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)

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)

Commonplace Book

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

from Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (Chapter Six)

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.

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)

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.

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)

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.