Commonplace Book

'"...Everybody's life ends in an ugly stagnant morass. I really think the best thing to do is to take to good works in time, - make a virtue of necessity, and so prove the necessity of virtue..."'

from The Second Lady Delcombe by Mrs Arthur Kennard (Chapter XXII)

Commonplace Book

'...A surprise, a misunderstanding, confused impressions, had smashed open the secret hiding places where everything furtive, forbidden, overheated, uncertain and lonely in Torless's soul had accumulated, and channelled those dark impulses towards Basini. Because there, all of a sudden, they encountered something which was warm, which breathed, which was fragrant, which was flesh, something that gave those indistinct and wandering dreams a form and part of its own beauty, in place of the corrosive ugliness with which Bozena had tortured them in his loneliness. All at once a door to life was opened up for them, and everything mingled in the resulting half-light, desires and reality, orgiastic fantasies and impressions that still bore the warm traces of life, sensations that broke in from without and flames that flickered towards them from within, shrouding them beyond recognition.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil

Commonplace Book

'One thought concentrated Torless's whole body. Are adults like that, too? Is the world like that? Is it a universal law that there is something within us that is stronger, bigger, more beautiful, more passionate, darker than we are ourselves? Something over which we are so powerless that we can only aimlessly scatter a thousand seeds until suddenly one of them sprouts forth like a dark flame that finally towers over us?...And every nerve in his body quivered with the impatient answer: Yes.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil

Carrington : Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries (1970)

There's one acknowledgement I'd like to make straight away - to David Garnett, who edited these. He had the foresight to make this a long book, though I don't know how much even longer it might have been. It seems to me that the power of this collection lies in the cumulation. We start out with Carrington mid-war writing to Mark Gertler, a fellow Slade graduate, and it's almost painfully evident from the start that she wasn't an easy person to like at that time. Full of deceit and evasion with cold running to hot and back again in misleading bursts - all the while seeming to be exclusively dedicated to honesty in relations, in the way that signified the bohemian at that period. But then we see her develop the 'peculiar-triangular' with Ralph Partridge and Lytton Strachey and the first strong mentions are made of place, in this case Tidmarsh's Mill House. Somehow the filling out of the portrait with a beloved house, almost as a kind of deeply observed background in a painting, provides enriching context. The semi-convenient marriage to Partridge and the concurrent maintenance of the Strachey connection are precursors to the great story of place in her life, the purchase and development of Ham Spray house, just south of Hungerford between Marlborough and Newbury, which they all three shared. Intermingled with the slow deadening of the Partridge marriage and his new interest in Frances Marshall is Carrington's passionate affair with Gerald Brenan, mostly carried on at a distance while he lived in Spain. Her own art is given spirited mention, and is much wider in application than I realised - trompe l'oeil paintings on friends' cottage walls, the decoration of tiles and domestic porcelain, the magnificent traditional canvases, and groups of commissions, broadened by word of mouth, of intriguing works like pub signs. As the relationship with Brenan subsided, her last affair flowered - that with Bernard 'Beakus' Penrose, a sailor. And then that, too, cooled, and she was left with her only constant, Strachey, and a sense of settledness approaching, of a kind of grace. Then the unthinkable occurs - Strachey's longish final illness, diagnosed as typhoid but discovered to be intestinal cancer after his death, which simply left a yawning gap for Carrington, and no-one with whom she might share the things that they enjoyed exclusively. She tried once to asphyxiate herself while Strachey was dying, and finally succeeded in exiting this world with the help of a shotgun in March 1932, a couple of miserable months after his death. This woman whom I had started out disliking became, if not thoroughly likeable, brilliantly compelling.

Commonplace Book

'The memory of the terribly still, sad-coloured silence of certain evenings alternated suddenly with the hot, tremulous unease of a summer afternoon that had once rippled glowing across his soul, as though with the twitching feet of a hissing swarm of glittering lizards.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil

Commonplace Book

'He was afraid of that fantasy, because he was aware of its lascivious furtiveness, and he was unsettled at the thought that such ideas might win ever greater mastery over him. But they overwhelmed him precisely when he imagined himself at his most serious and pure. As a reaction, it might be said, to the moments when he became aware of emotional realizations which were preparing themselves within him, but which were not yet appropriate to his age. For early in the development of every fine moral force there is such a point, when the soul weakens, and that will perhaps be its boldest moment - as though it must first put down searching roots in order to churn up the earth destined later to support it - which is why adolescent boys with great futures ahead of them possess a past rich in humiliations.'

from The Confusions of Young Torless by Robert Musil

Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott (1816)

This appeared in the first volumes of Tales of My Landlord along with The Black Dwarf. Old Mortality is a man who wanders Scotland in a lonely hermitlike way tidying the graves of forgotten Scots heroes and people of principle. This story is one that he promoted through his activities - and that's the last we hear of him, the rest is the story itself. It centres around Henry Morton, heir of Milnwood, who, in the time of Charles II, becomes a key figure in the rebellion based around religious ideas that culminated in the battle of Bothwell Bridge. Morton is in love with Edith Bellenden of Tillietudlem Castle, but the spanner in the works is that the Bellendens are supporters of the monarchy, while Morton's principles of freedom of religion lead him to support the raggletaggle army of the rebels. The ideas behind the rebellion range from a manial fundamental ultra-Puritan protestantism through to Morton's style of broad church requirement for freedom to worship. He is a constant calming voice among his more uncompromising and bloodthirsty fellows, insanely fired as they are by what they deem to be virtually a pro-Catholic conspiracy, and what does seem to be confirmed prejudice at the least. Morton's rival for Edith's affections is the royalist Lord Evandale, a handsome young blade who is deeply attached to her, and whom she feels she must reluctantly settle for given that Morton is persona non grata. After a surprising initial success the tide turns and the rebels are routed at Bothwell Bridge. Morton escapes on a Dutch boat, leaving the personal field open to Evandale. The Dutch boat sinks halfway across the channel and Morton is assumed drowned, but he is rescued and spends a good while incognito in the Netherlands. Some years later, with the revolution which installed William and Mary on the throne, he returns to Scotland, unaware that he is dead in most people's minds. Wandering under an assumed name he discovers that Evandale and Edith are about to be married, and that through political means Tillietudlem has been wrested from the Bellendens by their evil cousin Basil Olifant. He travels to Fairy Knowe, the Bellendens' much reduced home, secretly, hoping to see Edith one more time. She catches sight of him, assumes she's seen a ghost, and collapses. The recollection, once she awakens, is too much, and the marriage to Evandale cannot go ahead. Evandale, meanwhile, has changed sides and is a supporter of the faction which is critical of the monarchy. Basil Olifant, a firm monarchist, comes to Fairy Knowe with some royal dragoons to capture Evandale, but the arrest turns into a pistolfight. Olifant is killed, Evandale is shot. Just before expiring he brings Morton and Edith together giving them his blessing. By a strange twist of fate Olifant has died without a will, so the Bellendens reinherit Tillietudlem! There's a neat ending. Scott's usual brightness is pretty undimmed here; the battles are brief but exciting, the intrigue is enjoyably complicated and there is humour too in cranky retainers and Lady Margaret Bellenden (Edith's mother) and her obsessed overdressed memory of a one-night royal stay at Tillietudlem and the importance it confers on her family. Without being his best, this was fine.

Commonplace Book

'...We also had Aleister Crowley at the end of dinner, a most impossible charlatan, looks like a north country pork manufacturer and speaks with a cockney-american accent.'

from a letter to Lytton Strachey, dated September 18, 1929, in Carrington: Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries

The Sound of My Voice by Ron Butlin (1987)

I need to posit two scenarios to get at this one. Scenario One: BBC Scotland, 1978ish, a commissioning process for a series of one hour TV plays on social issues. Scenario Two: a creative writing class 'senior project'. Weave these two together and we're virtually there. I think the press for this one is most unkind to the author, delivering expectations of grand brilliance and mind-elevating poetry which simply are not here. What is here, however, is a good apprentice piece. This is a novel which speaks of a mid-life alcoholic who has not yet come to a full realisation of his circumstances. Morris Magellan works in middle management in a biscuit factory in a Scots city in the 70s sometime, and has got to the point where he's beginning to slip drinks in between most activities, including drinks. Butlin has a neat knack with ways of tracing the steps of this process. He illustrates it with, for example, a vision of Morris feeling the need to 'clear the mud off everything', which only a drink will do in his mindscape, or of him drinking the ocean of emotion he feels he's been immersed in all his life dry. The whole setup has a simple, staccato, "problem play" feeling; this could almost be backstory for a much more modern crime drama - this family, updated, could be the surrounds of a red herring on Silent Witness, until the real psychopath turns up. Elegiac moments, lost in a slight mistiness, moody sideways shots of kids playing in a back yard, a discarded bottle glinting under a bush, Boards of Canadaesque soundtrack...The family are 'stock characters' in essence - the unplumbable, sometimes viciously angry, sometimes endlessly forgiving wife Mary - unplumbable unfortunately because she's not really there to be understood. The two youngish children are very aptly named 'the accusations' which is a fine notion, beginningly elaborated, but goes no further. Morris' associates and helpmates at the factory are in the same vein, but it's a credit to Butlin that he tries to inject some almost-humour into the scenes here, and appropriately it's a humour which quickly slips lurchingly into awkwardness and social pariahdom in a miasma of alcoholic fumes. The background to Morris' mindknot is again very sketchy - there are a few 'shots' of bewildered childhood and a silent domineering father. There's a skeleton here, and some of the muscles and tendons are showing up, have some heft about them, but the big, bright, soulful human essence is yet to come. I look forward to reading it when it does. I think there's been a temptation in some circles to see the simpleness of this as part of its excellence; the difference between workmanlike ordinariness and virtuous simplicity is the telling one - that's the transformation needed.