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.

Monday, January 6, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...there is nothing so like an honest man as a knave who knows his business!..'

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

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Commonplace Book

'...God would have made His will known without books, considering how very few could read them when Jesus of Nazareth lived, had it been His pleasure to ratify any peculiar mode of worship. As to your immortality, if people are to live, why die? And our carcases, which are to rise again, are they worth raising? I hope, if mine is, that I shall have a better pair of legs than I have moved on these two-and-twenty years, or I shall be sadly behind in the squeeze into Paradise...'

from a letter to Francis Hodgson, dated September 25, 1811, in The Letters of Lord Byron