Commonplace Book

'...the Southerner is not a home man. It is the people of the North, the poor climates[,] who have invented "home," the intimacy of the family circle to which Provence and Italy prefer the terraces of ice-shops, the noise and excitement of the street.'

from A Passion of the South by Alphonse Daudet (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'...For it is true that our schools are factories, with a machinery to unmake and remake, or fabricate, the souls of children, much in the way in which shoddy is manufactured. You may see a thousand rags, or garments, of a thousand shapes and colours, cast in to be boiled, bleached, pulled to pieces, combed and woven, and finally come out as a piece of cloth a thousand yards long of a uniform harmonious pattern, smooth, glossy, and respectable...'

from Afoot in England by WH Hudson (Chapter V)

"Good-bye, Sweetheart!" by Rhoda Broughton (1872)

If Broughton is to be repromoted, the inescapable likening would need to be Austen I think. This is not to say that they are in any way identical, but their novels live at the same magnification, there is something in the size of the scene, the centrality of the small number of female characters, usually sisters, and the underlying wit or lifeworn humour. Broughton is late nineteenth century in her embracing of more tragedy, and she is less of an obvious wit than her predecessor, preferring instead a species of what I have hitherto called cheekiness - it might better be typified as a kind of amused small-scale daring. This fourth instalment in the bibliography is again about a pair of sisters, Jemima and Lenore Herrick, with the later intrusion of their settled superficial elder sibling, Sylvia. Jemima is 28 and quite plain and sensible, has never had an admirer. Lenore is 19, and is the beautiful indulged baby of the family. She has always been able, since an early illness as a little one, to command everything she wants and not brook any interruption or opposition. On holiday in Brittany, they encounter two young Englishmen - Paul Le Mesurier is not terribly handsome, not terribly impressed with any woman, and has a cold, commanding manner; Charlie Scrope is big, blond, handsome and very easily led. Lenore is shocked by Paul's indifference - he's the first man who appears completely unmoved by her beauty, and she immediately conceives a fascination with him and the challenge he holds out. Charlie is very taken with Lenore, a circumstance which many other women might be delighted with, but his pretty amiability bores her. We follow as Paul and Lenore circle one another and gradually begin to get over their initial antagonism - which has involved them in some amusing contretemps. They fall in love, but their relationship is fraught with argument and friction as their primary natures rub and scrape at one another. Paul leaves for England, among other things in order to prepare his conservative family for the advent of Lenore. In the remainder of their holiday, a bored Lenore flirts quite strongly with Charlie to keep herself occupied. Back in Wales, at Sylvia's comfortable home in the country, Lenore and Paul prepare for marriage, but Paul's now savagely jealous nature has detected that there just might be something Lenore is hiding about what occurred after he left France. On the day of the wedding, all finally explodes as Lenore's flirting is exposed, as is her unwillingness to edit herself for genteel respectability. Paul leaves permanently. Lenore travels quickly from rage to a kind of nervous prostration. On the rebound, and pining desperately for Paul, she agrees to marry Charlie who has been unable to keep himself away. That move is quickly exposed as impossible; Lenore is not able to care for Charlie as she does for Paul. Trapped by her own pride and wilfulness, her health begins to suffer, but the family think she'll get over it if they head to warmer, clearer climes. In Switzerland, out on a solitary walk, Lenore, to her amazement, meets Paul coming in the opposite direction. As he speaks of his forthcoming marriage, all her hopes of reconciliation are dashed. There is also an embarrassing meeting with the Scropes who are staying in the same hotel. Charlie renews his courting, but Lenore will have none of it, keeping his devotedness hanging on a string as usual. Then she begins to look feebler, thinning out even more than beforehand, and it slowly becomes clear that consumption has caught up with her weakened state. The Herricks are trapped at the Swiss hotel for many weeks, unable to move Lenore. In a last desperate attempt, Charlie is sent off to fetch Paul, so that Lenore can see him one more time - but he returns alone; he has arrived on Paul's wedding day, meaning that there is no conceivable way Paul can accompany him back. This is the end for Lenore. And the novel ends there, which is not the most upbeat of endings, despite I guess being a very artistically sound one. That's not Austen - would it disturb her enthusiasts? Probably.

The History and Adventures of an Atom by Tobias Smollett (1769)

This satire of politics, royalty, finance and governance appeared anonymously in 1769. It has been attributed to Smollett, but apparently this attribution has been contested at various times. I don't feel skilled enough to comment firmly, and can only hedge my bets: it seems Smollettian in a sense, but also is markedly different to his novels, so who knows? Perhaps a reading of his continuation of David Hume's A Complete History of England, or his own The Present State of All Nations would give a clue as to his non-fictional manner. As it is, this piece is classic eighteenth century satire, replete with scatology, bluster and fantastical names. It purports to be a recent history of Japan, retailed to one Nathaniel Peacock by an atom within his brain. This atom has had a long and colourful history, as do most apparently, while travelling through the systems of all and sundry right across time. We never really find out how this particular one became able to communicate, and why it chose to talk to Peacock about "Japan". Now, the gen is that this story is really England's, and that all the players are disguised versions of the main protagonists of the period of The Seven Years' War. An aside here: my internet 'research' has uncovered the extraordinary fact that this conflict was in fact the first world war, its conflicts reaching across most of the continents then in communication, especially colonially, and involving the majority of European powers in one way or another. So, our First World War was actually the second, our Second the third. Anyway, 'Japan' is caught in asset-draining wars with almost all of its near neighbours; its emperor is caught in the sway of self-interested 'cuboys' trying to rub one another out sneakily so as to consolidate their own power, whilst also himself becoming manically obsessed by parcels of land which are impossible to defend; great orators control the beast of public opinion and vie with administrators in influencing policy. All the while this same public are completely asinine, and led up the garden path into glaring contrarieties of opinion, falling moblike into greater and more fulsome folly. The main players have such a variety of names - ranging from the almost culturally accurate like Mura-clami, to the obviously nonsensical like Nin-kom-poo-po, and journeying through Fika-Kaka, Got-Hama-Baba, Brut-an-Tiffi and Gotto Mio among tens of others along the way. The rumbunctious, noisy, grunting satire is amusing for a reader like myself with next to no knowledge of the era, but I can only imagine that the appeal would multiply accordingly as the inside straight was understood. This also has no particular ending, almost as though it was an unfinished project. It simply stops dead with nothing resolved, which is a little disappointing. The journey is crazy enough to make it worthwhile; whether it's Smollett's work or another wag's, it entertains.

Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914 (1998)

This does resoundingly what books like this should do best - provides a widescreen viewing into the background of a previously lesser-known relationship. I came to this not having read any of Brooke's letters, and knowing nothing of Strachey except his Freud-translation credentials. This book was the first to print a good number of letters, revealing the true extent of the homosexual underpinning of their friendship - which materials had been prohibited in the past due to the prejudices of the main players in the 'Brooke industry' and to the long lives of some surrounding people whose feelings had to be considered. The correspondence begins with the two of them at the end of their school lives and just about to embark upon the adventure of Cambridge. They are quickly established as exemplars of Edwardian decadence, both in its male-fascinated and its intellectual determinors. They were not only a tight-knit small group in themselves, but had in their enemies and rivals similarly-nuanced individuals. Brooke came from a pretty well-connected upper middle class background, Strachey from a slightly dissolute, particularly outre coterie, an upper middle class family with introductions into and familiarities with aristocratic echelons. The two of them had, seemingly, very different moods and effects - Brooke's much-vaunted beauty with windswept light hair and serious charm; Strachey's darker, bright-eyed impishness with intellectual strength beneath. It becomes clear that Strachey, like so many, was bowled over by Brooke, who, in his turn, thought Strachey well worth cultivating. Brooke seems best summarised as a fluid egotist, who had become habituated to adoration and attention of all kinds, which made him skilful in corralling it to his needs, in both its sexual and non-sexual manifestations. They both join the most notable intellectual 'secret society' of the time, the Apostles, and enjoy for a good few years their mainly homoerotic adventures and life of the mind, as well as a fair swathe of gossip and infighting. Every now and then in the first half of this compilation I was aware of a sense of a stumble in the verbal rhythm, where I think perhaps something had been mistranscribed - sentences just not reading right: Brooke's script does look undecipherable in the visual examples given, so that is forgivable. The change comes in the last couple of years of their correspondence. Brooke has slowly adventured into female relationships as well as male, and Strachey is thinking of following suit, I guess in what would be considered in that time as a natural progression - several women of their acquaintance come under consideration. Brooke at a particular point gets ill, and appears to have a kind of breakdown. This triggers not only a reappreciation of much of the tenor of his life to date, but probably also latent mental illness associated with anxiety and jealous paranoia. So, with emerging heterosexuality, distrust of former friends and associates, a sizeable ego, and also what many a man will recognize as a typical stage that many go through, one of 'cleansing' and visions of what constitutes a 'right' life, Brooke made a strong break. His particular angles meant that this had an egotistical element, a superemphasis on masculinity, a hounding dislike of 'half-men' like Strachey's brother Lytton and even Strachey himself (and, I guess, of Brooke himself as he formerly was). This led him, in 1914, to an embrace of war and death in it as glorious, which great fate he of course fulfilled. Strachey continues in an extraordinarily loyal way trying to support his beloved friend, whilst being thoroughly honest about hating him from time to time. We are left in no doubt that he was highly critical of the later Brooke, and conversely that he was one of the great loves of his life. A brilliantly stimulating record, not only of a relationship, but of an era of intellect and behaviour whose fascinating development was utterly halted by conflagration.

Red Doc> by Anne Carson (2013)

The predecessor to this, Autobiography of Red, was by turns fun and irritating. The irritation lay mainly in a lot of "posy" appendices and supporting paraphernalia, and occasionally in encountering gloopy approximation or overly knowing reference in the work itself, a kind of loose late 20th century poet-speak which lacks impact, or turns the reader off. I'm pretty sure a good quantity of the easily impressed are very taken with these dips to 'profundity' couched in pseudo-Beat language. Carson is capable in different areas; those I've just mentioned are her weakest mode. All these tropes are repeated here, with one exception: the crappy apparatus is gone - hooray for that. This takes Geryon from the first book forward to a period where he is known by the poet simply as G. I'm not sure, but the feeling I get is that his friend here, Sad But Great ('SBG' or mainly just Sad) is his old flame from the first book. They catch up with each other, and with a wild friend, Ida, and also later connect with an army survivor, 4NO, who may be a development of Sad's character, or may be a separate individual. This indicates quite how fluid and impressionistic this piece is. The journey starts with G and Sad and the road north, on and on, into icy territory - Alaska? The Rockies of the northwest? A territory of the frosted mind? They turn up at what is revealed as their destination - a kind of mental health facility, where they re-encounter Ida and meet 4NO. This is the locus of the second half of the book, where their encounters with one another, re-enacting scenes from the past, playing out their traumas, giving one another impressions, realisations of healing and blockedness, interactions with the staff and the program, form the narrative. Carson is occasionally luminous, pulling out an impression which really speaks, and occasionally drab and limited, seemingly just writing in a kind of common 'literary' automatism. This mixed impression is the key. Her intention seems both cool and serious and individual in the best moments, fussed and posy and over-referential in her worst, and often thinly middling. The more she can clear out the need for the latter and embrace the former, the more powerful she'll get. I wonder whether an illustrator would have helped; the transformation into a graphic novel may have assisted in bringing this piece more to life, in making its effect more memorable. As it is we're left with a piece with striking images and moments whose impact is destrung by many more of self-absorbed 'cleverness' or waffly indistinction.