and VIPs jostle for standing, feud, and have marked contrasts of character. Backgrounding this is the author's trademark hard earnestness, this time in relation to a small group of mainly English inmates and their families, circling around the Davenant family. Julian Davenant, the young, university educated, idealistic, impetuous son of the British ambassador has a complicated relationship with his beautiful cousin Eve, where he mistrusts her selfishness and imperiousness but adores her beauty and originality. In the third part, when Julian has been convinced that he should lead an uprising of the Islands against a newly-elected unsympathetic president of Herakleion (his family have a long history of connection with them), the narrative closes in on the relationship between Julian and Eve, whom he has taken there with him. Like her second novel, but with not quite the same strangeness, this is the point where there is a sense of overheating and superpassion. Suddenly we move from the urbane world to the passionate one, closing in on the machinations of their intense and contradictory feelings for one another, revealed in extremely heightened language. Then there is a plot twist, fuelled by jealousy, which brings about a violent conclusion, an escape and a death at sea. Storm in a teacup? Almost. True to its own design? Definitely.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...Every inch of the earth is, after all, so dangerous. Here, where we stand, a minute or a million years ago, some heart failed. There, at that point to which our dear love is hurrying, the lightning struck, the germ of plague was born, the murderer will stab - a minute or a million years hence - a minute or a million years ago. Living is a matter of missing death by a hair's breadth or an aeon - it doesn't matter which - and dying is a matter of coincidence. If we knew the past and the future of every yard of every path we tread, or of every stone our dear love's foot turns over as he goes - where should we turn for peace? Once we have realised the billions of deaths and horrors that have been, the billions that will be, every inch of the world seems soaked in blood...'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter IX)

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...Men and women - especially women - had been judged too much by their capacity for love. This was because people who love, propagate, thought Varvara, and transmit their vulgar standard of love from generation to generation. Just as rabbits transmit their bobtails. Bobtails are a conventional rabbit standard. A rabbit with a long curly tail would be feared, shunned, trampled to death, so the innovation would die untried, unbequeathed, abortive. But its death didn't prove the essential wrongness of long curly tails for rabbits. Genius was probably often heartless. But genius did not often propagate. Strangeness meant physical mortality, so strangeness was rare - never re-born - always new in every manifestation. All the stupid things - cruelty - prostitution - womanly modesty - conventional religion - conventional morality - only survived so rampantly because of the excessive fertility of the stupid.'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VII)

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...She knew that he had killed himself by way of revenge on her - he had told her that he would - but she did not know why. What were two me's[sic] to each other, that one should be so necessary to another? A sort of accident, it seemed, happened in young men's blood that made them think that two me's could be kneaded together into an us. Most of them probably lived to find it a mistake. Only dear Sasha had incredibly thrown his me away - poured it out of a cut throat - because he could not double it into an us. Here in this generous world were a million million me's - a million million columns of lonely blood and bone. There was no such thing as a real us.'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VII)

Monday, April 8, 2013

Commonplace Book

'The water climbed up Seryozha's body as he waded deeper and deeper. The garment of delicious coldness, as it wrapped itself higher and higher about him, seemed to be piped by a wire of almost pain - a steel hair of ice or fire, climbing up his legs and his body. His thirsty skin gloried. He threw himself flat in the water, his open mouth just held above the surface. He felt strangely level with the world's floor. All perspective changed to fit eyes only six inches from world level instead of the usual six feet. He saw the darkening sandbanks like clouds, the bullock and the dog like giants, wild geese resting on far-distant sandbanks like tall electric grey ghosts.'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'What was it, this bond of flesh? so material, yet so imperative, so compelling, as to become almost a spiritual, not a bodily, necessity? so transitory, yet so recurrent? dying down like a flame, to revive again? so unimportant, so grossly commonplace, yet creating so close and tremulous an intimacy? this magic that drew together their hands like fluttering butterflies in the hours of sunlight, and linked them in the abandonment of mastery and surrender in the hours of night? that swept aside the careful training, individual and hereditary, replacing pride by another pride? this unique and mutual secret? this fallacious yet fundamental and dominating bond? this force, hurling them together with such cosmic power that within the circle of frail human entity rushed furiously the tempest of an inexorable law of nature?'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part III, Chapter IV)

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...To be approached was entirely unbearable; a desiring or acute glance was in itself an assault; see she must, but to be seen was somehow insult. She loathed touch and always avoided it; the lightest accidental touch rasped her like a cat's tongue. Love of her neighbour was a thing felt stilly, thinly diffused among pitied lovers - puppies - parents - flowers - insects - even things - (she often felt guilty for disappointing things) - even invented things - blank pensioners of her compassionate fancy...'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter IV)

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Commonplace Book

'He insisted, -

"When did you really become aware of your own heartlessness?"

She sparkled with laughter.

"I think it began life as a sense of humour," she said, "and degenerated gradually into its present state of spasmodic infamy."'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part III, Chapter I)

Thursday, March 28, 2013

The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank (1923)

The feeling with this novel is that it is the apotheosis. The absolutely typifying central point may have been reached. Another striking thing about it is the realisation of how much of it is Firbank's own work. I am used to thinking of him as the assembler of shards, a builder of puzzles made of many little pieces. But in fact most of the grand swing of this is in his own words, or so it seems. Set in the mythical Mediterraneo-Arabic tiny nation of Pisuerga, in its camply overdone royal court, this is the story of Laura de Nazianzi's doomed private passion for Prince Yousef, and about the visit of the king and queen of a neighbouring nation, The Land of Dates. Full of hints of decadence, overstated heatedness and tendencies toward hissing confession and the pull of the cloister, Firbank serves up a feast of orientalist, colonialist, aestheticist hues. It never happened, but one can imagine the illustrated edition, with full colour plates and exquisite gold tooling on the cover. His liking for an oddly turned sentence is in full spate in this - with a particular penchant for what might be called interpolative qualifying - little tippings-in between commas in a larger clause(!), which lend an unmistakable rhythm: "Propped high by many bolsters, in a vast blue canopied bed, the Archduchess lay staring laconically at a diminutive model of a flight of steps, leading to what appeared to be intended, perhaps, as a Hall of Attent, off which opened quite a lot of little doors, most of which bore the word: "Engaged."" Many are simpler, with short one-word furtherings like that 'perhaps' which fulfil the Firbankian cloudy swish-of-the-hand intent perfectly. The fact that these assemblages are reasonably clearly all his own is the most important one. He was not only a magpie of the oddness of Edwardian high conversation, he was also a phenomenal stylist in his own right.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Commonplace Book

'Death. He had never seen it. As he saw it now, he thought that he had never beheld anything so incontestably real as its irrevocable stillness. Here was finality; here was defeat beyond repair. In the face of this judgment no revolt was possible. Only acceptance was possible. The last word in life's argument had been spoken by an adversary for long remote, forgotten; an adversary who had remained ironically dumb before the babble, knowing that in his own time, with one word, he could produce the irrefutable answer. There was something positively satisfying in the faultlessness of the conclusion. He had not thought that death would be like this. Not cruel, not ugly, not beautiful, not terrifying - merely unanswerable...'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part II, Chapter V)

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"...the great inevitable is perhaps the least intolerable of all human sorrows. There is, after all, a certain kindliness in the fate which lays the obligation of sheer necessity upon our courage."'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part II, Chapter II)

Monday, March 11, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"You'd not think now by the look of her she had been at Girton!" Mrs. Bedley remarked.

"Once a Girton girl always a Girton girl, Mrs. Bedley."

"It seems a curate drove her to it...."

"I'm scarcely astonished. Looking back, I remember the average curate at home as something between a eunuch and a snigger."

from The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank (Chapter IV)

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Commonplace Book

'Forbidden in youth by parents and tutors alike the joys of paddling under pain of chastisement, the Archduchess Elizabeth appeared to find a zest in doing so now. Attended by a chosen lady-in-waiting (as a rule the dowager Marchioness of Lallah Miranda), she liked to slip off to one of the numerous basins or natural grottos in the castle gardens, where she would pass whole hours in wading blissfully about. Whilst paddling, it was her wont to run over those refrains from the vaudevilles and operas (with their many shakes and rippling cadenzi) in favour in her day, interspersed at intervals by such cries as: "Pull up your skirt, Marquise, it's dragging a little, my friend, below the knees..." or, "A shark, a shark!" which was her way of designating anything that had fins, from a carp to a minnow.'

from The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank (Chapter II)

Monday, March 4, 2013

Robert Orange by John Oliver Hobbes (1900)

This is the sequel to the author's previous novel The School for Saints, and forms the last part of the life story of a fictional Disraeli-era MP. It is also a notably conservative Catholic piece, and a long way from the author's start in literature as a wit of the early 1890s. In this second part we are primarily in London, where Orange and his beloved Brigit have returned after their continent-wide explorations and intrigues of the previous book. The story is mainly concerned with the eponymous lead man and a group of his intimates, as they realise that they each either love someone else, or are betrothed where they shouldn't be. They are all investigating their options at the prime of life and where they should be led by them. Unfortunately I think too much of the book is taken up with these wonderings - it has a static feeling for long periods. But against that can be laid the author's still aphorismic style - she has a great facility for drawing up and out of a particularity she has created in the plot, and discussing it in poetic and philosophic terms, honing in on a rich and complete statement of exactly what counts in the matter. More's the pity that this aptitude is not directed into humour as it formerly was. The only other concern would be that two of the main characters end up, almost unconvincingly, in holy orders. Orange becomes a monsignor and deserts British politics altogether, and Sara de Treverell, who loved him knowing she couldn't have him because his heart was Brigit's, gets herself to a nunnery. Meanwhile Brigit's very odd course through this history is completed as an accomplished stage actress! Perhaps I'm really trying to say that I don't quite believe in the psychology. It's still a quietly elegant book.

Commonplace Book

'...An island! land that had slipped the leash of continents, forsworn solidarity, cut adrift from security and prudence! One could readily believe that they made part of the divine, the universal discontent, that rare element, dynamic, life-giving, that here and there was to be met about the world, always fragmentary, yet always full and illuminating, even as the fragments of beauty.'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part I, Chapter IV)

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Commonplace Book

'28th. To my Lord Lauderdale's, where we find some Scotch people at supper. Pretty odd company; though my Lord Brouncker tells me, my Lord Lauderdale is a man of mighty good reason and judgment. But at supper there played one of their servants upon the viallin some Scotch tunes only; several, and the best of their country, as they seemed to esteem them, by their praising and admiring them: but, Lord! the strangest ayre that ever I heard in my life, and all of one cast. But strange to hear my Lord Lauderdale say himself that he had rather hear a cat mew than the best musique in the world; and the better the musique, the more sick it makes him; and that of all the instruments, he hates the lute the most, and next to that, the baggpipe.'

from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Suitably Edited (July 28, 1666)

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Four Fates by Theophile Gautier (1848)

In the original French this was The Two Stars, so I'm very glad to see the English translator redub it, as it covers the shockwaves in two misdirected relationships, and, after all, the women were there too! It starts in a very Dumasian way in London, with foggy streets, murky tunnels, mysterious strangers: drab, wet, quiet, grey, and unsettling. We are led through quick strokes into two upper crust relationships which are heading toward marriage on the same day in the same church. Amabel Vyvyan and Benedict Arundell are untroubled and, despite the weather, excited about their upcoming nuptials. Edythe Harley and the swarthy Count de Volmerange are less well-starred, with Edythe's fall from grace with another disturbing her peace - she is not relishing telling him of it after their marriage. Amabel and Benedict are scheduled first, but just as they arrive a mysterious old friend of Benedict's gestures him aside down a side-street. Amabel never sees him again. She is still waiting in the vestibule, crying, when Edythe and the Count pass through and marry. Later, Edythe's parents hear a huge groan from their room, and they too are found to have disappeared. It turns out that Edythe has revealed her secret and the Count, in a rage beyond reason, has followed her frightened flight through the garden and then the city. He catches up with her on London Bridge, sweeps her up, and throws her into the raging river to drown. Unbeknown to him, she is collected by the crew of a passing strange boat, which is speeding downstream with a prisoner on it. The prisoner? Benedict Arundell, who has been kidnapped by his old friend to fulfil his secret society oath to be of help in a great purpose. Suffice it to say that this involves a long trip into the Atlantic and ends at St Helena, where a certain great personage is waiting to be sprung from his confines. Meantime, Count de Volmerange, destroyed by anger and what he has done, is approached by a stranger in Regent's Park, and conveyed to a meeting with Dakcha, a mysterious Indian who is planning a revolt in that country. It is revealed that Volmerange's Indian background means that he is next in line for the Indian Lunar Throne, which Dakcha wants to re-establish, and in doing so throw out the British. Volmerange also meets there Priyamvada, a hugely exotic Indian woman whose dark entrancing drug-like mystery he falls for. She is Dakcha's right-hand woman, and the two spirit him off to India to lead the revolution the way a 'royal' only can. The terrible thing is, after all this, neither exploit comes off. The Indian revolt is crushed, and Napoleon dies just as he could be freed. The odd juxtaposition of the foggy, grimy streets of London with the wild exoticism and big adventure of the later portions is very entertaining; the mysteries unfold very unwillingly, which is tantalising and great fun.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"O my God! to live for so long a time in one idea, one hope - to consecrate one's life to it with a devotion the most absolute and an abnegation the most complete - to renounce for it love, friendship and family - to feed its flame with a holocaust of all human sentiment - to sacrifice to it one's genius - to put at its service the power of an inflexible will - and then at the moment of realization to be prevented from accomplishing it by some miserable obstacle! Yesterday an absurd tempest - this morning some trifling incident which I cannot imagine [...] no-one can foresee the thousand stupid resistances of things to ideas - of matter to spirit."'

from Four Fates by Theophile Gautier (Chapter XIX)

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...In the freezing snows of the world's solitude, a prudent man does not try to make himself happy, but he is less than a man if he allows others to make him wretched. The flesh has its discomfort: the spirit, however, has its illimitable conjectures. When all else fails me, I may still find solace in conjectures...'

from Robert Orange by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter XX)

Saturday, February 9, 2013

The Red Cockerel by Miodrag Bulatovic (1959)

I wasn't prepared for quite how affecting this book would be. Surrealism is usually 'blah' emotionally - it doesn't reach far. But the surrealism in this is only a portion of the mixture: it occasionally intrudes to bend and twist events into other shapes, but doesn't dominate the whole proceeding. The author is Montenegrin, and the story takes place in the north of Montenegro, nearby to the town of Bijelo Polje. It involves a small landscape including a farm and its owner, a wedding being celebrated raucously on that farm, a road that passes by it on which two tramps are walking and resting, and a Muslim cemetery nearby where two gravediggers are preparing to bury a woman. There is a folkloric underfeel to these situations, but this is overlaid with very physical heat, dust, self-loathing, misery, plaintiveness and dreaming. Ilja, the farm owner, is struggling with a massive turnaround in his attitudes as he passes from unreasoning violent abusiveness to some sort of caring. This is exemplified in his treatment of Muharem, a young crippled farm-worker, who is struggling himself with the idea of becoming a man in his compromised physical state. The wedding, which goes on in greater or lesser bursts of unruly dancing, unruly drunkenness, unruly music, unruly ugly mob-like behaviour all through the piece, grips Muharem's attention as the bride is Ivanka, by whom he is fascinated. She is big, sweaty in the blazing heat, and voluptuous. The bridegroom Kajica is tiny, frightened by her, not at all sure he wants this manhood thing which challenges out of her like a beam. He's constantly on the run from various guests trying to get him to take his wife. The conversation of the passing tramps and the drunk gravediggers highlights other angles of humanity, as they interact with these characters and each other. Over them all hovers Muharem's red cockerel, a symbol of either one's personal spirit, or the soul of people's hopes and dreams, or those perhaps of the nation. The cockerel is put through hell and high water (as is his master) as wedding guests try to catch it to eat it, people try to convince Muharem to give it up, he goes wandering with it, he loses it, burning, up into the sky. So this book is symbolist too - and I'm sure there are elements here which I've only barely understood. It's also a work of art, which is impressive and fascinating in its poetic looseness and contrary force.

Monday, February 4, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"...When I hear a sermon I feel an inclination always to say, 'My dear fellow, can't you put your case better?' I want good stuff about Divine and human nature - not this vagueness and platitude. Why don't they tell one something about the optimism of God, even before the spectacle of man's weakness? But, instead, we are told to moan about this vale of tears; we are promised chastisements, disappointments, woes, persecution. A philosophy of suffering makes men strong, but a philosophy of despair is bound to make a generation of pleasure-seekers."'

from Robert Orange by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter XVI)

Monday, January 28, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...The world seldom takes account of the unhappy sensitiveness in devout souls; it thinks them insensible not only because they know how to keep silent, but how to sacrifice their secret woes...'

from Robert Orange by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter XI)

Commonplace Book

'...Men's designs are never so indefinite and confused as when they meet with no outward resistance. A close attack has proved the salvation of most human wills and roused the energy of many drooping convictions. It is seldom good that one should enter in any vocation very easily, sweetly, and without strife. The best apprenticeships, whether ecclesiastical or religious, or civil or military, or political or artistic, are never the most calm. Whether we study the lives of saints or the lives of those distinguished in any walk of human endeavour where perfection, in some degree or other, has been at least the goal, we always find that the first years of the pursuit have been one bitter history of temptations, doubts, despondencies, struggles, and agonising inconsistencies of volition...'

from Robert Orange by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter XI)

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Caesar is Dead by Jack Lindsay (1934)

This is the second of the trilogy, and a much spicier read than the first. Where that one had long periods of grim sticking-with-it, this one travels at a fair tick. There were a couple of moments where I thought it had run a little thin on steam, but on the whole it was strongly involving. This section is the story of Caesar's murder and the reactions of the main senators, power-players and the populace to it; the striving to replace him, the adoration of him, the gladness among some that his influence was over, and the regret of his passing among others, exemplified in renewed economic chances, closed off possibilities, the political-hope-and-dream-machine having its character irremediably changed. There are a whole series of relationships at the core of the book, men and women of many castes and affiliations: Antonius and his searing wife Fulvia, Amos the young Jew and his love for an Egyptian maid Karni, Gallus the poet and his drunken fascination for the reciter Cytheris. Their matchings are trouble-laden, foolish, animalistic, often fated, but always rich. Lindsay's attitude to the depiction of these presumably reveals those he had toward men and women and their partnering across the board and all through time. This book has one notable failing: the author's attempt to match the facts with invented psychology. In trying to imagine why the main players did what they did when they did Lindsay struggles to find believable meaning. A good example is the initial rise of Octavianus, who seems suddenly to come to the fore when other players' efforts are unsuccessful. Even though all around are very well versed in who could possibly have a claim to the leadership and to Caesar's name and position, Lindsay avers that Octavianus had simply been forgotten about. That being the case doesn't really bear scrutiny psychologically. But this middle novel is lively, sensual, intensely coloured and deeply enjoyable.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...Asceticism is a faithful quality. It is won by slow and painful stages, with bitter distress and mortifying tears, but once really gained, the losing is even harder than the struggle for its acquisition.'

from Robert Orange by John Oliver Hobbes (Chapter IV)

Monday, January 14, 2013

More Women Than Men by I. Compton-Burnett (1933)

This is the first Compton-Burnett that I have enjoyed with out-and-out relish. There is the sense in this one that she's attacked the jugular just that little bit more firmly and assuredly. I think I also like the fact that it isn't set strictly in a family environment, rather in that of a girls' school. Josephine Napier is the headmistress. She has very strong and complicated relationships with her team of mistresses and the occasional master. She also has her gay brother's son living with her as an adoptee, and receives regular visits from that brother and his younger waspish partner. Erupting into the scene are an old friend who has also been a rival in love and her young daughter. The author's torturous attitude to conversation and interrelation and what they bring out in people, as well as what they don't, or what they just hint at, takes all this up in a whirlwind of words, depositing some things along the way, keeping others stirred thoroughly, and consistently re-arranging both the overt and the covert angles of each character toward the others. Fascinatingly, there is a point reached in all these jealousies, seeming altruisms, polite allowings, barbed vicious comments and tangled grips of power-play where a simple, physical, frightening fact is shown up, causing a death, witnessed by only two of them, which ripples a tiny bit in the ensuing couple of pages, and then is never mentioned again. Such is the Compton-Burnett insistence on the implied that one is consistently wondering whether one or other of them will bring it up veiledly, or be called to account by the other by implication, or will refer obliquely to it whilst discussing another matter. But they never do. Which is like life, I guess. These people are generally not like life, they are much too accentuated, which has been a sticking point for me in the past, but I have to admit that this time I cared a lot less, because there was something viscerally entertaining in all this lather of contest.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Ninety-Six Hours' Leave by Stephen McKenna (1917)

This fourth novel is a return to the author's brightest mode. His first novel was close to the mood of this; the second and third deepened considerably. I don't know what prompted the return, but either of these modes is a welcome one for this reader - McKenna has a lovely rich aplomb whether he directs it toward the lighter or the darker. It's the story of four upper class young officers with a few days' leave in 1916. They return to London and re-emerge into their prior world - that of the top hotels, their restuarants and cafes, and the denizens who frequent them. One of them spies a gorgeous young woman as they alight at the station on first arriving, and makes it his mission to get to know her. Little does he know that the urge will lead him and his three fellows into a world of spying, political intrigue, royal impersonation and murder! The strangest thing about reading McKenna is the inexplicability of his reputation's demise. Perhaps I have to read further to find out why - he survived until 1967, publishing almost yearly, with his final novel in 1962. But he's never been 'rediscovered', never republished by lovers of the neglected author, is almost completely forgotten. From being hailed on his debut in 1912 as Oscar Wilde's truest inheritor, it seems that, after his huge success in 1918 with the novel after this one, it was all downhill, and a long way down. This lively stylish jeu d'esprit captures the spirit of elegance which is now more associated with Michael Arlen and the authors of the twenties. A kind of knowing cynicism pervades it, but not in a detrimental way. I'm guessing that the success of The Thirty-Nine Steps for John Buchan a few years previously provided an inspiration for this one's tangling with espionage, but the author was the nephew of a cabinet minister and close to that world of diplomacy and no doubt skulduggery, so his influences could have been multifarious. His style is assured and great fun.