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.

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)

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)

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.

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)

Commonplace Book

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

from Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (Chapter XV)

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

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)

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

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)