(Edward Atkinson Hornel, The Blackbird Song: Dundee Art Galleries and Museum Collection)
I thought for a moment that the blackbird in the tree that reaches over the back neighbour’s fence into our garden had sung itself hoarse. It’s certainly dwindled, unsurprisingly, since it was already in full flow when I came downstairs, cheered on by the cat, at 05:30 this morning. There is even a tentative sunlight, flickering a little, as if unsure of itself, a faltering connection – and who can wonder, at the end of an 18-month period (since October 2022) which is the wettest in Met Office recorded history? Of course, they only started collecting the data in 1836 (Guardian, 10 April 2024), so it’s not even 200 years yet.
The weekly journals arrive, still a little light on the good news. ‘Easy stories drive out hard ones. Simple paradigms prevail over complicated ones.’[1] Well, yes, though sometimes it really is that simple and, hearing some of the voices currently uplifted in the world, brings the sentiment expressed in the Goncourt Journal vividly to mind: ‘If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.’[2]
The ice-cream van drifts into hearing, still a few streets off, playing ‘Yankee Doodle went to town’. I used to be rather baffled by the line, ‘Stuck a feather in his cap / and called it macaroni.’ Now, along with anyone that has access to the internet, and, presumably, millions of Americans, I’m no longer baffled, at least by that. As the incomparable Opie team has it: ‘Young dandies, who had been on the Tour, wore fantastical clothes, and affected Continental habits, were dubbed “Macaronis”; there was, indeed, a Macaroni Club flourishing in 1764.’[3] By 1772, a year before the Boston Tea Party and three years before the American War of Independence began, the Macaronis ‘were distinguished especially by an immense knot of artificial hair worn at the back but with the peruke flat on top’.[4] The story goes that the British forces sang it to mock those unsophisticated colonials but the Yankees took it up anyway. And, come to think of it, they won that war.
Philip Dawe, ‘The Macaroni. A Real Character at the Late Masquerade’ (1773)
Later, the rain still holding off – and now I can hear the bees. The tulips are open and not yet fallen; the cherry tree in its strong pot some seven feet high; branches above the high fence nodding; faint tones of the Italian near-neighbour and the laughter of a few guests, their windows must be ajar, the season’s premier opening; less faint tones of scaffolders a few houses along; Harry the Cat nodding on an outside blanket; all this is the first real scent of summer. I remember Sarah Bakewell noting that Plutarch’s Moralia, translated into French in the same year in which Montaigne began writing Essays, touched on the question of how to achieve peace of mind: ‘Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.’[5] No doubt both Plutarch and Seneca had their difficulties to contend with – but one of those was not the internet, with its clamorous, competing and often lethal versions of the world. Reading of Elizabeth I’s ‘innate disposition to hedge’ in ‘the face of peril or hostility’, I noted Strachey’s later remarks about Robert Cecil: ‘But passivity, too, may be a kind of action – may, in fact, prove more full of consequence than action itself.’[6] Indeed. Or, too often, alas.
[2] Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, entry for 24 January 1868, Pages From the Goncourt Journal, edited and translated by Robert Baldick (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 135.
[3]The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 532.
[4] James Stevens Cox, An Illustrated Dictionary of Hairdressing and Wigmaking (London: Batsford, 1984), 99.
[5] Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (London: Vintage 2011), 32.
[6] Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: a Tragic History (1928; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 114, 140.
(Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Spring: J. Paul Getty Museum)
Mayday, m’aider. I think, without counting pages to an absurd degree, that 1 May, along with 1 January, is only exceeded by 25 December in the extent of its coverage in The Oxford Companion to the Year, which mentions at the outset the sacrifice of a pregnant sow by the priest of Vulcan to Maia (a goddess of growth).[1] My ageing dictionary offers for Mayday ‘given to sports and to socialist and labour demonstrations’. There was such a time, I think, and the change has not been for the better. This particular Mayday, we have continuing wars and war crimes, failing states, thuggish cops violently assaulting and arresting students and faculty on several American campuses.
But here – we have local elections! Yes, one-sixth of England’s district, borough and unitary councils will hold elections tomorrow, Thursday, 2 May: 2,636 council seats to be contested in the 107 (out of 317) scheduled council elections and 48 by-elections, plus elections for 10 metro mayors, as well as police commissioners and members of the London Assembly. Our ward is in one of the 107: two councillors to be elected and the only candidates standing who contested it that last time around are the incumbents, both Green Party councillors.
We’ve been constantly reminded, of course, that this is the Year of Elections. More than 60 countries and directly affecting almost half of the world’s population. From India and the United States to Indonesia, Mexico, Iceland and Sri Lanka. It would be pleasant to view the prospect positively or even with equanimity, but it’s just too much of a stretch. Many of the countries going to the polls are not even democracies in any meaningful sense. Not that democracy is a perfect political system—if it were, there would be fewer psychopathic thugs, undisguised crooks and congenital liars in positions of power—it’s just that all the other systems are worse.
In the UK, we expect a General Election too and, around the country, people—especially those who follow politics closely—are able to indulge in the parlour game that consists of trying to identify a single sector or section of British social, cultural and economic life that the present government, in its fourteen-year tenure, has not destroyed, diminished, degraded or damaged beyond repair or recovery. Among the candidates are the health service, universities, schools, rivers and coastal waters, housing, freedom of speech, crime, social care, railways, roads, parks, the tax system, the legal profession, pedestrian thoroughfares, prisons, immigration, foreign policy, poverty, doctors, dentists, childcare, homelessness, domestic violence, the rental sector, defence, the climate emergency, the right to protest, sexual harassment in and out of the House of Commons. Answers on a polling card, please. . .
(Altarpiece of St George, Attributed to Andrés Marçal de Sas, active 1393–c.1410: Victoria and Albert Museum)
Still, as Sarah Churchwell, observed, a few years back: ‘Because most people spend little time analysing political events or studying history, democracy will always risk being shaped by voters’ feelings rather than analysis.’[2] A risk, yes, but there are points in any country’s history when the two converge, in some species of agreement: informed analysis of the last decade and a half in the United Kingdom will identify decline, dissension, worsening social and economic conditions for the majority of its citizens, while a wide-ranging survey of voters’ feelings will find an immense tiredness, if not exhaustion, in a nation where everything now is broken and nothing works – unless, as ever, you are filthy rich.
(Albrecht Dürer, St Michael Fighting the Dragon)
Churchwell wrote in another book that: ‘Mythical histories lay the groundwork for fascist politics.’[3] Also true, increasingly evident in many countries around the world, including some of the most vaunted ‘democracies’, a few of them uncomfortably close. It was briefly illuminated (through a glass, darkly) by some of the clamorous noise around 23 April, St George’s Day, the patron saint of England, though ‘very little is known of him and his very existence is often doubted’.[4] If he did exist, he may have been born in Cappadocia, may have died in Palestine and never came near England. Still, he’s the patron saint of at least fifteen countries, states and major cities around the world. And, of course, there’s the matter of that dragon, a story added centuries later. Something may have happened somewhere in Libya, it seems.
‘Before Dürer’, Philip Hoare wrote, ‘dragons existed; after him, they did not. We were left with only the dragons of our unconscious, as Carl Jung would say.’[5] Even more on topic, one might say, is Nicolas Mosley’s comment about his father, Oswald Mosley: ‘But heroes continue not to see the dragons that are in themselves.’[6]
While the local elections may not accurately predict the winners in the various constituencies in the coming General Election, they will, I think, correctly identify the losers.
Notes
[1] Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 183.
[2]Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 215.
[3]The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells (London: Head of Zeus, 2022), 352.
I see that, 118 years ago today—a nice round number, as they say—Ezra Pound, on a fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania to study Spanish literature in Madrid, ‘went down to the ship’, specifically the König Albert, and left New York, landing at Gibraltar on 7 May. On that later day, he wrote to his parents to announce his arrival, mentioning that he’d been reading Rudyard Kipling’s From Sea to Sea and quoting from that work: ‘Imagine a shipload of people to whom time is no object, who have no desires beyond three meals a day and no emotions save those caused by a casual cockroach.’ He added: ‘for this voyage. deduct the cock roach, as the boat is clean.’[1]
Pound went down to the ship on several occasions in this early part of his life: the European tours with his Aunt Frank Weston in 1898 and 1902; the 1906 trip; the departure on 17 March 1908, on Cunard Royal Mail Steamship Slavonia, to Gibraltar in March, then Venice for much of the summer and on to London in August 1908.[2] In 1911, after more than six months in the United States, he returned to Europe, boarding S. S. Mauretania on 22 February 1911. Then followed something of a pause in those sailings, before he boarded the Rex in Genoa, 13 April 1939 – that pause being a little over 28 years.[3]
(S. S. Slavonia)
Kipling himself went down to ships a great deal more often than ‘the Idaho kid’. Born in Bombay—now Mumbai—he was taken to England, aged two, by his mother when she travelled there to give birth to her second child, Alice (‘Trix’). Then they returned to India. Aged 5, he took ship again, he and his sister being left in Southsea at ‘The House of Desolation’ as Kipling later termed it.[4] He was there for five years. In 1882, he sails back to India, returning to England seven years later via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco and New York. His trip around the world follows in 1891. The following year sees more voyaging, to America and Japan. After the return to England the frequent trips to winter in South Africa begin – and there’s more to come, including the West Indies and South America.[5]
Much of the 1890s journeying fed into the many letters and sketches which provided the material for the two-volume From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, as well as the later Letters of Travel (1892-1913). In that sense, the voyages were not simply leisure; yet Kipling could somehow combine work and play to a striking degree. Immediately preceding the lines quoted by Pound in the letter to his parents, Kipling writes: ‘Now we are lying off Moulmein [later renamed Mawlamyine] in a new steamer which does not seem to run anywhere in particular. Why she should go to Moulmein is a mystery; but as every soul on the ship is a loafer like myself, no one is discontented.’[6]
He wrote again about his experience of a specific ship in the article, ‘Sea Travel’, first published as ‘Egypt of the Egyptians’ in Nash’s Magazine (June 1914). Some of the men working on the ship brought back vivid memories of his early years in India: ‘Serangs [lascar boatswains] used to be very kind to little white children below the age of caste. Then: ‘Most familiar of all was the ship itself. It had slipped my memory, nor was there anything in the rates charged to remind me, that single-screws still lingered in the gilt-edged passenger trade.’ This was an exciting discovery for some ‘North Atlantic passengers’, who were ‘as pleased about it as American tourists at Stratford-on-Avon.’ The passengers are disembarking at Port Said, towards which the ‘one-screw tub thumped gingerly’. Kipling has leisure to observe the table linen, the glassware, the poor waiting service, the cabins lacking curtains and other dispiriting features: ‘time and progress had stood still with the P. & O.’ He then gets into conversation with other passengers and is entertained by the telling of several stories but ‘no stories could divert one long from the peculiarities of that amazing line which exists strictly for itself.’ He reflects on the glory days of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company and concludes that: ‘To-day it neither feeds nor tends its passengers, nor keeps its ships well enough to put on any airs at all.’[7]
Ships and stories. His biographers explore his love of both. He would later enjoy trips on Royal Navy vessels but in From Sea to Sea the author of Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) remarked that: ‘The blue-jacket is a beautiful creature, and very healthy, but . . . I gave my heart to Thomas Atkins long ago, and him I love’ (I, 292). Marghanita Laski observes that, ‘As a traveller, his chosen transport was the most comfortable steamer available, and even so, if the sea was at all rough, he was usually seasick.’[8] Nevertheless, a remarkable number of articles, fictions and poems centre on, or strongly feature, Matthew Arnold’s ‘unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’.[9]
When I was a child and my father was posted to Singapore, we flew out and sailed back. I can’t be entirely sure of the ship’s name but believe it was the S. S. Oriana, at that stage owned by the Orient Steam Navigation Company. The flight out had its moments—an impressive bout of air sickness, melting tarmac under the feet at the airport in Tehran, brief stops at Istanbul and Mumbai, I think—but the voyage home, three years later, unsurprisingly, had far more. Pyramids and Tutankhamen in Cairo, fierce heat and alley cats in Aden, light and colour in Lisbon. Sea, sky, the shipboard entertainment uncritically consumed, the table tennis tournaments, ferreting about in forbidden corners, running like lunatics up and down stairs and along narrow corridors. Even a fine romance –as fine, at least, as an inexperienced thirteen-year-old could make it. . .
(A boy on a camel)
At that age, it occurs to me, Kipling’s work was appearing for the first time in The Scribbler, a family magazine, in collaboration with May and Jenny Morris (daughters of William and Jane), and Philip and Margaret Burne-Jones (children of Edward and Georgiana). More precocious than some, that Kipling.
Notes
[1] Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, edited by Mary de Rachewiltz, David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 72n., 73.
[2] J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908-1925 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 66.
[3] A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work: Volume II: The Epic Years 1921–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 301.
[4] Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, edited by Thomas Pinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7; and see the story, ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, in Wee Willie Winkie, edited by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 260-288. An ‘English Heritage’ blue plaque is on the house now: I see it’s not so very far from where I lived in Southsea for several years.
[5] Much of the chronology lifted from Norman Page’s indispensable A Kipling Companion (London: Macmillan, 1989), 1-7.
[6] Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel, 2 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1900), I, 230.
[8] Marghanita Laski, From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling Abroad and at Home (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), 142.
[9] ‘To Marguerite – Continued’, Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, edited by A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 81. Familiar to some readers from its use in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
(Horatio McCulloch, Loch Katrine: Perth Art Gallery; managed by Culture Perth and Kinross)
(‘Bussoftlhee, mememormee!’ James Joyce, Finnegans Wake)
I was reading Rosemary Hill’s review of a recent book by Steven Brindle, Architecture in Britain and Ireland: 1530-1830, and the extent to which Henry VIII’s break with Rome was an ‘unmitigated disaster’ for architecture. ‘“The dissolution of the religious houses”, Steven Brindle writes, “tore the heart out of the patronage of … the arts” as it had existed for nine centuries and brought about “the largest redistribution of land since the Norman Conquest”. It would take three generations to begin to recover from this “colossal self-inflicted cultural catastrophe”’.[1]
In the current painful condition of the United Kingdom, the notion of colossal self-inflicted catastrophes brings to mind most readily the ill-conceived and dishonestly presented referendum of 2016, although, with the example in mind of Kipling’s phrase in ‘With the Night Mail’, ‘the traffic and all it implies’,[2] we tend to reflect on Brexit and all it implies. The implications are not pretty. A part-time television critic of my acquaintance, who’d watched a series called ‘The Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson’, observes that it’s very easy to forget how simply and thoroughly ‘a small group of men fucked this country over’. Indeed it is.
Memory is fickle, quite easily manipulated (as is blindingly obvious in our time) but, in any case, a fiction writer of great, if sometimes wayward, abilities. It can also perform extraordinary feats. Katherine Rundell, writing of John Donne’s age, describes how‘ [a] school system which hinged on colossal amounts of memorisation had built a population with the kind of mammoth recall which is, in retrospect, breathtaking’ – listeners returning home to argue over sermons, plagiarise them, make them ‘part of the fabric of their days.’[3] Sylvia Beach recalled reading a line at random from “The Lady of the Lake” – and James Joyce then reciting the whole page and the next ‘without a single mistake’.[4] Scott’s poem is in six cantos, the first of which has 35 stanzas, the second 37 – and the stanzas are not short ones. As for its author’s own powers of recall, James Hogg, in his Domestic Manners and Private Life ofSir Walter Scott, ‘tells of how he once went fishing with Scott and Skene [James Skene of Rubislaw]. He was asked to sing the ballad of “Gilmanscleuch” which he had once sung to Scott, but stuck at the ninth verse, whereupon Scott repeated the whole eighty-eight stanzas without a mistake.’[5]
Jenny Diski wrote that ‘there is nothing so unreliable or delicious as one’s rackety memories of oneself.’[6] And we certainly hear and read a lot about ‘unreliable narrators’. Memory is, of course, both narrator and reliably unreliable. This applies both to ourselves and the wider world (perceived and processed by those same selves). In the ‘Foreword’ to Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook, centred on her trip through the deep South in 1970, Nathaniel Rich discussed how a view of ‘the past’ had been relegated to the aesthetic realm and Didion herself remarked on ‘[t]he time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.’[7]
Oddly (though probably not), memory delayed a little in reminding me that my remark about unreliable narrators may be more or less purloined from an essay by Frank Kermode, revisited when I went back to a Conrad novel last year. Nearly one-third of the books I read in 2023 I’d read before, largely due to working on Ford Madox Ford, of course; they were either his own books or Ford-related, directly or tangentially.
Unsurprisingly, they included ‘that finest novel in the English language’, as Ford once described it. And again: ‘[F]or me, Under Western Eyes is a long way the greatest—as it is the latest—of all Conrad’s great novels.’[8] Once more: ‘That is to say, in common with myself, he regarded the writing of novels as the only occupation for a proper man and he thought that those novels should usually concern themselves with the life of great cities.’ There were two such novels. ‘But although The Secret Agent was relatively a failure, Under Western Eyes with its record of political intrigue and really aching passion has always seemed to me by a long way Conrad’s finest achievement.’[9]
I had read Conrad’s novel of pre-revolutionary politics, betrayal and assassination so long ago that it might almost have been for the first time – almost. It is, no doubt, a tribute to the writing that I found myself consciously offering advice to the student Razumov during his interview with Councillor Mikulin: Shut up! Don’t say another word! Hold your tongue! He can’t, of course. And Ford saw the driving force of much of the book to be personal honour. Of Razumov’s ploy to ‘add a touch of verisimilitude’, having a foolish boy rob his own rich father but then tossing the money from a train window, Ford comments: ‘And the same unimaginative cruelty of a man blindly pursuing his lost honour dignifies Razumov to the end.’[10]
My surviving sense of the book had included Conrad’s known antipathy to Russia (hardly surprising in a Pole born in the Ukraine, part of the Russian Empire but once part of Poland) and his contempt for revolutionaries, which was evident in The Secret Agent. Under Western Eyes was written between two Russian revolutions, published (1911) exactly midway, in fact. But notions of nationality, allegiance and bafflement also shouted aloud ‘Conrad’! Or, perhaps, ‘Konrad Korzeniowski!’ Much of this was to do with that complex process of holding onto a strong sense of one’s native country and culture, while adopting a second language (retaining fluency in the first) – and then a third, while settling in another country and choosing to write in that third language. None of this was made much easier for Conrad by his being attacked on occasion by Polish compatriots for deserting both language and country. Not that migration is ever only a matter of language. H. G. Wells had a couple of digs at Conrad, not only that he spoke English ‘strangely’ but also that ‘[o]ne could always baffle Conrad by saying “humour.” It was one of our damned English tricks he had never learned to tackle.’[11] Under-westernised?
Kermode’s celebrated essay, ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’, I’d also read a long time ago.[12] Briefly, he argues that Conrad’s text shows itself obsessed with certain words and images which wholly evade orthodox, ‘common sense’ readings. More, he suggests that the book’s ‘secrets’ are in fact ‘all but blatantly advertised’ (99) and from which, by a curious process of collusion, ‘we avert our attention’ (95). He is pointing to the novel’s constant references to ghosts or phantoms, souls, eyes and, perhaps above all, to the art of writing, more, the materials of writing: black on white, ink on paper, shadows on snow, notebooks, a journal wrapped in a veil. I went back to the essay after reading the novel. It’s true that I found it difficult to see how critics had not seen and grasped – or sought – the significance of the astonishing frequency of such images. Souls, ghosts and related words occur a hundred times, references to eyes more than sixty times, and so on. This is bound to snag the attention of a reader of Ford’s The Good Soldier, an even shorter novel, I think, in which the verb ‘to know’ in its various forms, occurs not far short of three hundred times. ‘What I ask you to believe’, Kermode writes, ‘is that such oddities are not merely local; they are, perhaps, the very “spirit” of the novel’ (97). Difficult not to notice, I said, but cannot be sure of how much that noticeability is related to residual memories of his essay. With a fistful of exceptions, I’m unacquainted with the secondary literature on Conrad which is, I’ve learned, ‘huge, approximately 800 monographs, biographies, edited collections, volumes of letters and catalogues, without counting the hundreds of peer-reviewed papers in the general and specialist literary journals, the untranslated material and the unpublished doctoral theses.’[13]
Richard Parkes Bonington, La Place du Molard, Geneva (Victoria & Albert Museum)
St Petersburg, Geneva. The book is centrally concerned, of course, with Russia: its psychology, Conrad himself suggested, more than its politics. There is also the essential complicating factor of the narrator—‘all narrators are unreliable, but some are more expressly so than others’, as Kermode remarks (yes, that’s the one).[14] A language teacher, English, in love with Natalia Haldin, sister of the executed assassin Victor Haldin, and friendly with their mother. Speaking sometimes in his own voice (whatever the extent to which it’s borrowed) and sometimes through the medium of Razumov’s journal, he repeatedly asserts an inability to understand the Russian character, the Russian soul. He glances down at the letter Natalia is holding, ‘the flimsy blackened pages whose very handwriting seemed cabalistic, incomprehensible to the experience of Western Europe.’ At one point, ‘I could not forget that, standing by Miss Haldin’s side, I was like a traveller in a strange country.’ Again, ‘The Westerner in me was discomposed’ and: ‘I felt profoundly my European remoteness and said nothing, but I made up my mind to play my part of helpless spectator to the end.’ And: ‘To my Western eyes she seemed to be getting farther and farther from me, quite beyond my reach now, but undiminished in the increasing distance.’ One more: ‘And this story, too, I received without comment in my character of a mute witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my Western eyes.’
Continually asserting his incomprehension, the unfamiliarity of what he is observing, he does, of course recall Ford’s John Dowell, to whom it is all a darkness and who repeatedly asserts: ‘I don’t know’. And yet, and yet. There are many suspicious readings of The Good Soldier, some of which ask if Dowell is as unknowing as he appears to be and also, perhaps, what kind of knowledge he does not possess. It is, unusually for Ford, narrated in the first person. In any case, it is fatally easy, waltzing among thornbushes, to catch one’s sleeve on that knowledge of knowing nothing, to recall the famous moment in Eliot’s The Waste Land—‘I knew nothing,/Looking into the heart of light, the silence’—and, remembering his interest in eastern thought and religion, wonder if that knew should be stressed infinitely more than the nothing.
(J. M. W. Turner, Sunrise with a Boat between Headlands: Tate)
Kermode notes that, when Conrad began the book, he called it Razumov: ‘but when it was done (on the last page of the manuscript, in fact) he changed the title to Under Western Eyes. He had found out what he was doing’ (98). I remember the pleasure with which I came across that last sentence: the recognition of the fact that, so often, we find out not only how to do something but what it is we are actually doing – only by doing it. And this, certainly, not just in art.
The novelist and playwright Enid Bagnold described how: ‘Beauty never hit me until I was nine.’ When she arrived in Jamaica as a child: ‘this was the first page of my life as someone who can “see”. It was like a man idly staring at a field suddenly finding he had Picasso’s eyes. In the most startling way I never felt young again. I remember myself then just as I feel myself now.’ She adds, a little later: ‘And what you remember is richer than the thing itself.’[15]
Well, sometimes.
Notes
[1] Rosemary Hill, ‘Des briques, des briques’, London Review of Books, 46, 6 (21 March 2024), 13.
[2] Rudyard Kipling, Actions and Reactions (New York: Scribner’s 1909), 148.
[3] Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (London: Faber, 2023), 223.
[4] Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, new edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 71.
[5] John Buchan, SirWalter Scott (London: Cassell, 1932), 131. The ballad was included in Hogg’s first book, The Mountain Bard (1807).
[6] Jenny Diski, In Gratitude (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 187.
[7] Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook, foreword by Nathaniel Rich (London: 4th Estate, 2017), xviii, 104.
[8] Ford, Thus to Revisit (London: Chapman & Hall, 1921), 90-91; Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 193.
[9] Ford, ‘Introduction’ to Joseph Conrad, The Sisters, edited by Ugo Mursia (Milan: U. Mursia & Co., 1968), 11-30 (14).
[10] Ford, ‘Joseph Conrad’, English Review, X (December 1911), 68-83 (71).
[11] H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (1934; London: Faber, 1984), 616, 622.
[12] Frank Kermode, ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’, Critical Inquiry, 7, 1 (Autumn 1980), 83-101 (references are to this); reprinted in Essays on Fiction, 1971-1982 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 133-155.
[13] Helen Chambers, review of Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), Last Post: A Literary Journal from the Ford Madox Ford Society, I, 4 (Autumn 2020), 124.
[14] Kermode, 89-90; and see footnote 7: ‘The trouble is not that there are unreliable narrators but that we have endorsed as reality the fiction of the “reliable” narrator.’
[15] Enid Bagnold, Autobiography (London: Century Publishing, 1985), 14, 100.
‘When he finally left, his eyes blurry from having stared at printed papers for so long, he felt that something was different’, Georges Simenon (or his translator) wrote of Inspector Jules Maigret. ‘It took a while to dawn on him that it had stopped raining. It felt like a void.’[1]
It has hardly stopped raining here, has barely drawn breath, in fact. No relief. None either in the news, with its daily litany of continuing atrocities, grotesque historical ironies and politicians soiling themselves to degrees remarkable even in our Golden Age of Hypocrisy.
But here the work continues, the ordinary processes of living which, more fortunate than some others, we are able to pursue: in my case, transcribing letters, reading Simenon, William Faulkner, Mary Butts – and feeding the cat.
(Harry the Cat)
When their meals are imminent, some cats have a habit of displaying affection to their owners (their staff) and, often, to the corners of cupboards, the legs of chairs, the edges of tables. Harry rubs his face against various fixtures and fittings but, particularly, the corners of a low table in front of the living-room sofa, where I sit to take off my outdoor shoes after a walk. Several times I’ve watched him work his way around the table – but always nudging three corners and missing one, though the missed one varies.
I mention to the vacant room that, when Doctor Johnson missed touching a post, he had to turn back to remedy the situation before continuing on his way, as reported by a man named Samuel Whyte:
I perceived him at a good distance working along with a peculiar solemnity of deportment, and an awkward sort of measured step…. Upon every post as he passed along, I could observe he deliberately laid his hand; but missing one of them, when he had got at some distance, he seemed suddenly to recollect himself, and immediately returning back, carefully performed the accustomed ceremony, and resuming his former course, not omitting one till he gained the crossing. This, Mr. Sheridan assured me … was his constant practice.[2]
(Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, National Trust: Knole)
Superstitions. Black cats, lucky beans, touching iron, meeting pigs, replacing chairs after dining, turnips, umbrellas and snails – throwing and divination. I realise that I have not one but two relevant reference books: Steve Roud, The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland (London: Penguin, 2003), and Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, editors, A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Iona Opie, with her husband Peter, wrote the classic The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, containing a chapter, ‘Half-Belief’, which assembles an astonishing array of ‘ancient apprehensions’ that, ‘even if only half-believed in, continue to infiltrate their minds’. These range from the likely bad effects of seeing a white horse (and omitting to spit) through the madness resulting from moonlight shining on a sleeping person’s face, screeching owls, dropped photograph frames, the perils of stepping on black beetles, walking under bridges as trains cross them, glimpses of funerals, chimney sweeps, spotted dogs, haycarts, sailors’ collars, nuns and wooden legs.[3]
(Georges Simenon: via Discovering Belgium)
Simenon again:
“Good luck, boys!” “Break a leg,” grunted Torrence, touching wood. Lucas, who claimed not to be superstitious, repeated in an almost reluctant whisper, “Break a leg!”[4]
Lucas claiming not to be superstitious but following suit anyway is a sly version of Pascal’s wager: bet on God’s existence and, if you’re wrong, nothing lost; if you bet on his non-existence and he then rolls up at your front door with a couple of heavies, you’re in trouble. I have vague memories of paying childhood lip service to one or two superstitions, just in case, then vigorously reversing. My avoidance of walking under ladders was succeeded by my determinedly walking under every ladder in sight (to demonstrate that I was not superstitious) and I recall an enthusiastic embracing of the number 13 on every possible occasion. Black cats I greeted warmly, was never overly concerned with sneezes or snowdrops, and may have looked askance at pairs of crows or ravens only because of the ballad of ‘The Twa Corbies’.
“Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane, And I’ll pike out his bonny blue e’en: Wie ae lock o’ his gowden hair We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.”
Richard Ellmann writes that Paul Ruggiero, whom James Joyce had known in Zurich during the First World War and with whom he renewed acquaintance on returning there following the outbreak of the Second, had the habit of dropping in to see Joyce after work and laying his hat on the bed. Joyce ‘reproved him each time’, believing in the superstition that it meant somebody was going to die.[5] This one seems connected particularly to cowboys and Italians. Bad luck to anyone that sleeps in the bed, evil spirits spilling out of it – in past times, I gather, priests and doctors would sometimes lay their hat on the bed if the patient in it was on the way out. Joyce, of course, subscribed to a mass of superstitions, ranging from thunder through colours, numbers, months, the arrangement of cutlery and a rat running downstairs.
He also shared Ford Madox Ford’s dismal view of years which added up to 13,[6] and a superstition about numbers must be one of the commonest. Edmund de Goncourt recalled a dinner at the Charpentiers, attended also by Emile Zola and his wife. Zola ‘spoke about his superstitions, saying that he added up the figures of the carriages he noticed, that 7 was his favourite number, and that he tapped the doors and windows a given number of times before going to bed.’[7]
‘I have always been superstitious myself and so remain—impenitently’, Ford wrote in 1931. ‘I cannot bear to sit in a room with three candles or to bring snowdrops, may or marigolds indoors.’ He claimed that, when the Daily Mail requested him to write a sonnet on Samuel Johnson, ‘All I could remember about Johnson at the moment was that he had kept pieces of orange peel and patted corner posts when he walked down Fleet Street.’[8]
Superstitions, the word and the idea, are endlessly malleable, able to fit occasion, character or context. Herman Melville, he of the White Whale, whose dealings with William Shakespeare were complex and extensive, nevertheless asserted that ‘this absolute and unconditional adoration of Shakespeare has grown to be a part of our Anglo-Saxon superstitions. The Thirty-Nine Articles are now Forty. Intolerance has come to exist in this matter. You must believe in Shakespeare’s unapproachability, or quit the country.’[9] Wyndham Lewis remarked that, ‘One of our greatest superstitions is that the plain man, being so “near to life,” is a great “realist.”’[10] Graham Greene presented it, in the case of his Assistant Commissioner, more as a matter of conscious selection, albeit a necessary one, like diet or wardrobe: ‘One had to choose certain superstitions by which to live; they were the nails in the shoes with which one gripped the rock. This was what a war threw up: a habit, a superstition, one more trick by which one got through the day.’[11]
But I like this, what might be termed intelligent tolerance, another threatened species – Dervla Murphy, in another age and another country, noting a traffic policeman in Kabul, abandoning his post to pray at the appointed time: ‘This frank devotion is for me one of the most impressive features of Islamic culture. If we accept that it is more than a superstition then there is something very wonderful indeed about mixing one’s daily deeds and one’s daily prayers in such an unselfconscious fashion, instead of keeping each in an airtight compartment.’[12]
Notes
[1] Georges Simenon Maigret and the Man on the Bench (1953; translated by David Watson, London: Penguin Books, 2017), 108.
[2] Samuel Whyte, Miscellanea Nova (Dublin, 1801), 49: James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by G. B. Hill, revised and enlarged by L. F. Powell (Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1934), I, 485 n1. This and a great deal more is referred to and discussed by Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr., in an article, ‘Samuel Johnson’s Tics and Gesticulations’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 22 (April 1967), 152-168.
[3] Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959; New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 206-231.
[4] Georges Simenon, Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters (1952; translated by William Hobson, London: Penguin Books, 2017), 140.
[5] Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 739.
[6] Stuart Gilbert, editor, Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber, 1957), 161, n.
[7] Entry for 8 December 1891: Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, Pages From the Goncourt Journal, edited and translated by Robert Baldick (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 369.
[8] Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 254-255 and 271; 299.
[9] Herman Melville, ‘Hawthorn and His Mosses’ (1850; in The Portable Melville, edited by Jay Leyda, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 409.
[10] Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body, edited by Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982), 102.
[11] Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefield (1934; London: Penguin Books, 1980), 170.
[12] Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965; London: Century Publishing, 1985), 63.
(John Frederick Herring II, ‘Farmyard with Saddlebacks’: Haworth Art Gallery)
The year has turned but, unfortunately, the direction of human travel has not, bringing to mind the old ballad:
It was mirk, mirk night, there was nae starlight, They waded thro’ red blude to the knee; For a’ the blude that’s shed on the earth Rins through the springs of that countrie.[1]
We have long passed ‘that blessed season’, which Saki so liked, ‘between the harshness of winter and the insincerities of summer’.[2] I read hungrily, if not always strictly relevantly to the projects currently in train.
‘Every time I consider autobiography’, Guy Davenport wrote to the author and publisher W. C. Bamberger in June 2000, ‘my mind instantly runs to senseless (but satisfying) recrimination.’ He went on to detail the losses – due to carelessness or dishonesty – of valued letters, priceless association copies of books, drawings made to accompany essays or stories, which were jettisoned by editor or publisher once the material had been printed. ‘One of them was a Greek mask I’d worked on for a week, pen and ink, perhaps the finest drawing I’ve ever done.’ He added: ‘And there’s the art book with color plates that a fellow grad student at Harvard borrowed and kept his place with a slice of bacon,’ before concluding: ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres.’[3]
(Portrait of Lady Charlotte Harley as Ianthe: drawn by Richard Westall, engraved by W. Finden)
Bacon, you say. . . . Francis and Roger and Francis, and how many more? There was Lady Charlotte, wife of Colonel Anthony Bacon of the Lancers and daughter of the Earl of Oxford. Bacon was involved in the War of the Brothers, 1832-1834 (Pedro and Miguel) in Portugal, in the cause of Dom Pedro. Charlotte was the ‘Ianthe’ to whom, at the age of ten, Byron wrote his introductory stanzas at the beginning of Childe Harold.[4]
Such is thy name with this my verse entwined; And long as kinder eyes a look shall cast On Harold’s page, Ianthe’s here enshrined Shall thus be first beheld, forgotten last[5]
There was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Keeper of the Great Seal to Queen Elizabeth I, who built a fine house mentioned by Ronald Blythe in his discussion of Stiffkey, a Norfolk village more famous since for the rector, Harold Davidson, who was defrocked after being charged with immorality – and died as a result of being mauled by a lion.[6] Francis – not the painter – supplies two epigraphs to Dorothy Sayers in her 1935 novel, Gaudy Night.[7] More entertainingly on the bacon front, Peter Vansittart writes that, until the Hundred Years’ War, the patron saint of England was Edward the Confessor. ‘Then Edward III, in debt to Genoese bankers, replaced him with their patron, the more aggressive St George, who was not to escape the attention of the supreme English ironist, Gibbon: he dismissed George as a dishonest bacon contractor, loathed by Christian and pagan alike.’[8]
Anyone fretfully wondering how long it will take Ford Madox Ford to rock up can now put their mind at rest. In Ancient Lights, Ford segued from a memory of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s limericks to an anecdote about ‘another poet, a descendant of many Pre-Raphaelites, of whom it was related that whilst reading his friend’s valuable books at that friend’s breakfast table he was in the habit of marking his place with a slice of bacon.’ He added that he knew this anecdote to be untrue.[9] How might he be so sure? Slip forward twenty years and Ford is remembering his doctor, Tebb, with whom Ford stayed for a while when the good doctor was treating him in the late stages of a breakdown. He writes of Tebb inventing ‘one of the most ingenious lies’ about his guest: that Ford marked his place in Tebb’s ‘priceless first editions and incredibly sumptuous large paper copies with a slice of bacon.’[10]
Reading the recently published collection of shorter pieces by Hilary Mantel—and reminding myself of just how funny she can be—I come across an article, written for Vogue, on perfumes. Mantel remarks: ‘What women have always wanted to know is what scent drives men wild; researchers have the answer, say Turin and Sanchez [co-authors of the book Perfumes: The Guide], and it’s bacon.’[11] It’s just possible that this news may not have brought unalloyed delight to those inquiring women.
Bacon features largely in Ford’s letters around the end of the First World War, given the twin factors of meat rationing (introduced in 1918) and Ford’s own pig-breeding ambitions. ‘I got as far as the above’, he wrote to Stella Bowen in a letter that stretched over two days (28-29 April 1919), ‘when sleep overtook me—or rather sleepiness, for, when I went to bed I cd not get to sleep. I fancy an unmixed diet of bacon is telling on my liver.’[12]
William Cobbett – farmer, MP, soldier, traveller, radical journalist, printer, avid dispenser of practical advice to the common people (‘The Poor Man’s Friend’) – who took a positive view of pigs, wrote in his Cottage Economy:
A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them upon the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes, though assisted by the terrors of the hulks and the gibbet.[13]
It was also a matter of personal preference. On one of his famous rural rides, he arrived at Ashurst ‘(which is the first parish in Kent on quitting Sussex)’, where, ‘for want of bacon’, he was ‘compelled to put up with bread and cheese for myself. I waited in vain for the rain to cease or to slacken, and the want of bacon made me fear as to a bed.’[14] So he rode on through the night and the driving rain. Better drenched than baconless.
No mention of pork or bacon, unsurprisingly, in our Syrian and Palestinian cookbooks, nor, surely, in Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food? But yes, there is an entry in her index, which turns out to be connected with her visit to El Molino in Granada, a centre for research into the history of Spanish food. She was told that some Marranos, forced by the Inquisition to convert to Christianity, ‘made a point of cooking pork to protect themselves from charges by the Inquisition of continuing to practise their old religion.’[15]
The Librarian and I were recently comparing our inability to remember jokes. Some people have a repertoire of hundreds, others recall not a single one. The Librarian offers only one: it concerns the Pink Panther and she first heard it decades ago. I cudgel my brains and offer a knock knock joke dredged from some long unvisited cerebral recess:
Knock knock! (Who’s there?) Egbert! (Egbert who?) Egbert not bacon!
A brief, pitying smile. She murmurs, with visible effort, ‘That’s quite funny.’
It’s the way I tell them.
Notes
[1] ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, in The Oxford Book of Ballads, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910, reprinted 1932), 3.
[2] ‘The Romancers’, The Short Stories of Saki (London: The Bodley Head, 1930), 311.
[3] Guy Davenport, I Remember This Detail: 40 Letters to Bamberger Books, edited by W. C. Bamberger (Whitmore Lake, Michigan: Bamberger Books, 2022), 79-80. The French sentence is Jean Paul Sartre’s famous line from his play Huis Clos (No Exit).
[4] Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal (1946; London, Penguin Books, 1985), 307.
[5] Lord Byron, Selected Poems, edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 60.
[6] Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties 1919-40 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 156.
[7] Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2016), Chapters 3 and 17.
[8] Peter Vansittart, In Memory of England: A Novelist’s View of History (London: John Murray, 1998), 42.
[9] Ford Madox Ford, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), 44, 45.
[10] Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 305.
[11] Hilary Mantel, ‘At First Sniff’ (2009), in A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing, edited by Nicholas Pearson (London: John Murray 2023), 332. I also learn from this that Burger King, yes, released a meat-infused scent called ‘Flame Grilled’.
[12]Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, edited by Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 109-110.
[13] William Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1823; Oxford University Press, 1979), 103. In past centuries, pigs ‘were kept by everyone, fed economically on scraps, waste, and wild food’: Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, Second Edition by Tom Jaine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49.
[14] William Cobbett, Rural Rides, edited by George Woodcock (1830 edition; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), 171-172.
[15] Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food (London: Viking, 1997), 332.
(Marianne North, Foliage and Flowers of a Madagascar Tree at Singapore, Marianne North Gallery; photo credit: Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
I see that Mick Jagger—Sir Michael Philip Jagger, rather—is eighty this year. We lived abroad for a few years because of my father’s job while the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were getting going. ‘Not Fade Away’ must have been the first Stones song I heard when we came back to England; and it was another year before Jagger sang: ‘Well I told you once and I told you twice, But you never listen to my advice’—a slight friction there between ‘telling’ and ‘advice’? Unsurprising, perhaps, that it could have been the last time.
I’ve always been wary of advice, both giving and receiving. ‘I never myself took anyone’s advice’, Ford Madox Ford remarked, ‘and I do not imagine that many people will take mine.’[1] Robert Lowell appears to have taken it, though with mixed results, telling Flannery O’Connor in 1952: ‘Ford used to say that you could tell if a writer was any good from the first sentence—I found this advice useful when manuscript-reading for Sheed and Ward, though it led to fatal misunderstandings in my interviews with students at Iowa . . . ’[2]
I wouldn’t say ‘never’, I’m sure I’ve taken it from time to time but rarely with enthusiasm. Giving it as well, being too conscious of the tendency in many people, myself not excluded, to react negatively to such gestures, even embracing the opposite, sometimes ending up, metaphorically or literally, in a rainstorm without an umbrella. Though, it now occurs to me, I can advise, or at least suggest, that eating beetroot for lunch while reading a book you care about is best avoided.
Politicians, newspapers, television channels and radio stations are profligate dispensers of the stuff. I can recall the days when doctors and the BBC, anyway, were viewed with near-unanimity as reliable sources. Now people unwilling or unable to distinguish between blanket mistrust and informed scepticism are easy prey. Some conversations, to be sure, are best kept private when so much of the world appears to have gone mad-dog. To be appalled by so many governments is hardly a novelty, though, and my intake of news bulletins remains. . . careful.
(Herbert George Ponting, ‘Captain Scott’s Birthday, 6 June 1911’, National Portrait Gallery, London; photo credit, NPG. Cherry is the third seated man along on the left)
‘Defeats on the Western Front in March catapulted the nation into shock’, Sara Wheeler wrote in her biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, recalling the period of the First World War. ‘The Times rallied as usual to shore up public confidence, issuing advice on all fronts, including the stern “Don’t think you know better than Haig”, even though most people over the age of ten probably did.’[3]
On all fronts, not just the Western one.
In Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, a novel based on the life of the 18th century writer Novalis, Fritz meets Sophie’s elder sister Friederike (‘the Mandelsloh’): ‘“I thank you for your advice,” said Fritz. “I think, indeed, that women have a better grasp on the whole business of life than we men have. We are morally better than they are, but they can reach perfection, we can’t. And that is in spite of the fact that they particularise, we generalise.” “That I have heard before. What is wrong with particulars? Someone has to look after them.”’[4]
Yes, those particulars. Colette was a generous dispenser of advice, not least to the young Georges Simenon when she was literary editor at Le Matin, telling him that, though on the right track, ‘he should drop “the literature”. “Pas de littérature!” she said. “Supprimez toute la littérature et ça ira!”’[5] To a young woman writer who had sought her advice, she replied: ‘When you are capable of certifying that today’s work is equal to yesterday’s, you will have earned your stripes. For I am convinced that talent is nothing other than the possibility of resembling oneself from one day to the next, whatever else befalls you.’[6] But she also served as a magazine’s regular agony aunt, sharing her expertise in matters of dress, cosmetics and, always, love.
(Colette, plus—of course—a cat)
On dress and cosmetics, I am probably unreliable; but I was writing recently about aeroplanes, though hardly straying from my usual temporal zone, the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. The context was Ford Madox Ford’s war but a lot of the material I had to draw on related to Guy Davenport—some of which has gone into blog posts here—as well as other writers of Ford’s time, references to whom had to be whittled down or eliminated. Every time I approached the suggested word limit, things spiralled out of control again as some other alleyway beckoned. I remembered that line of W. B. Yeats: ‘My thoughts were a great excitement, but when I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a balloon into a shed in a high wind.’[7]
The Davenport material went, leaving only a faint shadow of his 1991 response to Laurence Zachar’s remark that: ‘A proportionately large part of your work is Utopian. It deals with happy people, in an ideal place where there is no violence’, when Davenport commented of “The Aeroplanes at Brescia”, ‘there’s the implicit sense that aeroplanes were going to stop all wars; the Wright brothers wrote a famous letter to the War Department which paid no attention to it, saying: with the aeroplane, there can be no more troop movements because they can be observed from the air, and therefore no more wars.’[8]
When his story, or assemblage—drawing on Franz Kafka’s first published work, a report on the 1909 air show—appeared in the Hudson Review, a paragraph on the final page put the assertion that wars would cease with the coming of the aeroplane into the mouth of Max Brod’s engineer brother Otto but Davenport may have felt that such an unbearably painful irony was too easy, too heavy-handed. It was omitted when revised for book publication.[9]
Another twist on that occurred to me when I was rereading the memoir by Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising, who was in his teens when he joined the Royal Flying Corps. By the time he was posted to Home Establishment, he had survived eight months overseas, including four months of the Somme battle, and spent 350 hours in the air, during a period when pilots were lasting, on average, three weeks. Within little more than a month after the Armistice, he had been demobilised and secured a civilian job with Vickers. He was then twenty years old.
Writing in the mid-1930s, he looked back to the failure of the postwar conferences, aimed at ensuring peace, to take note of air power, finally waking to the significance of that power with a shudder of horror. ‘No wonder. Frontiers were gone. Security was gone. No man could hope for peace or prosperity under the threat of a violent death. The days of war were over: massacre had taken their place, wholesale massacre of the community in which children would retch their lives away, women would be blinded and men powerless to protect or succour. The end of civilization was in sight.’[10]
Notes
[1] Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 251-252.
[2]The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 187.
[3] Sara Wheeler, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 199.
[4] Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (1995; London: Everyman, 2001), 364.
[5] Patrick Marnham, The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company 1994), 112.
[6] Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000), 409.
[7] W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), 41.
[8] Laurence Zachar, ‘Guy Davenport. Lexington, Kentucky: December 1991’, Effets de voix (Tours: Presses universitaires François Rabelais, 1994). See: http://books.openedition.org/pufr/3904 (accessed 20 January 2021).
[9] Guy Davenport, ‘The Aeroplanes at Brescia’, Hudson Review, 22, 4 (Winter, 1969-1970), 567-585; Tatlin! Six Stories (New York: Scribner’s, 1974), 52-70.
‘We drove up once to the Sequoia forest’, Christopher Isherwood told W. I. Scobie, ‘and I remember Stravinsky, so tiny, looking up at this enormous giant Sequoia and standing there for a long time in meditation and then turning to me and saying: “That’s serious.”’[1]
Sometimes, even for those long-practised in weathering it, the news becomes so distressing—and the public pronouncements of senior politicians so disgusting—that it’s best to pause, assuming you’re in the luxurious position of being able to do so.
Ford Madox Ford or, let’s say, the narrator, does just that on page fifteen of It Was the Nightingale, which I’m currently reading for—let’s say the fifth time, not to sound too crazy. He pauses ‘with one foot off the kerb at the corner of the Campden Hill waterworks’. He is ‘about to cross the road. But, whilst I stood with one foot poised in air, suddenly I recognised my unfortunate position. . . .’ His rendering of the reflections that occur to him in that position appear to end, or pause, around page 88.
A few years back, I was writing about Ford and comedy, about genres and how comic writing is not viewed using the same critical criteria as ‘serious’ writing, discussing mostly the novels by Ford that might be regarded as comic: farces, satires for the most part. I was struck by a passage in a Guy Davenport essay:
‘When Nostromo and Cabbages and Kings were published in 1904, we were beginning to make a distinction not among the four large types of literature which Northrop Frye has named comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire, or spring, summer, autumn, and winter spirits of the imagination, but between comic and serious. Some writers, like Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Bernard Shaw, were allowed to be both at once, but with the understanding that the comic was being put in the service of the serious. The seriousness of the comic writer could only be sentimentality, and his business was to entertain, not to instruct’.[2]
Davenport writes as an admirer of O. Henry, a fat selection of whose stories he edited and introduced for Penguin Books. ‘To those friends who knew his past’, he writes there, ‘O. Henry always compared himself to Lord Jim.’ His introduction ranges over the classics—unsurprisingly, Davenport being both classicist and modernist—and some of the writers, possibly unexpected, who have admired O. Henry’s stories, among them Cesare Pavese, the Russians of the Constructivist movement, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Alluding to practitioners of the New Comedy, he remarks: ‘Miserable as our century is, we can still boast that for seventy years of it we had P. G. Wodehouse, the Menander de nos jours, and for ten years O. Henry.’[3]
Ford being one of those who was surely ‘allowed to be both at once’, I tried to convey how many comic moments—certainly passages that made me laugh—there were in the ‘serious’ books, not excluding The Good Soldier and Parade’s End.[4] I’ve wondered since whether I shouldn’t simply have said: Well, just read It Was the Nightingale. But no. It’s perfectly possible to explain, or attempt in accepted ways to do so, why you think a writer or a painter is good, what they succeed in, their distinctive personal characteristics. But explaining why someone is funny? Can it be done? You might explain why you personally find something funny but that may sound, to a reluctant or sceptical listener, as interesting and persuasive as your last night’s dream.
I quoted the estimable Frank Budgen on his friend, author of the comic masterpiece, Ulysses: ‘one day Joyce laughed and said to me: “Some people were up at our flat last night and we were talking about Irish wit and humour. And this morning my wife said to me, “[w]hat is all this about Irish wit and humour? Have we any book in the house with any of it in? I’d like to read a page or two.”’[5]
If the reader doesn’t find Ulysses funny, I suspect it’s because it feels intimidating too: this huge book, full of words, phrases, constructions, comparisons, images and symbols that you’re never come across before. Not, anyway, in those contexts and those combinations. Worse, it’s the Greatest Novel of the century or one that defined an era or the justification for the whole modern movement or—but is it funny? Well, yes, probably not if you go through it on tiptoe or hands and knees, peering warily about you as you go. But if you can relax, telling yourself that you’ll come back to it with a pick and shovel at some later date but just not now – pour a glass (leave the bottle) and sit back in that comfortable chair – things may go better.
I linger over that phrase—‘things may go better’—just for a moment, you understand. How could I not?
Notes
[1]Writers at Work. The Paris Review Interviews: 4th Series, edited by George Plimpton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 232.
[2] ‘The Artist as Critic’, in Every Force Evolves a Form (Berkeley: North Point Press, 1987), 79.
[3] ‘Introduction’ to O. Henry, Selected Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), xi, xv. Possible additions to these inheritors of the New Comedy are ‘the exotic and manic S. J. Perelman and the gentle, whimsical Thurber’.
[4] ‘Ford and Comedy’, Sara Haslam, Laura Colombino and Seamus O’Malley, editors, The Routledge Research Companion to Ford Madox Ford (London: Routledge, 2019), 427-440.
[5] Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ and other writings, enlarged edition (1934; London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 38.
(George Romney, Mirth and Melancholy (Miss Wallis, Later Mrs James Campbell): National Trust, Petworth House)
‘What did you do in the end times?’ Well, among other things, I reread Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War with immense pleasure and admiration. Here is the eunuch in the hallway of the Pomegranate nightclub in Athens: ‘His face was grey-white, matte, and very delicately lined. It was fixed in an expression of profound melancholy.’[1]
In 1915, after refraining from reading it until he had his own ‘few pages’ out of the way, Joseph Conrad wrote to the author of The Good Soldier: ‘The women are extraordinary—in the laudatory sense—and the whole “Vision” of the subject perfectly amazing. And talking of cadences, one hears all through them a tone of fretful melancholy extremely effective. Something new, this, in Your work my dear Ford – c’est très, très curieux. Et c’est très bien, très juste. You may take my word for that —speaking as an unsophisticated reader first—and as homme du métier afterwards—after reflection.’[2]
That ‘fretful melancholy’ is perhaps a distant relation of the ‘hilarious depression’ identified by Graham Greene in his review of Ford’s Provence.[3] But it’s the word ‘melancholy’ that lingers more determinedly: how could it not, in yet another news cycle dominated by the latest governmental cowardice, grubbiness and xenophobia?
‘Come to me my melancholy baby/ Cuddle up and don’t be blue’. So ran the 1912 song, ‘My Melancholy Baby’, since associated with some famous names—Judy Garland, Al Bowlly, Connie Francis, Bing Crosby. The word itself has a long history, beginning as one of the four humours in Hippocratic medicine. Black bile, linked not only to melancholy but to one of the elements, Earth, and later to the season of autumn.[4] John Keats grants melancholy goddess status, associating her with beauty and joy as well as loss: ‘Ay, in the very temple of Delight/ Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine’.[5] But such nuances were sternly ironed out over time and the word became, as it has essentially remained, a near-synonym for sadness, though usually implying something deeper and longer-lasting than the common or garden kind and, often, of rather mysterious or inexplicable origin.
‘This was one of the blackest days that I ever passed. I was most miserably melancholy’, the sufferer James Boswell wrote; and in a letter of the following year: ‘Yet let me remember this truth: I am subject to melancholy, and of the operations of melancholy, reason can give no account.’[6] He recalled of Dr Johnson: ‘Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, he said, was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.’[7] Robert Burton and Edward Young, author of Night Thoughts, are probably the big cheeses of British gloom. I have a copy of the Anatomy, a reprint of the 1932 edition, introduced then by Holbrook Jackson (bibliophile and journalist, who had bought the New Age in partnership with A. R. Orage), and in the New York Review Books edition by William Gass. I have, though, only sampled and dipped, rather than read cover to cover. Alexandra Harris mentioned that Burton, ‘it was rumoured, took his own life in his college room in Christ Church. If this is true, the date makes sense. He died on 25 January 1640, well past the encouraging feasts of Christmas, at a melancholy time of the year.’[8]
An understandable trajectory there: the falling off or lapsing back from good fare and company to a more customary level, and the likely worsening of weather into the bargain. Melancholy often sits companionably enough beside modifying words or notions. Robert Graves remembered an old man in an antique shop telling him that ‘everyone died of drink in Limerick except the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia.’[9] Ernst Jünger, fighting on the Western Front, remarked: ‘How often since that first time I’ve gone up the line through dead scenery in that strange mood of melancholy exaltation!’ And he remembered walking through a neglected but flourishing landscape: ‘Nature seemed to be pleasantly intact, and yet the war had given it a suggestion of heroism and melancholy; its almost excessive blooming was even more radiant and narcotic than usual.’[10]
(Dorothy Adamson, Goats: Walker Gallery)
D. H. Lawrence decided that staying a long time in England made one ‘so melancholy’ but let that feeling extend to Sardinia and to other living creatures than troublesome humans: ‘Sometimes near at hand, long-haired, melancholy goats leaning sideways like tilted ships under the eaves of some scabby house. The call the house-eaves the dogs’ umbrellas. In town you see the dogs trotting close under the wall out of the wet. Here the goats lean like rock, listing inwards to the plaster wall. Why look out?’[11]
Lawrence and animals. I have a vague (and getting vaguer) memory of an exam question which I seized upon – was it writers on the animal world or specifically Lawrence? A resounding victory for the vagueness. I certainly wrote about Lawrence and, what, horses, snakes, cattle, perhaps even goats. It used to be a not uncommon ploy for people to concede cautiously that Lawrence was ‘very good with children and animals’, as though he couldn’t be trusted with anything else. Perhaps, for them, he couldn’t. Unsettling sort of chap. There are increasing numbers of unsettling figures in literary history as boundaries soften or bend. Is she modernist or not? Is he essentially Georgian or Victorian or. . .? The either/or becoming both or several or all.
Nick Jenkins, narrator of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, reflects of Dicky Umfraville: ‘He seemed still young, a person like oneself; and yet at the same time his appearance and manner proclaimed that he had had time to live at least a few years of his grown-up life before the outbreak of war in 1914. Once I had thought of those who had known the epoch of my own childhood as “older people”. Then I had found there existed people like Umfraville who seemed somehow to span the gap. They partook of both eras, specially forming the tone of the postwar years; much more so, indeed, than the younger people. Most of them, like Umfraville, were melancholy; perhaps from the strain of living simultaneously in two different historical periods.’[12]
Umfraville! Umfraville! – a composition for trombones or some other confident brass instruments. A bleak and almost wintry sky. ‘Cuddle up and don’t be blue’.
Notes
[1] Olivia Manning, Friends and Heroes (1965) in The Balkan Trilogy (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 802.
[2]The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 5 1912-1916, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 529.
[3] ‘As in his fiction he writes out of a kind of hilarious depression’: London Mercury, xxxix (December 1938), in Frank MacShane, editor, Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 173.
[4] Roy Porter has a useful diagram of humours and elements in his The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 58.
[5] John Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, in The Complete Poems, edited by John Barnard, 3rd edition (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 349.
[6]Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763, edited by Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1950), 213-214; letter to William Temple, 17 April 1764, in Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764, edited by Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1952), 220.
[7] James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by R. W. Chapman, revised by J. D. Fleeman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 438.
[8] Alexandra Harris, Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 123.
[9] Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 349.
[10] Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, translated by Michael Hofmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), 9, 143.
[11]Letters of D. H. Lawrence II, June 1913-October 1916, edited by George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 25; Sea and Sardinia (1921), in D. H. Lawrence and Italy (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 13.
[12] Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World, in A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 153.
(Samuel Bough, Cricket Match at Edenside, Carlisle: Tulle House Museum and Art Gallery)
September. Autumn at last; and an end to the nonsense of summer, the increasingly anachronistic expectation of pleasant weather, an expectation mistreated by endless rain or unbearable heat. And, on Samuel Johnson’s birthday, a revisiting of his remark to Doctor Brocklesby (as refracted through James Boswell): ‘The weather indeed is not benign; but how low is he sunk whose strength depends upon the weather!’[1]
On another day, though white clouds are piled so high as to be on the point of toppling over onto the crowns of trees, they’re surrounded by sky so blue that one suspects a gargantuan deception. Still, disposable barbecues, spawned by the Devil, are nowhere to be seen and the grass of the park has been mown again, which always imparts a faint whiff of paradise.
Le paradis n’est pas artificiel, l’enfer non plus.
Ezra Pound at Pisa, with hell very much on his mind.[2] ‘I am now the proud possessor of a Johnson’s Dictionary’, Guy Davenport announced to Hugh Kenner in 1967. ‘Dorothy [Pound] once told me EP has never owned any other, and sure enough, practically every word of H[ugh]S[elwyn]M[auberley] is used with Johnson’s rhetorical colouring (juridical, adjunct, phantasm, factitious).’[3]
Walking is more comfortable in the cooler weather, thinking also. And the near-neighbours, we dare to believe, are gone, their riotous tenancy ended. The next lot may, of course, be anything from a heavy metal band that just loves to rehearse to a group of trainee Trappists. We await with interest. So the mood swings between, say, states represented by quotations, the first something like Clare Leighton’s: ‘Who can resist the Lincolnshire name for the wild pansy: meet-her-in-the-entry-kiss-her-in-the-buttery?’ Well, not me, obviously. On the other hand, there is always the reliable standby from D. H. Lawrence’s letter to E. M. Forster: ‘I am in a black fury with the world, as usual.’[4]
There are diversions, of course, of the usual kind, usual at this kitchen table anyway (between meals). In the ‘Credits’ section of Bad Actors, after the usual acknowledgements (publishers, agents, all those involved in the TV series of Slow Horses), Mick Herron recalls an email from a reader informing him that a line he’d used in Slough House was ‘more or less from a Robert Frost poem’. Herron asked for ‘many dozens of similar offences to be taken into consideration.’[5] And it’s true that one of the many pleasures of reading his books is picking up echoes, half-echoes, perhaps-echoes from poets and novelists. Some might not stand up in court—courts vary, as is painfully clear by now, I suspect—but I’m pretty sure about this from the third Zoë Boehm book, Why We Die: ‘Life was too short to approach death head-on. On that journey you took any diversion available – marriage, travel, children, alcohol. At the very least, you stopped to admire the view.’[6] Beside which I would set the resonant advice from William Carlos Williams, to ‘approach death at a walk, take in all the scenery.’[7] Elsewhere, Margery Allingham’s detective, Albert Campion, remarks to Guffy Randall: ‘“Across the face of the East Suffolk Courier and Hadleigh Argus, Fate’s moving finger writes, and not very grammatically either”.’[8] The response of the many readers of Edward Fitzgerald’s rendering of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is surely to nod sagely at a clear or misty memory of stanza LI:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.[9]
(A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and Edmund Dulac)
Or again, thirteen pages earlier, Campion talking of the intention to wait for an offer of purchase ‘and then to freeze on to the vendor with the tenacity of bull-pups.’ Bull-pups? Freezing? Here is Sherlock Holmes telling Dr John Watson in ‘The “Gloria Scott”’: ‘Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only through the accident of his bull terrier freezing onto my ankle one morning as I went down to chapel.’[10]
(Sidney Paget, Strand magazine illustration to ‘The “Gloria Scott”‘)
Do I find this stuff diverting? Why yes, in between those other matters of life and love and death and war. Some varied reading and even some varied writing, on the better days. But there are also visits to the vet with Harry the cat, the usual budget of human aches and pains, as well as that constant screaming of the world outside these walls. Winter, no doubt, is coming. Yet there are still pockets of sense and sanity to be found. One of my latest is the excellent Melissa Harrison’s new Witness Marks (‘A monthly miscellany from a little Suffolk cottage: nature and the seasons, poetry, books and writing, thoughts on creativity, news and Qs’).
I read, listen, enjoy and – yes – learn a few things.
Notes
[1] James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by R. W. Chapman, revised by J. D. Fleeman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 1338.
[2]The Cantos of Ezra Pound, fourth collected edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 76/460.
[3]Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward M. Burns, two volumes (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2018), II, 904. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755.
[4] Clare Leighton, Four Hedges: A Gardener’s Chronicle (1935; Toller Fratrum: Little Toller Books, 2010), 40; Letters of D. H. Lawrence III, October 1916–June 1921, edited by James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 21.
[5] Mick Herron, Bad Actors (London: John Murray, 2022), 339-340.
[6] Mick Herron, Why We Die (London: John Murray, 2020), 122.
[7] William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell (1920), in Imaginations (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1970), 32.
[9] In Daniel Karlin, editor, The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 125.
[10] Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2 volumes, edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company 2005), I, 502. Klinger quotes Nicholas Utechin’s Sherlock Holmes at Oxford to the effect that Trevor’s bull terrier ‘has been a subject more disputed by scholars in the Sherlockian world than any other—animal, vegetable, or mineral’, the issue of which university Holmes attended being a highly contentious one and the dog a crucial clue.
Reconstructionary Tales 