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

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.

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

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

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.

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)