Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...I have been here for 10 days having my back massaged by a singularly unpleasant young woman with peroxide hair and the beauty of Phyllis Dare. She is terribly sadistic and hurts me very much. However I conceal my real character and lead her on to tell me all her innermost feelings. "Don't you love Surrey, Mrs. P. I was down at Hindhead on Sunday giving my dog a run." "Don't you think dogs", violent slaps, "much more", slaps, "intelligent", bangs, "and more capable of love", bangs, "and affection than human beings", bangs. "I think", slaps, "something has been left out of human beings they are such miserable", bangs, "mean", harder bangs, "creatures", terrific bangs, "compared to intelligent dogs." Today being the last day shall I reveal my true character and shatter her? But that is probably impossible. She is made of iron...'

from a letter to Julia Strachey, dated [March 1927], in Carrington: Letters and Extracts from her Diaries

Monday, December 22, 2014

Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (1926)

Sitwell's intention here is, I think, to bury the Edwardian era - using, thankfully, humour, urged on with a reasonable quotient of rancour! This story of a slightly shy, slightly mysterious aged gentlewoman with an urge to become more popular, fantastically named Miss Collier-Floodgaye, and her newly acquired aged companion, Miss Bramley, who has been used in previous positions to being dominated and put upon, and now in Miss Collier-Floodgaye finds instead a victim of her own, is a magnificent indictment. Or at least it would be, if one subscribed to Sitwell's prejudices. I don't quite, but I cannot deny the brilliance of his effort. The relatively slender plot revolves around Miss Collier-Floodgaye being taken up by 'scheming types' in the seaside town of Newborough, famously modelled on Scarborough. Miss Bramley, having previously astounded herself by establishing very effective control over her employer's life, is disgusted with this new interest being shown in Miss Collier-Floodgaye by a putative group of 'relatives'; this connection is only maintained by the fact that their surname is Floodgay. Miss Collier-Floodgaye goes along with the story very willingly, finding popularity for the first time in her life, being the centre of attention, wearing herself out. Miss Bramley, of course, suspects that her fortune may be the target, but is powerless to completely deflect their inroads. All this takes place while Sitwell methodically sets about destroying the illusion of comfortable Edwardian respectability in a provincial outpost in 1907. He does this by means of superb setpieces of satiric explosion, character after character in the background standing in for one or another fatuous garrulity, veiled sadistic impulse, hopeless euphemism, wicked prejudice or doddering incapacity. The consistency of the wit cannot be denied, and is splendidly enjoyable. Then Miss Collier-Floodgaye passes away, and Miss Bramley realises that all of these befuddled reminders to see the lawyer she has been given, degenerating into intense stares when Miss Collier-Floodgaye becomes helpless and wordless in her last days, were in order to write her into the will, not the Floodgays! Her jealousy in angling to deflect her employer from the legal visit has undone her. Finally there is an effective epilogue in which Sitwell pushes forward a few years and posits the bombardment of the title occurring in Newborough, a skirmish of the 'Great' War. He seems to relish the obliteration of this world he has built up, writing of characters being 'atomised' in bomb-drops. So, a visceral expunging of long built-up frustration? I think so.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Golf, again, acts in the same way as does a grouse-moor - interns all those addicted to it. A golf course outside a big town serves an excellent purpose in that it segregates, as though in a concentration camp, all the idle and idiot well-to-do, while the over-exertion of the game itself causes them to die some ten or fifteen years earlier than they would by nature, thus acting as a sort of fifteen per cent. life-tax on stupidity. While alive, it not only removes them for the whole day from the sight of those who have work to do, or leisure which they know how to spend profitably, but causes them to don voluntarily a baggy and chequered uniform, which proclaims them for what they are, at half a mile or so off, and thus enables the sane man to escape them...'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter XX)

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (1849)

This book is an experience. OK, so every book is, of course. But this one is markedly. The author was clearly casting around for future modes in part, fulfilling wishes for which she hadn't yet had the opportunity in part, travelling deeper in her original vein as well. The first impression, through the dark and more harshly humorous early chapters, is of Thackeray-echo. This is not surprising, given her respect for the man. This sounding remains present throughout, but is very much backgrounded for long periods. The novel is set in the Napoleonic era, 1811 into 1812 to be exact, in the wilds of Yorkshire. The setting is near moorland, but a tad more civilised: there's a mill in a hollow, a local great house, a few respectable abodes of clergy etc, as well as a local populace mainly employed at the mill spread over the green landscape in cottages. The impression often given of this book as being one of 'dark, satanic mills' is pretty misleading. The mill-owner, Anglo-Belgian Robert Moore, is certainly in a lot of bother when the story opens, with a justly incensed population thrust out of work by some new machines he's installing. Luddite rebellion ensues in waves, his single-minded resourcefulness battling it successfully. Bronte is careful to elucidate both sides of this story, but of course is hamstrung by the fact that Moore is one of her heroes. As soon as Moore's love life takes centre stage in the latter part of this early melee, the die is cast for a contrasting progression. Hampered by the blockaded ports and trade embargoes, his business looks likely to fail. So his attention goes from young penniless Caroline Helstone, niece of one of the local vicars, to young wealthy Shirley Keeldar, inheritress of the great house, who has just returned to the neighbourhood. Shirley is wild-spirited, forthright, searchingly intelligent - apparently she was Bronte's idealisation of her sister Emily, as she believed she might have been. Caroline, her friend, is more tender, retiring, less impulsive. The two are friends, and go through a dance around one another because Caroline had been in love with Moore, and Shirley likes the idea of his new attention. All of this part of the book is pure Bronte, and is where I think she is exploring her true centre in terms of style-development. It is punctuated by some magnificently poetic stretches - the highest mood of the book is here, the most profound colour: it is an unusual colour though, a misty green and an intense grass-green with threads of gold and white; it's almost a careful semi-arcadia she creates, a careworn place of wind and silence. Contrasts to this are often in the background and form occasional points of heavy brightness - little sparks of scarlet, smoky blue and orange with a skeleton of tree-browns, furniture-browns and silvered moonlight. These settings and emotional hues linger in the memory with a strangeness and intensity bolstered by the poetry. There is, in the introduction of Moore's brother Louis, Shirley's old tutor, later in the piece, a catalyst brought to bear on the tangle of relationships at the novel's centre. Robert Moore is shot by a disgruntled ex-employee, and spends quite some time recovering, as does Caroline of a fever, but it is not this which moves their story forward to its final conclusion, though it helps him particularly to understand and value his love. Only in the last chapter, after Wellington's (another of Bronte's personal heroes) victory at Salamanca, are the ports reopened, trade freed up, and Moore's troubled finances set onto calmer waters. This fiscal freedom means that they can marry, as will Shirley and Louis. Very telling that: Bronte, for all her supposed romanticism, was practical and grounded when push came to shove.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"Still, I know I shall be strangely placed with that mountain nymph, Liberty. She is, I suspect, akin to that Solitude which I once wooed, and from which I now seek a divorce. These Oreads are peculiar: they come upon you with an unearthly charm, like some starlight evening; they inspire a wild but not warm delight; their beauty is the beauty of spirits: their grace is not the grace of life, but of seasons or scenes in Nature: theirs is the dewy bloom of morning - the languid flush of evening - the peace of the moon - the changefulness of clouds. I want and will have something different. This elfish splendour looks chill to my vision, and feels frozen to my touch. I am not a poet: I cannot live with abstractions..."'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Thirty-Six)

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Commonplace Book

'The notes flickered up into the warm orange air, and struck little rattling vibrations out of every ornament on the piano, or beyond on the small, littered tables that impeded movement, so that one waded rather than walked through the room. Now every object spoke and danced with its own accent: and the marble clock on the mantelpiece punctuated this sub-human chatter with a suggestion of mockery, hooting out the time in a clear, owlish voice. All these voices could be detected through the tones of the singer, tones which, though they veiled them, yet called them into being, as they flitted hither and thither, caressing the ears of the two elder ladies as if they were not notes, but tittilating items of gossip.'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter XVII)

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"...Gratitude is a divine emotion: it fills the heart, but not to bursting: it warms it, but not to fever. I like to taste leisurely of bliss: devoured in haste, I do not know its flavour."'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Twenty-Eight)

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Commonplace Book

'The hotel was, certainly, unlike other hotels; but it is useless to pretend that the eastern wave of luxury, which was now spending itself in London, had as yet broken over the interior of this, one of the first built hotels in England. Encaustic tiles make it echo, red flock papers make it dark. The rooms are too large, too well designed. With floating palm trees and ferns in them, they have, more than ever, the air of an empty aquarium waiting for new, half-human, half-marine specimens until even the round ottomans in the centre of the floor become so many closed-up red anemones on the tank bottom, the sofas and chairs loose rocks. Move these, and from under will crawl sideways some crustacean and armoured spinster, or a purple-faced monster of an old oceanic Colonel. When, however, the observer looks more closely, the greenery is too arid to justify such imagery; the leaves of palm and aspidistra are hard and withered, scratch the wall at any draught. Indeed the palm trees lumbering up in the corners of the rooms are so tall, their outspread fingers so bony, that they resemble rather the reconstructed extinct monsters at a Natural History Museum than anything in an aquarium.'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter VIII)

Monday, November 10, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Once more he could hear the peculiar leafy rustle made by the silken flounces of the crinolines, as they rippled caressingly past, while patchouli floated to him over the shrill east wind, whose shrieking he could not hear, whose sting he could hardly feel. Once more in his empty conch sounded the langorous lilt, beating up into a furious storm, of the Hungarian band, in their slung jackets and gaudy frogged uniforms. Or, he was back in the fabulous spring days of his youth, when May burnt with a steady green flame now unknown, and, as though the honeyed west wind had lifted suddenly a curtain, every tree was revealed weighed down by blossom, from the formal, pointed flambeaux of the chestnuts to the gold-flecked white foam of the fruit trees, to the hedge of hawthorns that were, at these moments, avenues of white-winged ships in full sail across a green ocean...'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter VI)

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...For from this novel, disturbing sensation was being born slowly, painfully, another emotion, jealousy: and Miss Bramley was frigid in manner to anyone who displayed a tendency to become intimate with the old lady. Even upon the casual acquaintance of a hotel - upon that pathetic over-dressed proportion of England's surplus middle-aged females, which in the short span between sunrise and sunset, birth and death, finds an assurance of eternity in the involute inanities of a conversation carried on among itself, and thus lives by taking in its own spiritual washing or, occasionally, washing its own dirty linen - Miss Bramley turned a severe and then a threatening eye...'

from Before the Bombardment by Osbert Sitwell (Chapter IV)

Friday, October 31, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...I had imagined Bilbao was a place full of lovely sailors and ships, but in case any misguided person should in future console themselves during a night journey from Madrid with equally Castilian imaginings, I will here record in cold ink that of all ports on God's earth it is the vilest. Even the Spaniards are debased, and so hideous that I believe they must really be French. They all wear the most stupid clothes and are rude and ungracious. The town is unredeemed by a single building which one could call architecture. In short it is very like what one conceives a south American port run up in 2 weeks by a cinema firm would be...'

from a letter to Lytton Strachey, dated April 18, 1919, in Carrington: Letters and Extracts from her Diaries by Dora Carrington

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

The Man from America by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (1905)

This is Pasture-lite. The author's initially established mode was to present a typically late nineteenth century tableau of marriage and money, leaven it with a large cast and comedy, and then add some moral depth for gravitas. In her previous novel she began to alter the mixture with a reduced cast and comedy and more moral depth. In this one she has switched the emphases again; the moral depth is much less evident. It starts with an aged Irish-French Vicomte de Nauroy established at one edge of Pasture's favourite location, in this instance the Devon-Somerset borders. An idyllic valley brimming with green, two great houses and a couple of lesser ones. The Vicomte, quite fat and comfortable and a little distant from worldliness (who could play him in the BBC adaptation? well, yes, only David Suchet) is very relaxed in the manorhouse-cum-cottage Honeycott. We follow his two charges, Rosaleen and Kitty, his granddaughters, through losing their mother, gaining a terrible stepmother, losing their father and their home (one of the two great houses) in favour of the stepmother's daughter. There is brightness and comedy scattered throughout this journey, the story is dappled with sunlight, twisting lanes, kitchen gardens, vast woods, flowers. Also part of the mix are a huge cast of well-to-do locals and some incomers. The 'boys' of the other great house, their nouveau-riche parents, as well as a family of incredibly wealthy Americans, one of the patriarchs of whom was the Vicomte's youthful friend in days of war, and who has acknowledged his debt to the Vicomte by supplying him with business-tips ever since. So, yes, this novel is even more about money than many of Pasture's others, although it's always an important skein. There is only one life challenge to be overcome in this plot, for all the young ones to marry well: that is to say, to marry someone they love, and be very comfortable financially by the way. And needless to say, with much tearing around, and an abundance of comedic come-uppances, all turns out as it should, and previously hidden wealth is put to very good use! I have to reiterate a previous comment: that Pasture is nothing if not a born storyteller; her resounding belief in this tale materially bulwarks its entertainment-value. But this is very 'spangly' - I'd like to see her return to the fine balance of her earlier efforts.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Commonplace Book

'A crash - smash - shiver - stopped their whispers. A simultaneously-hurled volley of stones had saluted the broad front of the mill, with all its windows; and now every pane of every lattice lay in shattered and pounded fragments. A yell followed this demonstration - a rioters' yell - a North-of-England - a Yorkshire - a West-Riding - a West-Riding-clothing-district-of-Yorkshire rioters' yell. You never heard that sound, perhaps, reader? So much the better for your ears - perhaps for your heart; since, if it rends the air in hate to yourself, or to the men or principles you approve, the interests to which you wish well, Wrath wakens to the cry of Hate: the Lion shakes his mane, and rises to the howl of the Hyena: Caste stands up, ireful, against Caste; and the indignant, wronged spirit of the Middle Rank bears down in zeal and scorn on the famished and furious mass of the Operative Class. It is difficult to be tolerant - difficult to be just - in such moments.'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Nineteen)

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"A very dangerous dog that, Miss Keeldar. I wonder you should keep such an animal."

"Do you, Mr Donne? Perhaps you will wonder more when I tell you I am very fond of him."

"I should say you are not serious in the assertion. Can't fancy a lady fond of that brute - 't is so ugly - a mere carter's dog - pray hang him."

"Hang what I am fond of?"

"And purchase in his stead some sweetly pooty pug or poodle: something appropriate to the fair sex: ladies generally like lap-dogs."

"Perhaps I am an exception."

"Oh! you can't be, you know. All ladies are alike in those matters: that is universally allowed."

"Tartar frightened you terribly, Mr Donne. I hope you won't take any harm."'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Fifteen)

Friday, October 10, 2014

Commonplace Book

'They both halted on the green brow of the Common: they looked down on the deep valley robed in May raiment; on varied meads, some pearled with daisies, and some golden with king-cups: to-day all this young verdure smiled clear in sunlight; transparent emerald and amber gleams played over it. On Nunnwood - the sole remnant of antique British forest in a region whose lowlands were once all sylvan chase, as its highlands were breast-deep heather - slept the shadow of a cloud; the distant hills were dappled, the horizon was shaded and tinted like mother-of-pearl; silvery blues, soft purples, evanescent greens and rose-shades, all melting into fleeces of white cloud, pure as azury snow, allured the eye as with a remote glimpse of heaven's foundations. The air blowing on the brow was fresh, and sweet, and bracing.'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Twelve)

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Tradesmen, when they speak against war, always profess to hate it because it is a bloody and barbarous proceeding: you would think, to hear them talk, that they are peculiarly civilized - especially gentle and kindly of disposition to their fellow-men. This is not the case. Many of them are extremely narrow and cold-hearted, have no good feeling for any class but their own, are distant - even hostile [-] to all others; call them useless; seem to question their right to exist; seem to grudge them the very air they breathe, and to think the circumstance of their eating, drinking, and living in decent houses, quite unjustifiable. They do not know what others do in the way of helping, pleasing, or teaching their race; they will not trouble themselves to inquire: whoever is not in trade is accused of eating the bread of idleness, of passing a useless existence. Long may it be ere England really becomes a nation of shopkeepers!'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Ten)

Monday, September 29, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"Odo!"

"Well?"

"How would you define a prig?"

"A prig," said Odo vaguely, "is a fellow who wants kicking."

"What for?"

"For being a prig."

"It seems useless to ask a boy for explanations," said Rosaleen with dignity.'

from The Man from America by Mrs Henry de la Pasture (Chapter VIII)

Saturday, September 27, 2014

The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig (1927)

I wonder if this was an angrier book in the original German. In this translation by Eric Sutton, only published a year after the original, it comes across as a sardonic satire of German military bureaucracy. Its moments of height, the points of humanity to which it stretches, are tragic; possibly informed by anger, but not showing it. Showing heartbreak, but undercutting that in some senses with wryness, rather than vituperation proper. It is a story of the Eastern Front of the First World War, in the area around the borderlands of Lithuania and Belarus (as they are now), and involves a Russian POW in an isolated timber camp, who decides to escape back to his little family in a trainload of cut wood. Having got so far, he skips off into the snowy forest and finds a group of similar escapees and minor outlaws, one of whom after some examination turns out to be a woman, Babka. Grischa, our escapee, and Babka fall for each other. She determines to help him get further on by lending him some parts of the uniform and identity tags of a dead deserter, Bjuscheff, thinking that if the German army pick him up, he'll get good treatment on the whole as a deserter and won't be sent back to the POW camp. But things have changed as the German army has advanced. Notices are up to the effect that deserters are to give themselves up to the conquerors immediately or be regarded as spies. But Grischa is illiterate - he carries on his merry way, and when eventually captured, his declaration of himself as Bjuscheff is the last thing that will help him. He is condemned to be shot. Here follows the major part of the book and its significant point. When he realises what he has let himself in for, he reveals his true identity. Most of the soldiers and officers around in his prison camp get to know and like him - they believe him. But getting confirmation of his identity from his old POW camp takes a long time. By the time it occurs a lot of water has run under the bridge, and the more dead-headed parts of the establishment want to see him shot anyway. A few more traditionally upstanding men feel that shooting him would be, in effect, a dishonour to the German army and a symptom of a creeping moral vacuum in army affairs. This push and pull between rival groups over Grischa takes on epic proportions in terms of its extent, however unepic it may be in its essential nitpicking, orders-versus-protocols-versus-ethics way. The satire of paperwork and vying allegiances appears at least gloriously realistic, but it sits a little uncomfortably next to Grischa's impending death, notwithstanding the fact that that oncoming doom must lend it contrarily frightening impact. The wrangling goes on and on; we feel for Grischa, lost in this maze of nonsense, his hope inflating and deflating as tiny battles are won or lost, but, a few chapters from the end of the book, comes the last journey out to a small quarry near the camp, a few shots, and this fallible, lost creature we have known through thick and thin falls down in a crumpled heap. The effect is to reveal the essential contrast here - humanity versus bureaucracy, literally the alive and the dead. An intriguing and challenging book, with a strange streak of humour through it, leaving one in a state of confirmed uncomfortability.

Commonplace Book

'A lover masculine so disappointed can speak and urge explanation; a lover feminine can say nothing; if she did, the result would be shame and anguish, inward remorse for self-treachery. Nature would brand such demonstration as a rebellion against her instincts, and would vindictively repay it afterwards by the thunderbolt of self-contempt smiting suddenly in secret. Take the matter as you find it: ask no questions; utter no remonstrances: it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don't shriek because the nerves are martyrized: do not doubt that your mental stomach - if you have such a thing - is strong as an ostrich's - the stone will digest. You held your hand out for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind: in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson[:] how to endure without a sob...'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Seven)

Friday, September 26, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Nothing refines like affection. Family jarring vulgarizes - family union elevates...'

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Six)

Monday, September 22, 2014

Kings in Exile by Alphonse Daudet (1879)

This is a lesser-known novel by the author. It concerns the deposed royal family of Illyria, which roughly coincides with Dalmatia, which roughly coincides with coastal Croatia today. As is usual in their time, one of the decline and obliteration of minor royalty all over Europe, when revolution comes, the King and Queen and young weakling Prince Zara head for Paris, along with a sizeable part of the court for support. Christian, the monarch, is a devotee of pleasure and has never been particularly comfortable with the more strictured part of his royal role, whereas Frederique, his wife, is as strong as an ox, staunch in her desire to regain power, to uphold what she believes to be their destiny to rule. This awkward contrast between their personalities dictates their future. Christian, relieved of the bother of rule, descends quickly into gaming and debt, wine and women. Frederique is at first ignorant of quite how far he's dropped into the mire of Paris. Soon he is selling any aristocratic titles in his gift to all and sundry, simply in order to gain money for his dubious exploits. All of Frederique's grand plans for reinstatement finally go awry when a foolhardy counter-revolution is planned, reluctantly agreed to by Christian. He gets waylaid while journeying to their port of embarkation by a furious mistress who has secretly planned to get him to abdicate by shrouding him in debt from which he can't escape without terrible exposure. This way she and her cronies hope to benefit from his personal wealth which is currently tied up with the crown and maintaining the royal presence and hope. What she doesn't know is that all this rumoured personal wealth is gone. Waylaid by her, he ditheringly fails to join his troop of counter-revolutionaries in an already highly unlikely effort. Vital messages are not communicated at a critical time; the sortie fails miserably, and almost all of the men are killed. Daudet surrounds these central characters and their melancholic struggling lowering fate with a group of self-serving ingrates on the one hand, and a few loyal fervent believers on the other. There is an unusual contrast at work here, between a kind of tragic fated destiny and a species of grimly realised enervation, almost like the author couldn't quite decide to which camp he belonged. Were these people deserving of their fate? For all the uncomfortability of that, this remains a fascinating bitter-melancholic exposure of the regal and the rotten.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"...I've lived like a man, and I'll die like a man, like a common man, who had little time for God, and for whom God had little time too, and if God thinks this insulting, surely death is hard enough, and God, if there is a God, will not be harder to me than I should be to a little child who was rude to me. For," he said with a smile, "if there is a God, and He really did make the world, then He won't just be as kind as I am to a little child, but a million times more kind, and if He hasn't as much patience with me as I have with a child, then praying isn't much use."'

from The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig (Book VII, Chapter III)

Monday, September 15, 2014

Lily Christine by Michael Arlen (1928)

Another visitation of a style and created world that could be by no other writer. If that distinctiveness were the only or true criterion of greatness, Arlen would be great indeed. As it is, we tend to slide the other way; he is dismissed as froth. Whilst there is no doubt that he is frothy in a sense, he is a lot more besides. He manages to fully occupy his milieu, that of twenties London and its top-hatted, slightly fast adherents, with a sympathy and teased-out depth which is intriguing. The element that distinguishes his work is its emotional truth. No matter that his characters live within a world of 'rum fellows' and 'dashers' and 'beastly good fun', they also live within an emotional framework which is very carefully elucidated. Arlen knows their minds to a significant extent, and doesn't stint in drawing out all the realistic stretch of their questing sensibilities. Here, Lily Christine Summerest stumbles upon Rupert Harvey after her car breaks down in the country. His house is the nearest and he offers her a bed for the night - not in that way. They fast become friends; he introduces her to his wife when she gets back from being away, and Muriel Harvey likes Lily Christine too - she trusts Rupert implicitly. After all, Lily Christine is super-elegant and beautiful, an honest human being and skilled in friendship, and honourable to boot. Her husband, the famous cricketer Ivor Summerest, is a hulk of a man, a bit of a blood, delightful, but has an eye for the ladies. His playing away has been accommodated by Lily Christine because she knows that ultimately they're just 'pieces of nonsense' and Ivor will always love her best. Unfortunately this state of affairs doesn't last. Ivor falls madly for Mrs Abbey, one of London's leading actresses, whom they all respect enormously. So much so that he is willing to leave Lily Christine. As Ivor and Mrs Abbey have heard the story of Lily Christine's adventure in the country and her night stayed at Rupert's, as has everyone in their set, it's all too easy for them to decide that a lot more went on than actually did, and to cite Rupert in the Summerests' divorce proceedings. Lily Christine is horrified to think she's embroiled Rupert in these scandalous affairs, and feels sure that Ivor will tire of Mrs Abbey after all and return to her - she still loves him. She and Rupert rocket back and forth through fast London society, angling and analysing, trying to develop schemes for winning Ivor back over. At the last moment, Rupert makes a tactical error, thinking he's helping Lily Christine, and disaster strikes in the background. Suffice it to say that this book, like many of Arlen's, ends tragically. In its so strongly delineated and completely original style, it's not only brilliant entertainment, but also a vivid portrait of the spirit of the era.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"Well, I never knew before that America had a corner in decency as well as in gold!"

"I'm not talking about decency but about that namby-pamby idealization of women they go in for - and all it has done for them has been to breed a race of confoundedly unpunctual women. No, the fellow's clubs won't turn against him. Why should they? America may be a beauty parlour for women financed by overworked millionaires whose only recreation is telling endless anecdotes - but England is still a man's country - in spite of votes for women and flappers and the Lord-knows-what..."'

from Lily Christine by Michael Arlen (Chapter XIV)

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (1935)

This is the third historical novel by Lindsay set in the Roman world. The other two have had essentially the same modus operandi: that of setting many strands of surrounding story alongside the great events which are being recounted. This one is a little different in that it has a core storyline which the great events themselves surround. Thus the background is Antonius and Cleopatra and those final months in Alexandria waiting and wondering what Octavianus will do, with Antonius depressed and drinking too much and Cleopatra despising him, failed attempts to patch up personally and make good political moves tripping them both up. The foreground is owned though by one of Antonius' young slaves, Victor, and by a middle-class Greek girl he meets, Daphne. Daphne's father is a classics-obsessed semi-ascetic, working at the Museion, for whom Daphne figures as an appendage only. She's lonely, quickly growing up, and falls for Victor, not minding when he reveals that he's a slave. Victor is locked into all the intrigues of the court, suffers wholesale decampments in Antonius' restlessness, endures tests of his loyalty and strength, manipulates to get free time in which to meet Daphne, survives the lunge downward into depression and confusion of his master. There's another 'character' in all this which is to my mind critical - it is the ancient city of Alexandria. Victor and Daphne move around its shaded lakes with their clumps of wild trees and thickets and their twinkling sun-bathed water, its busy ochre-coloured streets with the sun baking overhead, its harbour and the rough-edged quay districts tightly packed around it, even out to the Pharos, lovingly described in its stony mystery of many levels, the big bright blue sky over all. Eventually the defeat comes, Antonius and Cleopatra are dead, as is Daphne's father, and Victor and the now heavily pregnant Daphne must set off south along the Nile, in search of a former friend of Antonius who has promised Victor a place with him on his farm, Lucilius. Along the way their boat is attacked and they escape up onto the bare desert hills, to an unfinished tomb where Daphne gives birth. And in coping with that on their own, they find the strength and inspiration to begin their new life. Every now and then Lindsay indulges himself a little too much in what I would call impressionistic riffing - short stabs of sentence, all pulled together into one paragraph, like thought-shards drifting back and forth through an idea or construction. Conversely, a lot of the time that works well and helps to make for the most emotionally satisfying and distinctly coloured of the three novels in this sequence.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Close together, they found peace, and the warmth of oblivion. Tenderly, hardly moving. It was closeness, and surrender, the veiling of both their egoisms. Trust me, I trust you. Sweet, sweet, sweet. Bird-cry without the haunting cruelty of the bird. Peace of a kind, and a mounting sweetness. But not freedom, not the security of striding the streets of purpose. And yet a deeper purpose. And yet he wept, a little.'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (Second Part, Chapter XII)

Friday, August 29, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"Unless," he said to Parwen, "we get back to some hard-and-fast standards, we shall soon be breeding a race of amusing cads."

Parwen smiled wryly. "We won't," he said, "if by 'we' you mean the England that matters at all. But this particular class happens to be very busy committing suicide. I think it's a pity, as I happen to belong to it, but I don't suppose it matters in the long run if this particular kind of 'upper' class goes or not. There will always be a governing class of some kind, and it will always go rotten as it begins to be useless."'

from Lily Christine by Michael Arlen (Chapter VI)

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...A world forever wailing. The present was in throes of the future and there was no rest. There was no present, only a dying past and an unborn future; and humankind stood on that cloven point, that nothingness, and tried to create happiness and loyalties, to dream of justice. Was it heroism or madness?'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (Second Part, Chapter XI)

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Commonplace Book

'And so she found herself getting engaged from the moment she "came out." Presently she found herself in a chronic state of secret engagements. She did not know what to do. She thought of various dodges for keeping herself disengaged. She almost gave up dancing, for it was while dancing that she lapsed into that acquiescent state of engagement which she could not afterward account for.'

from Lily Christine by Michael Arlen (Chapter III)

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...The charming mystery of strangers! There is in all of us a wayward lyric germ, a germ bright and active with the hopes of the God that made man in his own image. And he who does not respect this germ within him shall surely kill it and be left empty evermore, for this is the germ that bids us linger and ponder and create, that feels the stir of beauty, that respects the future, the unknown, the stranger.'

from Lily Christine by Michael Arlen (Chapter II)

Monday, August 18, 2014

The Gateless Barrier by Lucas Malet (1900)

And thus the even turn of Malet's output stops. Up till now she had alternated quieter smaller more concentrated pieces with broader richer full canvases. This 'should' have been a full one, but isn't. There had been an indication in her last novel of her growing interest in supernatural phenomena, and this one carries that the whole distance. Laurence Rivers has come back to the family's Sussex estate from the States, where he has married well, because an old misogynist uncle is dying. Laurence is the heir. It quickly develops that a presence can be felt in an otherwise pleasant yellow drawing room at one side of the house. The room is rarely gone into and hides behind a vaguely erotic tapestry at one end of a corridor. Laurence, disturbed at first, soon becomes fascinated. The ghost is that of a beautiful young woman who flits silently, with a nervous strung-out look, around the room as though searching for something. Her wordlessness is balanced by the fact that she appears to look at Laurence with some sense of familiarity. Slowly, his interest augmenting, Laurence draws her out, sitting with her for long periods. They begin to be able to speak with each other. She begins to take on more colour, more bodily fulsomeness. At the same time, a story emerges in the background of a forebear, also Laurence Rivers, who went away to the Napoleonic wars and never came back. His young heartbroken love, a cousin sent mortally unbalanced by his death, is the ghost, Agnes. Laurence realises that he looks a lot like his namesake and that Agnes' warmth in responding to him is for that reason. He also 'realises', begins to sense, that in some way he can channel this ancestor while he's with Agnes, 'know' parts of his life, and respond to her both as his now infatuated self, and as this predecessor. Their relationship grows, her seeming 'reality' pulsates, to the point where Laurence is quite prepared to try to bring Agnes over the boundary of the door and into the now of the rest of the house, and in what he realises is now his love for her, espouse her. Of course, he is troubled internally by the flat contradiction of his existing wife in America, but has got to the point of thinking that a divorce is the only answer. Agnes submits to being lifted over the boundary of the door but immediately weakens a little, seeming to slip back to her more colourless and harried self. She has just enough energy to engage in the conversation about the future which Laurence has planned, and has him know that she will not countenance the consummation of their relationship as the facts are revealed to her. She slips back to the yellow room. Laurence goes back to America, having inherited, and hears there of a fire in the drawing room. It has revealed a hidden sepulchre built into the wall where an escritoire stood, behind which Agnes would always disappear. Her body had been entombed there unquietly by his antecedent's jealous brother Dudley, unrequited love torturing the process. There are moments when this slips a little from Malet's usual well-timed prose, drops into repetition or very occasional banality. There are also moments when it's a little too formally high-toned really to touch the emotions. But, on the whole, a fine and unusual piece.

Friday, August 8, 2014

Commonplace Book

'The wandering preacher, whom the lovers had wholly forgotten, had risen from his crouching posture, and now approached. He stared at the shrinking pair from under his bushy brows.

"There is no love," he said austerely. "There is only lust. When will you attain the directness of animals and the purity of human beings undeceived by words? Love is no more than a distortion of the mind, the evil of hungry words, words that merge into one another, distorting meanings, eating away the whole face of life with their mange. In sheer lust there is meaning. But love is entirely evil, the child and the begetter of suffering! spawn of the prying, dissatisfied mind! Be humble and learn wisdom!"'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (Second Part, Chapter VII)

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...For by now the night had taken on a magical aspect, neither of daylight nor of darkness, and the Sarapeion was a dream-building which dwelt always in this strange dimension of lamplight that dwarfed the earth and made all-embracing the home of the god. The centre cell was particularly frightening; the lights, the warmth, the unexplained movements of everyone, the awe of the colossal Sarapis with his curly ambrosial locks and beard, all seemed to direct attention towards - or rather to divert it too obviously from - the closed cell before which the fountain clashed its lithe belly-dance, like a bejewelled naked harem-girl, and within which surely lurked some god-ogre for whom the temple with its flame and ritual was the oven steaming the flesh of the chosen victims.'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (First Part, Chapter VI)

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Commonplace Book

'What was she thinking?

He despaired of ever knowing, forgetful how little he knew his own thoughts, how in the failing moments before sleep he glimpsed the enormous silence of dream, wherein all the world's words were only the frenzied life of a colony of insects from under a single turned-over stone, compared with the spaces of ocean and burning desert and windy mountain-crest and night of stars.'

from Last Days with Cleopatra by Jack Lindsay (First Part, Chapter IV)

Monday, July 14, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"...I admit, of course, the necessity of the existence of woman, since the perpetuation of the race appears at present desirable. It would be childish to argue the matter. She must be kept and cared for by qualified persons, as are the other higher domestic animals..."'

from The Gateless Barrier by Lucas Malet (Chapter V)

Sunday, July 13, 2014

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (1771)

The author's last novel is as much of a joy as his others. I suppose it updates his previous style in one way, which is nowhere near as important or revolutionary as some have claimed. The 'picaresque' style is retained, but is now epistolary. Where the other four are in some places seriously rumbustious, this one is a little more mildly so. This one covers a peregrination around many parts of Britain by a ageing man of means, Mat Bramble, who is Robert Hardyesque in terms of phlegm and good sense. Accompanying him is his waspish sister Tabitha, who is savage head of his household back home, and desperate for 'matrimony'; she throws herself at many an oncomer here! With them are their niece and nephew, tender young Liddy and splendid young Jerry; Liddy is struggling with an amour which has collapsed, while Jerry is our neutral ground with no great dramas attached. Along for the ride are various servants, retainers and such who provide glorious comic asides. One of them only is a correspondent - Tabitha's maid Win Jenkins, whose malapropisms, misapprehensions and misspellings are magnificent to behold. This motley journeys from their estate in Wales to Bath, to London, to the north, to Scotland, to the west country, collecting misadventures and excoriating society in their own selves or in those they meet, some of which are collected into their retinue. The drama which skeins through these carryings-on is the irruption into their journey of one Humphry Clinker, a poor man whom they save from a life of indigence to become Mat's servant. Vastly grateful and very endearing, he gets into all sorts of scrapes which require a rescue. He is also an inspiring preacher and his newfound Methodism pulls Tabitha and Win further into his remit. The story wavers between travelogue and comedy for a while up in Scotland, which is a place obviously dear to the author's heart. The climax comes with the overthrow of a coach in a swollen river in the west country, the taking up of the family by a local gentleman, and revelations of chequered past history and by-blow paternity which connect Humphry Clinker to the family much more completely. In a combination of happy circumstances, many misunderstandings are cleared up, leaving the path clear for no less than three weddings and much promise of living happily after. Smollett was only 50 when he died. On the basis of this, I would have wished him many more years, and us many more novels.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...It was good to be alive; it was fine to rush around, and hand lights or liqueurs to these brown clear-cut faces, with their bright eyes, and hair of every colour; it would be no less fine to hurl them out of the way with a kick or a rifle-butt, and send them to crack their bones and smash their skulls against the wall like eggs; and then to run home free as a naked savage. They were keeping him shut up - him, Grischa - they had nailed him fast, and that vast murder, that maddening hail of shells, ten thousand in an hour, had begun again, from Dvinsk down to the country through which he had marched in the early days when the Austrians had driven them back. There was no place in the world fit to live in; but he would notice all these things and later take a red-hot awl and one of his smooth coffin-planks, and burn into it all that he had seen. But he must wait till then: now, at any rate, all was bright and happy....Grischa enjoyed the sight of them, his heart went out to them all, young, and old, and close-cropped gentlemen with monocles, that made them look like caricatures. He felt that something must be going out from him to them, there was so much love and so much hatred seething in his breast.'

from The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig (Book Four, Chapter II)

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Grey Roses by Henry Harland (1895)

Finally Henry Harland goes to the bigger place. His stories to date have been pleasantly amusing, occasionally clever, but have left little in the memory, touched nothing of the heart. I think this may be the 'crossover volume,' where this appeal to the emotions takes weight in his work. Four stories of these nine are richer in impact: A Broken Looking-Glass with a heartfelt stab of lonely regret over lost love; The Reward of Virtue with regret over the vicissitudes of politics crushing a life, denying the liver a reasonable modest chance; When I am King with regret over unfulfilled promise, a friend discovering years later a friend who had hidden himself in shame over not making the name which had once promised; and A Responsibility, with its appalling regret over not having responded to the shy, disturbed overtures of someone who later succumbed to their loneliness. That's a 'yes' to the notion that I think this volume, slimmed down to its best, could have been called Regret, and could have held a significant minor place in literature under that banner. The remaining five are quite enjoyable. Castles Near Spain is a stylish frippery of a novella in limpid notes. The rest are in Harland's earlier mode of fun ideas but little impact. Now to see whether he maintained this more searching style in subsequent volumes. Patience has paid off.

Friday, July 4, 2014

Grimms' Fairy Tales by JLC and WC Grimm (2004)

This is an archaeological dig, and that surprised me. I had assumed that editing work would have been done with 'popular' editions of the Grimms' scholarly work. But no, an extraordinary thing has happened - our culture has embraced in its mainstream of literature a profoundly academic work of investigation. Folk tales, it seems to me, at their best, become annealed or distilled in the telling. That appears to be borne out here with the tales we all know - Rapunzel or Hansel and Gretel or Rumpelstiltskin or others. But yet others here show clearly that the Grimms probably only heard one version of an obscure tale, or heard a couple of versions clearly emanating from the same original source, but very different, and sandwiched them together awkwardly. So there are lesser-known tales here which frankly read like surrealistic crazedness, or have the oddest elements in them like lumps of foreign rock in a glacier moraine. The thing about these examples is that they are not annealed or distilled. They read badly. They haven't been put through the mill of telling. In the end, they're unsatisfying, and that's why they have remained "unknown". The primary audience, children, are notorious for their love of explanation and detail; these tales would raise questions in their extraordinary partialness, for which storytellers would invent answers: the tale would grow and silken-up with use. None of this bittyness is that objectionable in scholarship, though the cobbling together that I think I can sense in a couple of them is a bit suspect without annotation; the strange thing is that our tradition has absorbed these unsatisfying things inside a canonical populist version. So we're left with a book which contains a few things we all know and many which we've never heard, in a zillion different editions.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"...One must never state things baldly. One must qualify. It's the difference between Truth and mere Fact. Truth is Fact qualified..."'

from Castles Near Spain (Chapter IX), a piece in Grey Roses by Henry Harland

Monday, June 23, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"At least," said I, "give me leave to wish them such a degree of commerce as may enable them to follow their own inclinations."
"Heaven forbid!" cried the philosopher. "Woe be to that nation where the multitude is at liberty to follow their own inclinations! Commerce is undoubtedly a blessing, while restrained within its proper channels; but a glut of wealth brings along with it a glut of evils. It brings false taste, false appetite, false wants, profusion, venality, contempt of order, engendering a spirit of licentiousness, insolence, and faction, that keeps the community in continual ferment, and in time destroys all the distinctions of civil society; so that universal anarchy and uproar must ensue. Will any sensible man affirm, that the national advantages of opulence are to be sought on these terms?.."'

from Matt Bramble's letter to Dr Lewis, dated September 20, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Mr. Campbell himself, who performs very well on the violin, has an invincible antipathy to the sound of the Highland bagpipe, which sings in the nose with a most alarming twang, and, indeed, is quite intolerable to ears of common sensibility, when aggravated by the echo of a vaulted hall. He, therefore, begged the piper would have some mercy upon him, and dispense with this part of the morning service. A consultation of the clan being held on this occasion, it was unanimously agreed, that the laird's request could not be granted, without a dangerous encroachment upon the customs of the family. The piper declared he could not give up for a moment the privilege he derived from his ancestors; nor would the laird's relations forego an entertainment which they valued above all others. There was no remedy; Mr. Campbell being obliged to acquiesce, is fain to stop his ears with cotton, to fortify his head with three or four nightcaps, and every morning retire into the penetralia of his habitation, in order to avoid this diurnal annoyance.'

from Jerry Melford's letter to Sir Watkin Phillips, dated September 3, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Don't Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford (1960)

Mitford's last novel sees her trying to engage with youth as it was in 1960 in part. Fanny and her don husband from the cold climate novels have acceded to an ambassadorship in Paris, though quite why Alfred would have been swept from his tiny Oxford pastoral to this cosmopolitan glamour is not compassed. My suspicion is that he was a spy all along. Anyway, there are plenty of opportunities for Mitford to send up the craziness of the diplomatic sphere; both in its domestic element (a former ambassadress won't leave the embassy because she likes the lifestyle too much) and its political element (the French and English are about to have a major territorial spat over some tiny 'islands' which are only above water when the tide is out). This material is great and up to her usual standard of wry mirth. But the extension of the piece, and I'm presuming it's the place she would have felt obliged to visit further had she gone on writing fiction, is with the younger characters. The three children of their own, wide-boy scam-artist Basil, incipient Zen-man new age World Citizen David, and young Charlie, still at Eton but bored with it and pop music-obsessed, are embodiments of the cracks that were already appearing in societal fabric pre-60s. This carries with it an interesting observation: a lot of what constituted 60s 'alternativity' was spearheaded by those time and money-rich toffs! No wonder it carried so well culturally. The adopted child Fabrice (Fanny's best friend Linda's son) is a slightly more exotic version of Charlie, who makes a hit with his hitherto unknown French relatives here. There are added youths at the embassy who are naturally a little more traditional but even so quite challenging for someone of Fanny's now ageing generation. The best of them is Northey, Louisa's daughter fresh from Scotland, very slim, pretty and manipulative whilst retaining an ocean of charm. She is taken on as a secretary and manages to insouciantly inveigle most of the French government in clandestine affairs in turn, manipulating them brilliantly for cash, favours, fun and even diplomatic results! Grace and Valhubert from The Blessing are here too, though seen from a more critical angle, as is their ringleader-in-cheek son Sigi. I wonder whether Mitford's very slightly less sure grip on the younger characters would have improved with more use, or, contrastingly, was a sign of the need to stop, an omen which she understood and obeyed.

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...it is seldom that life approves our exacter calculations, every hour she leaps capriciously across them, led by her own laws, and a wise man follows her caprice.'

from The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig (Book One, Chapter III)

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...When we consider, that, in our churches in general, we breathe a gross stagnated air, surcharged with damps from vaults, tombs, and charnel-houses, may we not term them so many magazines of rheums, created for the benefit of the medical faculty, and safely aver that more bodies are lost than souls saved by going to church, in the winter especially, which may be said to engross eight months in the year[?] I should be glad to know what offence it would give to tender consciences, if the house of God was made more comfortable, or less dangerous to the health of valetudinarians; and whether it would not be an encouragement to piety, as well as the salvation of many lives, if the place of worship was well-floored, wainscoted, warmed, and ventilated, and its area kept sacred from the pollution of the dead...'

from Matt Bramble's letter to Dr Lewis, dated July 4, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Saturday, May 24, 2014

The Gift by H.D. (1982)

Usual story - I was quite ready to hate this. Modernism in its worst incarnation (As a Wife Has a Cow by Gertrude Stein etc) is a pet bugbear. But often I find that the less overt pieces in that slipstream, often just slightly tinctured with experimentation, charm me. This impressed me. Hilda Doolittle's style (this is my first exposure to it) is most likenable to impressionism I think, underpinned with psychoanalytic theory. This is the story of her childhood from a child's minds'-eye-view. It encompasses her brothers, their parents, their wider family group in Pennsylvania around the turn of last century. It retails all the usual unusual tics of these people, but attempts to remain within the unknowing of a child as it does so. So they are not necessarily 'explained' - they are observed, and some explanations that may have been around from a whole variety of sources, are canvassed. Some things are left unexplained entirely. Others the reader can pretty well gauge from other hints in the background, or from the author speaking rarely as her later self. Much of this causation has the fascinating elements of childhood in it - superstition, fears, sublimated wishes...But this book delves back on another plane. The Doolittles came from Moravian stock on her mother's side: the 'middle bit' of Czechoslovakia (as it became) sandwiched between Bohemia and Slovakia. The original immigrants to the States, escaping forms of persecution in Europe, according to this, approached the Native Americans in their push west with kindness, and found much in common; their mysticisms met, and there was some sort of combined idealist push toward a new North American spirit of the brotherhood of humanity. But there are hints here that a treaty was made and then dishonoured. Accompanying this is yet another plane where 'the gift' itself comes in - it is a kind of deeply luminous power of recreating and re-feeling the distant past to which you are connected. HD seems to have experienced a lot of this in her childhood but then felt that she lost it. The last section brings us onto yet another level - she comes into the 'now' of the piece in Blitz London, right in the middle of an attack, with she and Bryher holed up in their lofty flat, and all this matter of childhood flooding back in the extremity and fear of the bombardment. Very glad this was saved and published 40 years later, and like having my prejudices confounded with such style.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Commonplace Book

'In my last I mentioned my having spent an evening with a society of authors, who seemed to be jealous and afraid of one another. My uncle was not at all surprised to hear me say I was disappointed in their conversation. "A man may be very entertaining and instructive upon paper," said he, "and exceedingly dull in common discourse. I have observed that those who shine most in private company are but secondary stars in the constellation of genius. A small stock of ideas is more easily managed and sooner displayed, than a great quantity crowded together. There is very seldom anything extraordinary in the appearance and address of a good writer; whereas, a dull author generally distinguishes himself by some oddity or extravagance..."'

from Jerry Melford's letter to Sir Watkin Phillips, dated June 10, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Welou, My Brother by Faith Bandler (1984)

This one shares the quiet spirit of its predecessor, Wacvie, but has considerably less dramatic arc. Bandler delights in coolly celebrating domestic detail, in a straightforward way, emphasizing whatever is uppermost in her characters' minds and most important to them. It is fictionalised in a specific sense, that of being formed to read like a novel. My feeling is that it is not fictionalised in the sense of being an invention of facts. It is the story of Bandler's brother over a few years of his childhood in country northern New South Wales, living with his Islander father, Wacvie, his mixed race mother, Ivy, several brothers and his new little sister Lefan - I'm wondering if she may be the author. Bandler speaks lovingly of the family and their community and their interactions, helping each other, lending each other horses and workers so as to keep their farms running; children staying with other families to pursue education or work, or to provide the childless with company and assistance. There is a feeling to this one that it may have originally been intended to be part of something longer; it ends oddly and unimpactfully at a point where so much more could have continued happening. Perhaps Bandler tired of it, and it was seen to be complete enough as it stood to publish? And there is the issue of the lack of dramatic arc - really the small domestic details are all there is of this - but I would contend they are all there needs to be, they are strangely satisfying in themselves. My criticism of Wacvie stands for this one too, though - there is an emphasis on dignity in these characters which means that the salty bloodrush of life, our human equivocation, is not deeply pictured, though some small nips of it are there.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...He has not gall enough in his constitution to be inflamed with the rancour of party, so as to deal in scurrilous invectives: but, since he obtained a place, he is become a warm partisan of the ministry, and sees everything through such an exaggerated medium, as to me, who am happily of no party, is altogether incomprehensible. Without all doubt, the fumes of faction not only disturb the faculty of reason, but also pervert the organs of sense...'

from Jerry Melford's letter to Sir Watkin Phillips, dated June 2, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Saturday, May 3, 2014

The Right Place by CE Montague (1924)

Though this book is subtitled 'A Book of Pleasures' to me it is more of a meditation on place. These fourteen essays, called chapters, speak of location from many angles: where you are on the surface of the planet architecturally, culturally, or naturally; that last group covering landforms and geology and what they cause in human terms. Montague's style is cool and poetic, sculpturally and referentially rich without too much in the way of emotion. I'm guessing this is because of his earning a good part of his spurs on war reporting, where an objective head would seem to be critical: emotion, if one let it out, would explode in such circumstances. Early on, his focus is the central muscle-knot of Europe, the Alps. Britain is seen in contrast to this, occasionally coming into focus. As the book progresses Britain becomes the main concern. His point of view is loosely conservative, in the sense of his seeing value in clean air, work, a good life, some aspects of the country house system, but not at all in dilettantism, modern education, the 'silly' upper class - one gets the sense that he was a man of decided opinions which had thorough grounding in his mind in a sense of the value of effort and connectedness to nature and her rhythms. Any sort of 'superstructural' or 'fatty layer' stuff, whether it be left or right wing, was unnecessary nonsense! Thus useful country squires were OK, their hard-working tenants were OK, jibbering society types were not, as was not anyone who didn't contribute in a 'worthwhile' manner. He had the same sort of ideas when it came to writers, reading between the lines: there were those who were essential, and those who were dribblers. His enthusiasm for the wide sweep of the landscape is inspiring. He describes a Britain which was a lot cleaner and less stultifyingly and dangerously urbanised than the one of today, imagining bicycle journeys through it to sense the lie of the land for example, with gentle runs into towns that would be death-defying today. It leaves one with the usual sense of something lost. His meditations on architecture know nothing of post-war concrete gloom, either. But as a poetic, strong-toned, cool-brained examination of the landmass of Europe and Britain from a nature's-eye view, as well as an early twentieth-century human's-eye view, capturing that moment, it is deeply enjoyable.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Commonplace Book

'It was indeed a compound of villanous smells, in which the most violent stinks and the most powerful perfumes contended for the mastery. Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank arm-pits, sweating feet, running sores and issues; plasters, ointments, and embrocations, Hungary water, spirit of lavender, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile; besides a thousand frowzy steams which I could not analyse. Such, O Dick!, is the fragrant ether we breathe in the polite assemblies of Bath...'

from Matt Bramble's letter to Dr Lewis, dated May 8, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Commonplace Book

'"I know so few Americans," I said. "Do you like them, Philip?"

"Yes, I'm paid to."

"In your heart of hearts?"

"Oh, poor things, you can't dislike them. I feel intensely sorry for them, especially the ones in America - they are so mad and ill and frightened."'

from Don't Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford (Chapter 3)

Monday, April 28, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...My uncle and he are perfectly agreed in their estimate of life, which, Quin says, would stink in his nostrils, if he did not steep it in claret.'

from Jerry Melford's letter to Sir Watkin Phillips, dated April 30, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

Commonplace Book

'"They both belong to the same gang," said Uncle Matthew, adding rather wistfully, "we didn't have these gangs when I was young. Never mind, though, we had wars. I liked the Boer War very much, when I was Basil's age. If you won't have wars you must expect gangs, no doubt."

from Don't Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford (Chapter 1)

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Well, there is no nation that drinks so hoggishly as the English. - What passes for wine among us is not the juice of the grape. It is an adulterous mixture, brewed up of nauseous ingredients, by dunces, who are bunglers in the art of poison-making; yet we and our forefathers are, and have been, poisoned by this cursed drench, without taste or flavour. - The only genuine and wholesome beverage in England is London porter and Dorchester table-beer; but as for your ale and your gin, your cider and your perry, and all the trashy family of made wines, I detest them as infernal compositions, contrived for the destruction of the human species...'

from Matt Bramble's letter to Dr Lewis, dated April 28, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett

The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (1899)

This is a fable about the tyranny of beauty. Antony is married to Beatrice and they have a little girl child, strangely named Wonder. Antony is a sensitive artist type, trying to write. On a day in London, at Covent Garden, he finds in a shopstall a fascinating death-mask which shocks him with its resemblance to Beatrice. The shopkeeper tells him that it's the mask of a young woman who threw herself into the Seine. Bringing it home to the country, to Beatrice and Wonder, he finds himself utterly entranced by its beauty, and installs it in a little chalet in a wood next to their cottage which he uses as a writing retreat, hoping to find a muse for his work. Beatrice is disturbed by it and won't have it in the cottage. Antony is gripped. His imagination fired on all fronts, he begins what can only be descibed as a relationship with the Image; he senses that it is communicating with him and sees moods pass across and through it. It says that it is Silencieux, a kind of eternal spirit of beauty and inveigling fascination, which has commandeered and controlled men all through the ages, many of whom have died for it, and conversely benefited from its power of inspiration. In his rejection of all else around him and total concentration on Silencieux, Antony is the next of these. His work does improve, but his formerly loving connection to Beatrice and Wonder is gone. He has Wonder unwillingly kiss Silencieux to appreciate her beauty; she sickens and dies. This shocks and shames Antony out of his dream state, and he and Beatrice for a short period get away from their cottage, recover some balance in their grief, and find peace. Antony is astonished by who he has become, and is aware of Silencieux's sinister import. When they return to their cottage near the wood, he is determined to smash the Image. But he finds he can't, and decides to bury her instead. Here begins the final chapter. Her power is too strong. He digs her up and reinstals her in her former position in the chalet. Beatrice realises, heartbroken, that all is lost, that she no longer has any purpose in the world, hears the spirit of Wonder calling to her in the night near a black pond in the wood, and casts herself in. Antony, completely owned by Silencieux, is only slightly saddened by her death, and ponders quietly to himself how beautiful she looks with pieces of lily in her wet hair. He returns to the chalet, and in a short volcanic last paragraph, sees that the Image has changed - its mouth is open, and a death's-head moth sits inside! This is the most affecting Gallienne I've read thus far - he was a really good ideas-man. My former concerns about him still ring true - there is ultimately a bloodless quality to his work. Fascinating to consider what Wilde or Beerbohm would have made of this notion - the result could well have been a lasting classic. But in Gallienne's hands it is still remarkable.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Anyhow, he has made an escape. He has got out of reach, for the day, of that besetting malady of intricate civilisations - the want of a stirring visible relation between effort and result. A typical modern figure is the municipal Medical Officer who half thinks that his preservative work for the frail may only be compromising the future of the race. Matthew Arnold described it all, wailfully well, in his plaint about the way that we "each half-live a hundred different lives," strive without quite knowing what we strive for, and doubt and fluctuate and make fresh starts and then have fresh misgivings and nag and chatter and rant about ideals we do not live up to, until we "falter life away" with little done. At least for some eager and absorbed hours your true rambler has washed all that futilitarianism out of his soul and has started fair again in a heaven of simple effort and clear aim; a career in life opens before him at breakfast; success in life warms him at bedtime...'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter X, Part VI)

The Howling Miller by Arto Paasilinna (1981)

What a fine thing this book is: by turns gutsy, fantastical and blackly funny. This story of a man in 1950s Finland who is, in today's parlance, probably bipolar, twists and turns in a delightful way. Huttunen is a miller by trade, and he has experienced Finland's strange and emotionally devastating gallop through the Second World War. There is mention early on of his wife dying in a fire somewhere in southern Finland which, with his sensitivities, could easily have further destabilised an already tense personality, let alone what the privations of the war may also have brought out. He heads north to the top of the gulf of Bothnia and a fairly backwoods region to start again, and finds a mill he can get working easily nearby a scanty village, surrounded by forest, swamp, and wild rivers. But his emotional pressures come out in uneasy ways, the most notable of which is a tendency to howl. He sounds convincingly wolf-like and scares the limited locals. Whilst they are warily welcoming to begin with, the howling and the extremities of his behaviour soon begin to tell in the opposite direction. A couple of the locals are a little more understanding, in particular a police constable, Portimo, and a "horticulture advisor", Sanelma Kayramo. She's a classic 50s Scandinavian creation: in an age of communal activity, and top-down jollying along to a better life, the Finnish state served up to its people admonitions and cheery encouragement in the bodies of these "advisors" of the better way. But she's also young, gorgeous, and very taken with Huttunen! This new personal war between the miller and his adopted locale takes some fantastic turns as he battles with pompous locals, bears with their prejudices pretty unwillingly, gets sent to a mental hospital, escapes to the woods and sets up camp, survives wild-man style. Our sympathy is always with him, but we can also see where he could have handled trouble a lot more diplomatically! There's also some brilliantly funny commentary on the lazy, deceitful, self-obsessed villagers, and some wacky situations arise where everything tumbles at cross-purposes. What a quiet, tongue-in-cheek, sly thing Paasilinna is - it's a wonder to me that more effort hasn't been made to render him into English, if this and it's only anglo compatriot, the classic The Year of the Hare are anything to go by - the French have a good twenty titles to choose from. Here's hoping the fresh English translations roll in soon.

Monday, April 21, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Was not God created of all pure overflows of the human soul, the kind light of human eyes that not all the suffering of the world can exhaust, the idealism of the human spirit that not all the infamies of natural law can dismay?'

from The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XVII)

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...To be able to see - really to see - the whole of some great thing with the mind, at the instance of some fragment seen with the eye - this is a kind of success in life; and not for the man of science alone, who in presence of one small remnant of bone fossilised in a cave can see the whole of a monstrous bulk that wallowed in warm prehistoric slime, but for the artist, the traveller, the common man with all the common things about him. To graft upon the bodily sense of sight a special kind of imaginative energy, so that when the fit eye has gone as far as it can, its work is taken over and carried on without a break; so that, when later you try to remember, you cannot say where physical perception stopped and where mental vision began - all you know is that between them they have left you the memory of expanses greater than bodily eye ever saw, and also more urgently real than imagination alone could ever frame; this is the key of the garden..'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter IX, Part VII)

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Dore by George Sand (1858)

What a glorious feast. The difference of this one is its setting in time. All of the Sands I've read to date have been contemporaneous to her biography. This one is set right back in 1622, presenting a Sandian version of the times of The Three Musketeers, and concentrating in the main on the rebellion of the Huguenots. Sylvain de Bois-Dore, the elder of the two messieurs, is a scented and primped creature trying to retain his youth, but not at all effeminate. He is infatuated with the French classic pastoral romance Astree, and builds a fantasy of chivalry around it which completely permeates his life. His brother has been murdered in Spain in a mysterious way that he feels he can't get at or solve. The irruption into his chateau of a guest, d'Alvimar, presented by Sand almost as a kind of evil echo of Quixote, who has an offsider coincidentally named Sancho, precipitates a revelation and some tension. The revelation is that they may have been involved in his brother's murder, and the tension arises from the fact that they are fervent Catholics, whereas Bois-Dore is an ambivalent Huguenot who has taken on Catholicism to make things easy for himself. Suspicions arise everywhere. At the same time a group of Spanish gypsies visit the area. Bois-Dore is struck by the beauty and familiarity of one of the young ones, whose name is Mario. It is eventually revealed that he is the son of Bois-Dore's lost brother, and that the gypsies have the clue which reveals the culpability of d'Alvimar and Sancho in his loss. So, in the midst of political intrigue and secrets all around, this personal intrigue also comes to its climax, which is murderous and revengeful. Meanwhile, love blossoms between Mario, the now adopted younger messieur, and another guest of the chateau, Lauriane de Beuvres, who is an extremely young widow with fervent Huguenot credentials. Sand revels in all these strings of story, loving tangling them and then unravelling. Minor characters abound, lending humour, savagery, superstition, aristocracy and political angles. The landscape also plays an effectual part, with the Berry valleys, rivers, inns and chateaux bright in the piece. Not one, as I've said before, for lovers of tight singular plotting, but for lovers of a broad tapestry stitched in a thousand colours, perfect.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...All great natures are full of silence. Silence is the soil of all passion...'

from The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter X)

Friday, April 11, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...joy will not have herself ordered about like mutton or coal, of which any rich person can get as much as he chooses to pay for: she shies away from blunt or importunate wooing. All the "beauty spots" of Europe have always been haunted by the dull faces of rich suitors who have estranged her. You meet them in every hotel that guide-books term "first-class"; the plaint they make aloud is commonly about the food, but what they really mean is that streams have run dry in themselves and the choric spheres have got out of tune.'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter VI, Part V)

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Some of the old writers write about Knowledge with passion, as lovers speak of a mistress. She is "divine"; to "woo" her is rapture; to win her is joy past words. That is the tone, and to the common run of our middle-class young to-day it must seem to be mere tall talking or gush. For they are out of it all; it belongs to a lost world which they are not even able to miss, they are so far from having entered it. Checked in their mental growth by dead mechanical teaching, bound over for life to remain overgrown dunces, tied down to second-rateness by many impressionable years of intimacy with mean valuations, what are the poor things to do? Some of them are brought, perhaps, by the more virile kinds of sport as near as they are likely ever to come to the thrill of the high adventures of the human spirit. Some others put up with such simulacra as dissipation affords of the most puissant emotions attainable by men. Some just eddy about in the eddying dust all their days, blown round and round by adventitious gusts of sentimentalism or of fashion.'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter V, Part VI)

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"Things as they are" - the old phrase, no doubt is a trap. It implies some assumptions that seem to fade away into nonsense or nothing as soon as strict thought sets about its destructive work of analysis. Still, it may be used with due caution to signify those aspects of external things which fall under the jurisdiction of science rather than of art - all that can be measured, defined, referred to known causes and studied in its established effects. The phrase helps us to make clear to ourselves, so far as such clearness is not delusive, the distinction between our emotions and their objects, between our love and the beloved person, between fear and the enemy's attack or the storm's violence, between our own awe and the physical proportions of Westminster Abbey. Whatever philosophy may dissolve in the crucible minds of philosophers, we common people cling still to a working assumption that first there are things in existence outside our individual selves; that then we perceive them; and that, having perceived them, we then have, or may have, various feelings about them...'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter IV, Part V)

Friday, April 4, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...The Swiss are inspired hotel-keepers. Some centuries since, when a stranger strayed into one of their valleys, their simple forefathers would kill him and share out the little money he might have about him. Now they know better. They keep him alive and writing cheques. He has risen in economic value from the status of a hare or a wild pigeon to that of a milch cow - or, at the lowest, a good laying hen. And, to keep up his average yield, they diet not only body but soul; they melt heart-strings and purse-strings alike with cheap and cheery semi-gammon about Prisoners of Chillon, Tell's apple, the jousting of cows for the championship of the pasture, the prevalence of ghosts on the Matterhorn, and so on, till the lapse of coin from the wandering alien becomes almost spontaneous...'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter III, Part III)

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Evening was in the wood, still as the dreaming bracken, secretive, moving softly among the pines as a young witch gathering simples. She wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close, sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange lights across her haunted face.

The birds that lived in the wood had broken out into sudden singing as she stole in, hungry for silence, passionate to be alone; and at the foot of every tree she cried "Hush! Hush!" to the bed-time nests. When all but one were still, she slipped the hood from her face and listened to her own bird, the night-jar, toiling at his hopeless love from a bough on which already hung a little star.

Then it was that a young man, with a face shining with sorrow, vaulted lightly over the mossed fence and dipped down the green path, among the shadows and the toadstools and the silence."

from The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter I)

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (1870)

This is the first post beyond Broughton's inauguration, whose two books were so varied. In this, she settles for what may end up being her trademarks - a kind of youthful cheekiness, 1870s-style, which looks in the context of today like deeply conservative, almost classical elegance; and a tendency toward the celebration of the tragedy of death, a Victorian trait, which seems to act like an anchor, balancing her exuberance. Esther Craven is her young heroine here. She is spirited and intense, a poor yeoman farmer's sister, capable of being led astray minimally, but strong of mind. Her opportunities are typically limited by both her financial state and her gender. She is hounded into a partial promise to her farmer brother's friend 'next door', but feels trapped by it. On a visit to wealthy connections she meets huntin' shootin' fishin' St John Gerard, the heir to an estate, whose somewhat wily charms eventually capture her; she is also capable of refining him, to his surprise. Of course, propriety says that her prior agreement must be adhered to, but it was pretty conditional and she feels justified in herself in exploring the promise St John holds out. Unfortunately, when all is revealed, he doesn't feel the same, virtually accuses her of monstrous flirting, and she flees mortified at the pounding her reputation may suffer. The pretext for her fleeing is the illness of her beloved brother; he passes away. Esther is heartbroken, and also left without any means of support - as a typical Victorian girl, she has no means, or indeed the requisite knowledge, to continue the farm. In a slough of despond, it is sold, and Esther takes the only step she can in her situation - she becomes a companion to a wealthy, sleepy old couple on a rundown estate. The niece of these two is a former acquaintance who has had her beautiful but insipid eye on St John. On the rebound from Esther he has agreed reluctantly to marry her. Of course the niece visits her aunt and uncle and, unintentionally, Esther. Of course, St John comes to visit, too. And the rest is history, though there are some serious bumps on the road, and all is not settled until the very last chapter. Which, for Broughton, is saying something - this is her first conventionally happy ending; though she can't resist including in the last paragraphs the sad end of Esther's former affianced, who has died of a tropical fever in Bermuda with the armed forces, loyal to the last. The bounce of Broughton's cheekiness, from an 1870s point of view, is her significant charm. It will be interesting to watch what happens to it, if anything, as she ages and her career progresses.

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Some of these subtler terrors of death survive in a few unfortunate minds to this day. The last has yet to be heard of the flavourless heaven of tireless limbs and sexless souls, tearless eyes and choirs of effortless and infallible intonation. Imagine eternal youth with no impulse to walk in the ways of its heart, and in the sight of its eyes, and deposed for ever from its august and precarious stewardship of the clean blood of a race! Conceive the light that never was on sea or land, no longer caught in broken gleams through visionary forests, but blazing away like the lamps on common lodging-house stairs; and the peace that passeth all understanding explored and explained, to the last letter, inside and out! Think, if you can bear to do it, what your existence would be without wonder, or any need of valiant hope, or for resolution unassisted by hope, a life no longer salt with savoursome vicissitudes; all the hardy, astringent conditions of joy, and the purchase-money of rapture, abolished for ever. No, better not think of it. "It is too horrible."'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter I, Part II)

Friday, March 28, 2014

The Letters of Lord Byron (1936)

What a lovely revelation. So much is revealed that all I can really say is that these are essential reading. There is the necessity of countering the received notion of Byron that comes down through popular culture, which this definitely does, but of course that notion has come from somewhere, and this also elucidates that genesis. There are 232 letters or letter-excerpts here which range from early childhood epistles to his mother to a letter written on the day that he caught his fatal fever. The primal strength and determination of the man is evident throughout, but, as he says himself, if one was expecting someone roaring in a wolf's pelt one would be sorely disappointed. An absolute fascination in these is the progress of the works; the letters have been chosen carefully enough to give a remarkable picture of the to and fro of the development of many of them, and also to give voice to his responses to their critical reception. It's a fiery portrait, and an exciting one. They also naturally provide a vision of the vicissitudes of his life; matrimonial wars, deep analyses of society and culture, his love for his daughters, opinions of literary effort, political machinations, memories of lost friends - whatever really mattered. A vital book.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Commonplace Book

'It is not true that I ever did, will, would, could or should write a satire against Gifford, or a hair of his head. I always considered him as my literary father, and myself as his 'prodigal son'; and if I have allowed his 'fatted calf' to grow to an ox before he kills it on my return, it is only because I prefer beef to veal.'

from a letter to Douglas Kinnaird, dated February 21, 1824, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...I have known Walter Scott long and well, and in occasional situations which call forth the real character - and I can assure you that his character is worthy of admiration - that of all men he is the most open, the most honourable, the most amiable. With his politics I have nothing to do: they differ from mine, which renders it difficult for me to speak of them. But he is perfectly sincere in them: and Sincerity may be humble, but she cannot be servile. I pray you, therefore, to correct or soften that passage. You may, perhaps, attribute this officiousness of mine to a false affectation of candour, as I happen to be a writer also. Attribute it to what motive you please, but believe the truth. I say that Walter Scott is as nearly a thorough good man as man can be, because I know it by experience to be the case.'

from a letter to Henri Beyle (Stendhal), dated May 29, 1823, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (2009)

The power and compulsion of this novel are undeniable, I think. Its subject matter is 'standard Oates' - that is, the dark underside of everyday America. Not in a louche or particularly sexy way, but in a grimy or ordinary way. The best likening would be to talk about the difference between the colour of fresh grass in the countryside, and the colour of the grass in that rarely-touched area at the middle of a big motorway junction. Essentially it's the same micro-landscape, but at the motorway junction there's an unmistakable greyness, an ashy quality has been introduced. One imagines the soil a lot more burdened and yet leached. It's that post-industrial, commuter-era, grey, compromised world that Oates delineates, compulsively. This one is about a murder in 1983, and the consequences that echo down through the ensuing twenty years. The first part is seen through the eyes of Krista Diehl, a young teenage girl whose father is suspected of the murder of his lover, Zoe Kruller. It moves through the horrors and the bewilderment of the family explosion, and all the ripples which circle out through a small New York state city on the Black River. The second part is seen through the eyes of Zoe's son, Aaron, who found her murdered body, and who copes with an already dysfunctional family imploding still further. Their parents' lives are typical of their times, and Krista and Aaron are exemplars of their era also. The lameness emotionally, the disconnects and profoundly compromised coping strategies, the psychological burden are all realised with convincing ordinariness, against the sooty and snowy backdrop of a dreary long-past-its-best town. I think that one of the major achievements of Oates in this book, and those like it in her catalogue, is in the matter of proportion. She manages to so direct her material that the unmissable impression is that it could have happened in quite this way, that there is something in the feel of the story and her commitment to it which lend it an almost symbolic uber-truth. The structure of the picture left in the mind is compelling. Her awareness of this is perhaps on a not quite conscious (or perhaps it's a super-conscious?) level, and has the odd 'purity' of such things. She's known for her notion of 'channelling' a story, which makes all the more strange the fact that there's one area where her subconscious power doesn't rip through to its target. Speech is that area. Too many times her characters sound a little similar to one another. Certain words are used by slangy characters that only the uptight ones would utter. It's like her own inner voice somehow wins out over those her characters ought to have. However, it's a tribute to her that this failing comes across ultimately as minor, eclipsed by the extraordinary power of her visionary ordinariness.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Once, he'd been younger and more hopeful and thus disappointed, wounded in his hope. To hope is to risk too much, like baring your throat to a stranger.'

from Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (Part Three, Chapter 1)

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...But I suspect that he did not take quite so much to me, from his having expected to meet a misanthropical gentleman, in wolf-skin breeches, and answering in fierce mono-syllables, instead of a man of this world. I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever...'

from a letter to Thomas Moore, dated July 5, 1821, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Monday, February 24, 2014

Commonplace Book

'"...what business have people to bring children into the world only to starve, or to sponge upon others? There ought to be an Act of Parliament against it! Oh, why - why is not one allowed to have a look into life before one is born - to have one's choice whether one will come into it at all or no? But, if one had, who would come? - who would?"

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XXIII)

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Commonplace Book

'Mr. Keats, whose poetry you enquire after, appears to me what I have already said: such writing is a sort of mental ****-******** his Imagination. I don't mean he is indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state, which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium...'

from a letter to John Murray, dated November 9, 1820, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Friday, February 21, 2014

Commonplace Book

'The biographer has made a botch of your life - calling your father "a venerable old gentleman", and prattling of "Addison", and "dowager countesses". If that damned fellow was to write my life, I would certainly take his...'

from a letter to Thomas Moore, dated June 9, 1820, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Oh, ye liars! all ye that say sleep and death are alike! what kinship is there between the pliant relaxer of soft limbs, the light brief slumber, that, at any trivial noise, a trumpeting gnat or distant calling voice, flies and is dissolved, and the grave stiff whiteness of that profoundest rest that no thousand booming cannons, no rock-rending earthquake, no earth-riving thunderbolt can break? It is an insult to that strong narcotic to liken any other repose to that he gives...'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XX)

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Their moral is not your moral; their life is not your life; you would not understand it: it is not English, nor French, nor German, which you would all understand. The Conventual education, the Cavalier Servitude, the habits of thought and living are so entirely different, and the difference becomes so much more striking the more you live intimately with them, that I know not how to make you comprehend a people, who are at once temperate and profligate, serious in their character and buffoons in their amusements, capable of impressions and passions, which are at once sudden and durable (what you find in no other nation), and who actually have no society (what we would call so), as you may see by their Comedies: they have no real comedy, not even in Goldoni; and that is because they have no Society to draw it from.'

from a letter to John Murray, dated February 21, 1820, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Monday, February 17, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Well, if every one in England wept for every one else's sorrows, the noise of tears and sobbings would drown the whirring of all the mills in Leeds and Manchester - the booming of all the cannon at Shoeburyness.'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter XIX)

Friday, February 14, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Was he ever in a Turkish bath, that marble paradise of sherbet and Sodomy?...'

from a letter to John Murray dated August 12, 1819, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Friday, February 7, 2014

Commonplace Book

'We were in a first-floor room at the far end of a two-storey stucco building of just discernible shabbiness and melancholy: something in the very jauntiness of the sign Days Inn Vacancies exuded this air of shabbiness and melancholy. In books there is said to be meaning, in our English class our teacher was reading poems by Robert Frost to us and it was astonishing to me, and a little scary, how the words of a poem have such meaning, but in actual life, in places like the Days Inn motel there is not much meaning, it is just something that is...'

from Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (Chapter 24)

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...I think Rubens a very great dauber, and prefer Vandyke a hundred times over (but then I know nothing about the matter). Rubens' women have all red gowns and red shoulders - to say nothing of necks, of which they are more liberal than charming; it may all be very fine, and I suppose it may be Art, for 'tis not Nature.'

from a letter to Augusta Leigh, dated May 1, 1816, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Monday, January 20, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...If we never slept, we should not know the joy of waking; if we never woke, we should not know the joy of sleep. How, I marvel, shall we feel the happiness of heaven, if we never lose, and consequently regain it?'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter IV)

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...In youth the dining-room is not our temple, our sanctuary, our holy of holies, as it often is in riper years. In youth our souls are great, and our bodies slender; in old age our bodies are often great and our souls slender...'

from Red as a Rose is She by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter III)

Friday, January 17, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...Swift says 'no wise man ever married'; but, for a fool, I think it the most ambrosial of all possible future states. I still think one ought to marry upon lease; but am very sure I should renew mine at the expiration, though next term were for ninety and nine years.'

from a letter to Thomas Moore dated February 2, 1815, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Monday, January 13, 2014

The Toys of Peace and other papers by Saki (1919)

After a very long wait (since 1914) devotees of Saki got this wonderful posthumous volume, which collected together the best of his work which was hitherto uncollected. It is dedicated to his battalion, the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, with whom he had died during the Battle of the Ancre in 1916. It also has a short memoir appended by Rothay Reynolds, a friend and fellow Russophile, as well as a lovely introduction by G. K. Chesterton. The first 29 stories are in the style we would expect from Saki, a concoction of Wildean charm with rather more elaborate savage black wit and gallows-delight. They range from the pointedly brilliant to lesser sketch-like material; a few more little drops of the necessary from that rare pen - in the end, to be savoured, no matter what. The last four pieces are placed in time by the publishers with footnotes. The first of them is The Image of the Lost Soul, written in 1891, a heartbreakingly sad elegant little fable. Then there are two fictional sketches from the time of the Balkan War in 1912-13. And finally what may have been his last story, "written at the front", entitled For the Duration of the War, which has nothing to do with the war Saki was busy fighting, rather an internecine one between a Rector and his wife marooned in the country. Another set of proofs of the fact that this author was one of the finest, and funniest, of his era.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...The great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this 'craving void' which drives us to gaming - to battle - to travel - to intemperate, but keenly felt pursuits of any description, whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment...'

from a letter to Anne Isabella Milbanke, dated September 6, 1813, in The Letters of Lord Byron

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Dog Rock by David Foster (1985)

Given the welter of irritations in his last two novels, I have no idea why this one leaves me so peaceful. What's the crucial difference? I can't think of an overt one, other than that Moonlite and Plumbum both had very specific extending mechanics in mind, whereas somehow this one is closer to Foster-home. It's set in a small mountain town not far from Sydney, in the contemporary period. But it does cover, in the usual elusive Fosterian manner, all sorts of ins and outs. The centre of it is a series of murders, focused on Dog Rock, the town, by a strange parcel, which may contain the killing implement, being discovered there. The main character is one of the two local postmen, who double as overnight telephone exchange operators. But the town is chock full of red herrings and misleads, secretively and politically revealed by D'Arcy D'Oliveres, that main character. I may be peaceful, relatively, about this book, but I do still have a criticism - D'Arcy's the centre of it. Foster establishes him as an Englishman, and then fills out the portrait explaining him as a Westcountryman from the Cotswolds. Now, if there's any British voice I can hear in D'Arcy's words and thoughts, it's Alan Bennett. I think he would provide an inspired reading of this character, in company with some Australians to provide the beefy local voices which would be beyond him. I wonder if he'd relish the opportunity to show how he could get a whole slice darker and more difficult with this material. I would go so far as to say that I think imagining Bennett's velvet-spiked vocals while reading this made it for me. I think Foster had perhaps a fairly rudimentary ('typically Australian') view of the English and wrote a character really very effectively of which he maybe didn't quite consciously sense the pitch. The West Country dialect is more about ordinary speech, where the inflection is the whole thing. Bennett's Leeds Yorkshire dialect is much closer to what Foster writes here, where odd proper nouns and pushing edginess are closer to the home territory. Anyway, I've astonished myself by quite enjoying it; not minding the comic-book in it, or the blatheriness of the satire. Somehow he's let me just enjoy his sparking mind in this one, and I'm grateful.