Literary History – Reconstructionary Tales

Simple Hearts, Simple Words

(The photograph is by Francesca Woodman)

In her introduction to the New York Review Books edition of Richard Hughes’ The Fox in the Attic, Hilary Mantel refers to the very slow writer that Hughes had been even with his first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica (1929). By the time he had devised, planned and begun to write ‘The Human Predicament’, two volumes of which appeared before his death, leaving just twelve chapters of the intended third volume, he was perhaps even slower. ‘He writes in short chapters’, Mantel noted, ‘many of which are self-contained, miniaturized works of art. Some went through fifty drafts. There were times when most of his work was deletion. He would claim to have done 50,000 words, which would “progress” to 10,000.’[1]

There is slow writing and there is an inability to finish, sometimes overlapping, sometimes distinct. Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952. He wrote some 2000 pages of another which remained unfinished. Joseph Heller’s debut novel Catch-22 had to wait some thirteen years before Something Happened arrived to keep it company in the Heller oeuvre. It was decades after Henry Roth’s first novel Call It Sleep (1934) that another long fiction appeared (he had destroyed a second novel, apparently, despite Maxwell Perkins believing it to be brilliant). Ezra Pound’s Cantos remained unfinished and we can only wonder how—perhaps if—that poem could ever have been completed. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake famously took some sixteen years, though even a cursory look at the text severely diminishes any initial feeling of surprise at that statistic.

Joyce was working on an earlier book when he met the painter Frank Budgen in Zurich. After reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Joyce had given him, Budgen learned about the novel then underway. Encountering Joyce one evening, he asks how Ulysses is progressing. Joyce replies: ‘I have been working hard on it all day.’

‘Does that mean you have written a great deal?’ I said.
‘Two sentences,’ said Joyce.
I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of Flaubert.
‘You have been seeking the mot juste?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Joyce. ‘I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I have it.’[2]

‘I thought of Flaubert.’ Hence le mot juste. Hence Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad discussing for ‘a whole day’ the suitability in a specific context of the word ‘azure’.[3] But before them, the Brothers Goncourt (1 September 1876):

‘Flaubert told me that during the two months he had spent confined to his room, the heat had given him a kind of intoxicated urge to work, and he had worked for fifteen hours every day. He went to bed at four o’clock in the morning and was sometimes surprised to find himself back at his writing-table at nine. A grind interrupted only by a swim in the Seine in the evening.
‘And the result of those nine hundred hours of work is a story thirty pages long.’[4]

This was Un coeur simple, written between March and August 1876, one of the Trois Contes published in 1877.

Ford had referred to Trois Contes in a 1905 article, a group of ‘men of letters’ talking of exchanging books, the ones ‘which, for each of us, are particularly our own.’[5] Twenty years later, writing of ‘real France, which is one, indivisible and unchanging’, he alluded to ‘Une coeur simple’ again: ‘Mme Aubain still sits beside the white wainscoting, looking through the windows at the life of the street; Félicité is still at work from kitchen to grénier’.[6]

Midway between those citings was his second volume of rather idiosyncratic ‘propaganda’, written for his friend Charles Masterman, who was in charge of the British propaganda department at Wellington House, Between St Dennis and St George. The epilogue, ‘Félicité’ (193-222), drew on half a dozen of Ford’s articles in The Outlook between 1 May and 5 June 1915, the last of them entitled ‘Un Coeur Simple’. Terming ‘Felicité’ the story which ‘at this moment, is of most significance to the world’, Ford responds to an imagined querying of that statement: ‘I can only answer that the exact use of words seems to me to be the most important thing in the world. We are, in the end, governed so much more by words than by deeds.’ And if, he adds, ‘with humility and attention you will read the following sentences you will know more of France than if you spend months and months and months in one of the large hotels near the Tuileries Gardens.’

(Alexander Jamieson, The Tuileries Gardens and the Rue de Rivoli: Tate)

He then goes on to quote (203-204) a 95-word passage from Flaubert’s conte, describing the room in which Madame Aubain—whom all the good ladies of Pont-l’Évêque envy for her servant Félicité—sits all day: ‘Un vieux piano supportait, sous un baromètre, un tas pyramidal de boites et de cartons.’ The passage closes with the comment, ‘et tout l’appartement sentait un peu le moisi car le plancher était plus bas que le jardin.’ Ford, in his long paragraph following the French passage, renders this as ‘and all the room will smell a little of mould because the floor is a little lower than the garden.’

Sixteen lines into Ezra Pound’s ‘Canto VII’ (1921) comes this:
Un peu moisi, plancher plus bas que le jardin.

Then:
‘Contre le lambris, fauteuil de paille,
Un vieux piano, et sous le baromètre. . .’[7]

Did Pound read Between St Dennis and St George? He was—as always—busy. Did he read Ford’s earlier propaganda volume, When Blood is Their Argument? Yes and no. On 18 April, he wrote to the lawyer, art collector and patron John Quinn: ‘Have told the Neutral Nations committee to send you copy of F.M.H.’s book which opens entertainingly. haven’t had time to read it.’[8]

(John Quinn with W. B. Yeats: New York Public Library)

But he would have kept his eye on The Outlook, in which Ford’s weekly columns were appearing. Just two weeks after ‘Un Coeur Simple’, Ford’s article was headed ‘From China to Peru’, an allusion to Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes (itself an ‘imitation’ of Juvenal’s tenth satire). In it, Ford reviewed, firstly, Yerba Maté by M. A. [Maud Adeline] Cloudesley Brereton, ‘Officier d’Académie, Royal Sanitary Institute, Fellow of the Institute of Hygiene’, the South American connection allowing him to bring in admiring references to Charles Waterton and W. H. Hudson.

Secondly, he turned to Cathay (published in April), ‘Translations by Ezra Pound For the Most Part From the Chinese of Rihaku, From the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga.’ Ford summarised this as ‘renderings of Chinese poems that are a thousand years old—at least I suppose that they are renderings and not part of a mystification by the bard of Idaho—or is it Montana? For, if these are original verses, then Mr Pound is the greatest poet of this day.’[9]

‘We are, in the end, governed so much more by words than by deeds.’ ‘A thousand years’. . . ‘one, indivisible and unchanging’. Simple words and phrases seemingly innocuous in themselves may ring alarm bells later, perhaps especially in an era of such grotesque historical ironies.

Notes

[1] Hilary Mantel, ‘Introduction’, Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), xiii.

[2] Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ and other writings, enlarged edition (1934; London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 20. The sentences are: ‘Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.’ From Chapter VIII, ‘Lestrygonians’: James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; London: The Bodley Head, revised edition, 1969), 214.

[3] Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), 160.

[4] Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, Pages From the Goncourt Journal, edited and translated by Robert Baldick (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 224.

[5] Ford, ‘A Literary Causerie: The Less-Known Flaubert’, Academy, 69 (11 Nov. 1905), 1175.

[6] Ford, A Mirror to France (London: Duckworth, 1926), 16-17; also 36-43; and Portraits From Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 217; Thus to Revisit (London: Chapman & Hall, 1921), 138, 140.

[7] The Cantos of Ezra Pound, fourth collected edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 24.

[8] The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915-1924, edited by Timothy Materer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 26.

[9] Ford, ‘From China to Peru’, Outlook, XXXV (19 June 1915), 800-801. T. S. Eliot wrote in Ezra Pound : His Metric and Poetry (1917): ‘“Cathay” will, I believe, rank with the “Sea-Farer” in the future among Mr. Pound’s original work.’ Reprinted in To Criticize the Critic and other writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 181. ‘Rihaku’ is the Romanised version of the Japanese pronunciation of ‘Li Po’ (or ‘Li Bai’).

Pick a decade

(any decade, look at it, put it back, don’t tell me what it was)

(An anti-fascist protester is arrested during the battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images via The Guardian)

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade

(W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’)

Christopher Isherwood’s birthday having slipped past a few days ago, I wondered how long ago it was that I read him. Most of those books—the Berlin novels, Lions and Shadows, Prater Violet, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, A Meeting by the River—I see were back in the 1970s. Christopher and His Kind, not much later; only Exhumations at all recently.[1] One of those writers, I suppose, that fits a time in the reader’s—this reader’s—life, is read once and enjoyed and put back on the shelf.

Isherwood crops up in other contexts, of course, in reading about Aldous Huxley or Edward Upward or W. H. Auden. There was Auden’s letter to him—more than one—printed as a part of Letters from Iceland, the travel book that Auden and Louis MacNeice collaborated on during their trip to the country in the summer of 1936:

‘Though I am sure you would enjoy a visit as much as I did, I think that, in the long run, the Scandinavian sanity would be too much for you, as it is for me. The truth is, we are both only really happy living among lunatics.’[2] (Note that strongly-indicated luxury of choice.)

(Christopher Isherwood and Auden at the railway station prior to their departure for China, 1938. Photo © Hulton-Deutsch collection/CORBIS/via Getty Images)

Between this trip and publication of Letters from Iceland in August 1937, Auden had been to Spain in January of that year and published his poem ‘Spain’ in April. Many readers recall particularly the final lines’ assertion, that ‘History to the defeated/ May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’ Samuel Hynes points out that Auden later ‘condemned this passage as “wicked doctrine”, on the grounds that it equates goodness with success.’ Hynes adds: ‘But in fact it does nothing of the kind; what it says is simply that History is Necessity, and that it is made by men’s choices. Once it is made, help and pardon are irrelevant. It is a harsh morality for a harsh time, but it is nevertheless a morality, and not a wicked one.’[3]

Other readers—or the same ones—will remember perhaps more readily the criticism by George Orwell, primarily of the line: ‘The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’. Seizing on this, Orwell commented: ‘But notice the phrase “necessary murder”. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder.’ And he goes on to mention that he has seen the bodies of murdered men, as well as experiencing the related issues of grief, terror, post-mortems, ‘the howling relatives’ and the rest.[4]

Auden’s poem was revised, probably in late 1939, and collected in Another Time (1940). As Edward Mendelson comments, ‘Some readers have assumed that Auden changed this on reading George Orwell’s criticism of the poem in Inside the Whale, but Auden first published his revision a month before Orwell published his objection.’[5]

Louis MacNeice too went to Spain: once in the spring of 1936, with Anthony Blunt (art historian, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Soviet spy), a few months before the outbreak of the Civil War; and again, in December 1938, during the last phase of the war, nine or ten days of walking or being driven around Barcelona. The city fell to Franco’s forces a little more than a fortnight after MacNeice’s departure.[6]

Of Madrid on that first trip, he wrote:

And all we did
   In that city was drink and think and loiter.
And in the Prado half-
   wit princes looked from the canvas they had paid for
(Goya had the laugh –
   But can what is corrupt be cured by laughter?)

And leaving:

And next day took the boat
   For home, not realising
That Spain would soon denote
   Our grief, our aspirations;
Not knowing that our blunt
   Ideals would find their whetstone, that our spirit
Would find its frontier on the Spanish front,
   Its body in a rag-tag army.[7]

Reviewing Jon Stallworthy’s biography of MacNeice, Penelope Fitzgerald commented: ‘In Spain, he had only noticed what was inefficient, magnificent, smelly, and picturesque, he wouldn’t pretend to have predicted the civil war.’[8] But even in 1936, and not just in Spain, the atmosphere was already thick with threat, menace, blood on the stairs, armed thugs in the streets, political ravings and racist demagoguery.

At the close of Letters from Iceland is MacNeice’s ‘Epilogue For W. H. Auden’:

For the litany of doubt
From these walls comes breathing out
Till the room becomes a pit
Humming with the fear of it

With the fear of loneliness
And uncommunicableness;
All the wires are cut, my friends
Live beyond the severed ends.

So I write these lines for you
Who have felt the death-wish too,
But your lust for life prevails
Drinking coffee, telling tales.

Our prerogatives as men
Will be cancelled who knows when;
Still I drink your health before
The gun-butt raps upon the door.[9]

From the 1930s to now, almost one hundred years. Are there currently fewer or more countries in which the rap of a gun-butt on your front door—or the local variation, petrol bombs, howling mobs, bricks— is only too likely?

(Laura Knight, The Nuremberg Trial 1946: Imperial War Museum)

In September 1946, Rebecca West, in her ‘Eye-Witness Impressions of the Nuremberg Trial’, published in the Daily Telegraph, ‘reiterated that the point of the judgement was to warn future warmongers that the peace would catch up with them and punish them.’[10]

The ‘warning’ was of shamefully brief duration and impact since, only three years later, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, denounced the policy of ‘denazification’, pushing for amnesties and early releases, and by 1951 nearly 700,000 people had benefited. Adenauer’s State Secretary Hans Globke turned out to have played a major role in the drafting of the Nuremberg Race Laws but he kept his job.

And those ‘future warmongers’? Peace catching up and punishing them?

Ah, well.

Notes

[1] This collection includes Isherwood’s review of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, but also a story that stuck in my head for years, ‘A Visit to Anselm Oakes’, originally written as part of the novel, Down There on a Visit.

[2] W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 30.

[3] Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation (1976; London: Pimlico, 1992), 254.

[4] George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in A Patriot After All: 1940-1941, edited by Peter Davison, revised and updated edition (London: Secker and Warburg, 2000): The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume XII, 103.

[5] W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, edited by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 424-425.

[6] Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 234-237.

[7] Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal, in Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), 113, 114. That line-ending, ‘blunt’, presumably not by chance.

[8] Fitzgerald, ‘A Kind of Magician’, in A House of Air: Selected Writings, edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 349.

[9] Letters from Iceland, 261; reprinted as ‘Postscript to Iceland: for W. H. Auden’ in Collected Poems, 98.

[10] Quoted by Natalie Livingstone, The Nuremberg Women (London: John Murray, 2026), 264-265.

Human Voices

(Harold Charles Harvey, The Tea Table: Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery)

Writing at the kitchen table was the title of the fine biography of Elizabeth David by Artemis Cooper.[1] It is also my current location, though updates arrive promptly and audibly from the front room where the Librarian is keeping a wary eye on the latest idiocy or outrage via news bulletins from the BBC, whose coverage of this latest disaster has been exemplary. I award myself no prizes for guessing to whom such of her phrases as ‘That’s insane’ or ‘He’s just nuts’ apply.

Voices whose variations, intonations and emphases we can read are often those learned over extended periods of time. But with literary voices or, rather, the closeness with which the voice fits the materials, the words on the page, the sense of fitness, of a join as fine as those of a master carpenter, the reader’s grasp can be almost immediate. A recent example for me was Rebecca Perry’s novel, May We Feed the King, the curator’s voice so exactly right that my confidence was assured from the outset.

Voices. On Ezra Pound’s 1939 visit to the United States, when he asked Louis Zukofsky if ‘it was possible to educate certain politicians’, Zukofsky retorted, ‘Whatever you don’t know, Ezra, you ought to know voices.’[2] As indeed he ought: of the Cantos, Guy Davenport wrote that voices ‘predominate in the poem’, that in fact its ‘basic metric’ is ‘simply the rhythm of talk.’[3]

Such concerns are not confined to the major modernists, though of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Hugh Kenner remarked that it is, ‘so to speak, a telephone poem, its multiple voices referrable to a massive short-circuit at the central exchange.’[4]

Eliot’s earlier masterpiece, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ ends with the reflection that:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Did that phrase furnish Penelope Fitzgerald with the title of her 1980 novel? As Hermione Lee notes, London was bombed from late August 1940 and Fitzgerald’s Human Voices is set precisely in that period, March to September, though Fitzgerald only started work at the BBC in December 1940.[5] The wartime BBC, Fitzgerald wrote, was ‘dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective. And yet there was no guarantee of this. Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness.’[6]

(Penelope Fitzgerald via The Telegraph)

It would be encouraging if it were still the case that truth ensures trust but the truth has numerous enemies these days, some of them very powerful and very well-funded. We are all familiar with what has long been recognised as the first casualty of war. By way of context, the Reporters Without Borders annual World Press Freedom Index for 2025 mentions the major factor of economic pressure, much of it due to ‘ownership concentration, pressure from advertisers and financial backers, and public aid that is restricted, absent or allocated in an opaque manner.’

https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-economic-fragility-leading-threat-press-freedom

That index, by the way, has the United Kingdom at number 20, the United States at number 57, and Israel at number 112.

Denton Welch heard a voice through a cloud; and, writing to John Flaxman (‘Dear Sculptor of Eternity’) in September 1800, William Blake reported of the arrival at the cottage in Felpham, in West Sussex (where he wrote Milton: A Poem): ‘I have begun to work. Felpham is a sweet place for Study. because it is more Spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates her windows are not obstructed by vapours. . voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard & their forms more distinctly seen & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses.’

(Detail from an illustration to Blake’s Milton)
Work to restore Blake’s cottage is still going on and needs support:
https://www.blakecottage.org/

Voices from clouds, from angels, from spectres are all very well in their place. And it’s true that of the earthbound kind, there are no guarantees of truthfulness or rationality or consistency. Readers of William Faulkner may well recall Quentin Compson’s observation: ‘They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.’[7]

Nevertheless, with all its attendant hazards, frustrations and uncertainties, my current plan remains to hold fast to human voices.

Notes

[1] Artemis Cooper, Writing at the Kitchen Table: Elizabeth David (London: Penguin Books 2000).

[2] Louis Zukofsky, ‘Work/Sundown’, in Preposition The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (London: Rapp and Carroll, 1967), 157.

[3] Guy Davenport, Cities on Hills: A Study of I–XXX of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983), 70.

[4] Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 36.

[5] Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 2013), 69.

[6] Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices (1980; London: Everyman, 2003), 145.

[7] The Sound and the Fury (1929), in Novels 1926-1929, edited by Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk (New York: Library of America, 2006), 967.

Crocuses promising well and not waiting for rain

Sitting at the kitchen table, a cat within the circle of my arms, flanked by James Baldwin and Walter de la Mare, I was thinking about crocuses.

The poet Edmund Blunden, then serving in the 11th Royal Sussex, ‘heard an evening robin in a hawthorn, and in trampled gardens among the luggage of war, as Milton calls it, there was the fairy, affectionate immortality of the yellow rose and blue-grey crocus.’[1] And: ‘The garden is gay with crocuses’, Ford Madox Ford wrote to John Rodker in March 1920, ‘or sh^dit be crocoi?’ De la Mare himself was not wholly adverse to a crocus: ‘the crocus soon/ Will open grey and distracted/ On earth’s austerity’; ‘as near, that is, as any name can be to a thing—viz, crocus, or comfit, or shuttlecock, or mistletoe, or pantry’; ‘Miss Curtis would no more have dreamed of sharing this old ghost with, say, Miss Mavor, than a crocus would dream of blossoming at the foot of the North Pole.’[2]

Literary, literary. It was, in fact, while walking in the park, that the Librarian drew my attention to a small group of crocuses, harbingers of spring, a welcome light in the encroaching gloom of the year so far, not least because of seemingly inexhaustible rain. We had rain on twenty-six days out of thirty-one in January. Several places outstripped that, there were floods on the Somerset Levels and elsewhere. But in any case—literary again!—the mention of crocuses always brings to mind Sherlock Holmes, specifically the alarming appearance of the gigantic and ferocious Dr Roylott, who has ‘dashed open’ the door of the sitting-room at 221b Baker Street:

(Illustration by Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, February 1892)

‘“Which of you is Holmes?” asked this apparition.
“My name, sir; but you have the advantage of me,” said my companion quietly.
“I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.”
“Indeed, Doctor,” said Holmes blandly. “Pray take a seat.”
“I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I have traced her. What has she been saying to you?”
“It is a little cold for the time of the year,” said Holmes.
“What has she been saying to you?” screamed the old man furiously.
“But I have heard that the crocuses promise well,” continued my companion imperturbably.’[3]

The promise of crocuses—or should it be crocoi? Promises, promises. Spring, yes, and all that it connotes. Or, perhaps, all that it used to connote.

‘The past has consequences in the present regardless of whether we know what happened in it; learning the history makes those consequences intelligible.’[4]

The month recently ended will soon be a finite, measurable chunk of that past, a blood smear on some historian’s page. Harold Wilson may or may not have said that a week is a long time in politics; Joseph Chamberlain, some eighty years earlier, is fairly reliably recorded as asserting that there’s no use in looking beyond the next fortnight.

Glancing around at a volatile and feverish world I was about to remark in an email to a friend that—hardly surprisingly—I seemed to be suffering from ‘the English disease’. I meant melancholia but remembered just in time that understanding of the term has varied over time, taking in rickets, a sluggish economy caused by industrial unrest, bronchitis, football hooliganism and more: ‘The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her’, Virginia Woolf wrote of her heroine/ hero Orlando.[5]

(Orlando, Hogarth Press, 1928)

Among the many pleasures of reading published diaries are the references to—or, sometimes, the lack of them, or delayed enlargement on them—what are later viewed as hugely significant events. I was recently reading Helen Garner’s impressive and enjoyable How To End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998 and seeing ‘The army has entered Tiananmen Square and machine-gunned students’ or ‘People are sitting on top of the Berlin Wall. They’re chipping chunks out of it with chisels, for souvenirs’. I wonder if some of what’s occurring now will be reducible in time to one or three or five lines. In what form will the United States survive? Will liberal or left of centre politicians learn how to do politics in this online, social media age so resistant to accurate information and inconvenient facts? Will Europe get its act—economics, security—together? I note various leaders’ recent responses as they finally accept that the current version of the United States is neither friend nor ally, and recall that appeasement didn’t work too well in the 1930s and is unlikely to do so now.

‘I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain’, James Baldwin wrote in ‘Notes of a Native Son’, first published as ‘Me and My House’ in November 1955.[6] Adam Shatz’s recent essay about the current situation in the United States, first delivered as a lecture, begins with Baldwin, who is also referenced in the piece’s title, ‘Another Country’ (Baldwin’s third novel). Shatz remarks that, though both parties have been ‘complicit in the creation of the imperial presidency and a neoliberal economic order’, ‘anyone who cares about the stability of the republic might have reason to regret the disintegration of moderate Republicanism, one of the defining structural features of American political life.’[7] We have suffered a version of that in this country too, with the collapse and near-disappearance of moderate Conservatism, those figures to whom we were totally opposed twenty or more years ago appearing now almost as beacons of light, intelligence and sweet reason, compared to the current crew. If I’d seriously believed then that the political landscape would be what it is, that certain individuals would be regarded as acceptable public servants, even as plausible contenders for government office, I would have sought medical help as a matter of urgency. Mais passons. There is always the rain. . .

‘If there’s much more of this’, I say to the Librarian as we trudge wetly home, ‘we might be living in a J. G. Ballard novel.’ We pass the City Farm, where their prize hens are sheltering, huddled together, beneath their chicken coop. It occurs to me that a number of Ballard novels might qualify though I was referring specifically to The Drowned World, which is, of course, concerned with rather more than water: ‘Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.’[8]

There has been very little brightness. Too often the sliver of sunlight glimpsed earlier in a day is—fittingly, in the current political climate—neither sincere, truthful, friendly or sustained. I’ve had the odd drenching myself but—full-length waterproof coat! umbrella! Englishman!—with no apparent ill-effects. Others have not always been so lucky. Perhaps ‘the most dramatic incident’ of Lewis Carroll’s life, Penelope Fitzgerald remarked, was the river expedition to Nuneham when the whole party, ‘including his aunt, two of his sisters, and Alice herself, got wet through and had to be taken to a friend’s house to dry off. In 1898, almost as an afterthought, Dodgson died of a cold and cough.’[9]

(Edith, Lorina and Alice Liddell)

Needless to say, awash as the country is, the disastrous privatisation of this vital resource, with its attendant greed and incompetence, has resulted in towns and villages running out of water, waiting days for their supplies to be reconnected or warned that they may have to be abandoned in the fairly near future. There is, apparently, a great deal more trouble to come: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/22/what-happens-england-water-run-out-drought-tunbridge-wells

The drought last summer was not as bad as it might have been because preceded by a wet autumn and winter, reservoirs well-filled and groundwater in a healthy state – certainly not as bad as that recalled by the novelist Violet Hunt. ‘We were in for a hot July—it was the year 1911 when heat and drought drove men mad, caused the cattle that supported them to be lean and perish, filled the Courts with murder and rapine, inflamed Strike committees, and incensed three nations to the verge of war for want of a little rain that might have staunched their hissing hatreds.’[10]

‘For want of a little rain.’ Just so.

Notes

[1] Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928; revised edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 117.

[2] Respectively, ‘The Children of Stare’, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 21; ‘Pigtails Ltd’, Walter de la Mare, Collected Stories for Children, edited by Giles de la Mare (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers Limited, 2006), 7; ‘The Picnic’, Short Stories, 1927-1956, edited by Giles de la Mare (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers Limited, 2001), 180.

[3] Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, in 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, 241-242..

[4] Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells (London: Head of Zeus, 2022), 11.

[5] Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 137.

[6] James Baldwin, ‘Notes of a Native Son’, in Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 7.

[7] Adam Shatz, ‘Another Country’, London Review of Books 48, 2 (5 February 2026), 3-10.

[8] J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 14.

[9] Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘In the Golden Afternoon’: A House of Air: Selected Writings, edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 81.

[10] Violet Hunt, The Flurried Years (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1926), 177-178.

Birth days (and other kinds)

‘Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.’
(Fragment of an Agon)[1]

Is T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney a little too concise here? You may be thinking, in some moods yes, in some moods no. You may even be thinking it a little too expansive. But most people, I suspect, might want to add a bit.

Take today, for instance, 17 December. The celebrated translator of Russian literature, Constance Garnett, died at 03:00 on this day in 1946. Over 70 English versions, of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Goncharov, Tolstoy. Dorothy Sayers, author of superb detective stories and translator of Dante, died in 1957, also on this day.

The middle term: throw in a wedding (and assume a positive). On 17 December 1914, the painter Paul Nash and Margaret Odeh—‘Bunty’—were married in St Martin-in-the-Fields by ‘the young pacifist vicar the Reverend Dick Sheppard.’[2] Cue the opening stanza of W. H. Auden’s Letter to Lord Byron:

Excuse, my lord, the liberty I take
   In thus addressing you. I know that you
Will pay the price of authorship and make
   The allowances an author has to do.
   A poet’s fan-mail will be nothing new.
And then a lord—Good Lord, you must be peppered,
Like Gary Cooper, Coughlin, or Dick Sheppard.[3]

Gary Cooper, at least, will still be a familiar name; the other two, these days, rather less so, though not to historians of the 1920s and 1930s: Sheppard, the priest whose sermons, broadcast by the BBC, made him a national figure, and who later founded the Peace Pledge Union; Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest who was also a widely-known broadcaster, though his anti-Semitic and pro-Fascist sympathies made his output rather different.

(Dick Sheppard broadcasting from St Martin-in-the-Fields: BBC)

On 17 December 1941, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to her friend Paul Nordoff: ‘Luckily, I have a tough memory for what I like, and I have most of it tucked away somewhere behind my ears.’[4] Just ten days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, then, a reminder if one were needed that on another 17 December—1903—Wilbur Wright’s fourth and last flight carried him 852 feet in 59 seconds.

The implications of that pioneering effort emerged with gradually increasing force and clarity a decade or so later. In 1915, Ezra Pound wrote to his parents (17 December): ‘Lewis has enlisted. That about takes the lot.’ He added: ‘I suppose we will go to France after the war. if it ever ends.’[5] Bombardier Wyndham Lewis would later recall that: ‘The war was a sleep, deep and animal, in which I was visited by images of an order very new to me. Upon waking I found an altered world: and I had changed, too, very much.’[6]

A few years on (17 December 1958) and the great Australian novelist Patrick White was writing to his friend and publisher Ben Huebsch—the rock on which White’s career was built, David Marr remarks—about his novel, Riders in the Chariot. ‘I shall want somebody here to check the Jewish parts after a second writing. I feel I may have given myself away a good deal, although passages I have been able to check for myself, seem to have come through either by instinct or good luck, so perhaps I shall survive. After all, I did survive the deserts of Voss.’ And in another letter to Huebsch, five months later, he returned to this: ‘What I want to emphasise through my four “Riders” – an orthodox refugee intellectual Jew, a mad Erdgeist [Earth spirit] of an Australian spinster, an evangelical laundress, and a half-caste aboriginal painter – is that all faiths, whether religious, humanistic, instinctive, or the creative artist’s act of praise, are in fact one.’[7] (I reread all Patrick White’s books seven years ago and I’m damned if I don’t feel almost ready to do it again. . .)

(Ford via New York Review of Books)

But then – why not celebrate? 17 December birthdays, yes: Humphry Davy, John Greenleaf Whittier, Erskine Caldwell, Paul Cadmus, Penelope Fitzgerald, Jacqueline Wilson, John Kennedy Toole – and the primary focus, or beginning spark, of all this anniversary rambling, Ford Madox Ford, 152 today.

His birthdays weren’t always joyous: at a party in 1901, he nearly choked on a chicken bone ‘and was prostrate for some days’.[8] In 1916, he was in a Red Cross Hospital in Rouen, writing to Joseph Conrad a couple of days later: ‘As for me—c’est fini de moi, I believe, at least as far as fighting is concerned—my lungs are all charred up & gone—they appeared to be quite healed, but exposure day after day has ended in the usual stretchers and ambulance trains’. In 1920, he spent at least a small portion of his birthday writing to Thomas Hardy, asking him to sign a manifesto protesting against British government policy in Ireland. It was published on 1 January 1921 in the Manchester Guardian and other papers. Fifty writers, artists and academics signed it but Thomas Hardy was not among them.

Past lives, past struggles, victories, defeats. Surely there is comfort to be found there, that they were faced with things we recognise only too well—not only the individual battles but the more general ones, against Fascism, vicious racism, authoritarianism, the hijacking of news, of the sources of information, the assaults on free speech, on civil liberties, on democratic rights—and came through. And we?

Optimism, pessimism. One up, one down; Monday, Tuesday; left hand; right hand. I liked Guy Davenport on the judicious estimate of his own make-up, reporting to Hugh Kenner that his friend Steve Diamant’s photographs included one that served as the author photograph on the dust jacket of Tatlin!, Davenport’s first collection of stories, or assemblages: ‘Guy beaming in the Dionysian priest’s chair, the Theatre, Athens. I had no notion such a radiant smile was in me. It cured a third of my paranoia and an eighth of my Calvinist pessimism to see it.’[9]

A whole eighth. Some photograph, some smile.

Notes

[1] T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 122.

[2] Ronald Blythe, First Friends: Paul and Bunty, John and Christine – and Carrington (London: Viking, 1999), 77; David Boyd Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance (London: Old Street Publishing, 2009), 238-9.

[3] W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, edited by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 169.

[4] Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letters, edited by William Maxwell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), 76.

[5] 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), 358.

[6] Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A narrative of my career up-to-date (London: Hutchinson, 1950), 129.

[7] Patrick White, Letters, edited by David Marr (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 151, 153. Marr’s remark about Huebsch’s importance is in ‘The Cast of Correspondents’, 638.

[8] Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (London: The Bodley Head, 1972), 73.

[9] Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward M. Burns, two volumes (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2018), I, 630.

‘The Weeping and the Laughter’

Almost August. Record–breaking temperatures in South Korea and Japan but a dull, grey morning here today. Even the saxophonist who practises in the small wood in the park may postpone his session for a while.

Emerging from Paul Willetts’ biography of Julian Maclaren-Ross, I was a little dizzy from the extraordinary sequences of work done, or proposed, or rewritten, of contracts honoured or let slip, of rooms and suites and flats rented and left in a series of moonlight flits or evictions, of creditors and lawsuits, landladies, hoteliers, retailers (a pram for his son Alex) and the post office (for telephone bills), of separations from, and reconciliations with, wives and girlfriends.[1] It’s difficult not to have a sense of being slightly bruised by contact with the innumerable knocks that the writer underwent. He was incurably extravagant and wasteful with money, nor did the alcoholism, heavy smoking, bad diet, amphetamine use and lack of exercise help much, and the fatal heart attack at the age of fifty-two is not wholly unexpected.

The two undeniable positives, though, are the biography itself, a prodigious feat of research and writing; and Maclaren-Ross’s own staggering fecundity. The novels, short stories, sketches, radio dramas, adaptations, autobiographies, screenplays, parodies, memoirs, reviews and essays emerge at an astonishing rate. Writing often through the night, he seems to turn out entire radio drama series in days, reviews and sketches in hours, year after year through the 1940s, 1950s and into the early 1960s, always in financial distress and increasingly aware that the impact made by some of his early work had not been maintained and had ebbed away. It’s remarkable, given the rate of production and the conditions in which most of it was written, that so much of it is so good. Some of the stories, the novel, Of Love and Hunger, the memoirs, many of the superb parodies and critical writings (on cinema as well as literature) in Bitten By the Tarantula, are assured, often very funny, and hugely impressive.

Endless monologues on a barstool in Fitzrovia. The teddy-bear coat, the sharp suit, the cigarette-holder, the silver-topped malacca cane, the snuff box, the eternal dark glasses: ‘From an early age’, Paul Willetts writes, ‘Julian put as much effort into propagating his personal myth as perfecting his prose style’ (306), going on to mention the many characters in poems and novels that are based on him, as well as the memoirs in which he features. Pubs and clubs, magazines and anthologies, are threaded through the story as much as boxers and bullfighters are in Hemingway’s, and Maclaren-Ross encountered an extraordinary range of writers, editors, publishers, painters and BBC producers. One of these, who became increasingly important in his desperate pursuit of commissions and payments, was Reginald Donald ‘Reggie’ Smith (born on this day, 31 July, 1914), whose name rang a bell because he’d cropped up in a couple of other stories. Married to the novelist Olivia Manning, he’s familiar to readers of her Balkan Trilogy as the model for her central character Guy Pringle (to viewers of the superb adaptation, it is, of course, Kenneth Branagh). Smith crops up on more than thirty pages of Willetts’ biography because he was hugely supportive of Maclaren-Ross for some years. He was a friend of the novelist and critic Walter Allen and of Louis MacNeice, and had been to King Edward Grammar School in Aston, Birmingham, with poet Henry Reed and George D. Painter, future biographer of Marcel Proust. When he married Olivia Manning in August 1939 at Marylebone Registrar’s Office, their witnesses included Stevie Smith and Walter Allen. Their best man had been written into the certificate as ‘Louise MacNeice’—both bride and groom noticed but said nothing—and Olivia seems to have taken the opportunity to shave a few years off her age, her birthdate recorded there as 1911 (in fact it was 1908).[2]

I may briefly take refuge now in something calmer, less harassed—perhaps a Simenon. Not that the world of Inspector Jules Maigret is entirely detached from that of Julian Maclaren-Ross, one of whose many publications was a translation, published by Penguin Books in association with Hamish Hamilton in 1959: Maigret and the Burglar’s Wife. . .

Notes

[1] Paul Willetts, Fear & Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Bizarre Life of Writer, Actor, Soho Raconteur Julian Maclaren-Ross, revised edition (London: Dewi Lewis, 2013). Willetts also introduces Collected Memoirs (London: Black Spring Press, 2004) and Bitten By the Tarantula and other writing (London: Black Spring Press, 2005). Penguin Books published Of Love and Hunger, with an introduction by D. J. Taylor, in 2002. ‘The Weeping and the Laughter’ is subtitled ‘A Chapter of Autobiography’ in Collected Memoirs (1-110).

[2] Neville & June Braybrooke, Olivia Manning: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004), 54, 58, 59.

Cookery: war, cavalry: rice

Browsing the tirelessly interesting The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene from 1900 to 1950, I come across (‘In the Wings’ section of 1913): ‘“Eager for any sort of adventure,” Joyce Cary serves as a cook in the Montenegrin Army in the First Balkan War, receiving a gold medal for his participation in the final campaign.’[1] Montenegro! It reminded me that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Major Jay Gatsby had been decorated by every Allied government, ‘even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!’[2]

And a cook! Intriguing, especially when poking about in various sources to confirm it but coming up against Red Cross nurse, stretcher bearer, Red Cross orderly, and finally: stretcher bearer and cook, which I promptly accept as definitive.

Cary (1888-1957) was born in Derry but, when he settled in England, this was where he largely stayed. He attended Clifton College in Bristol (as did L. P. Hartley, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Henry Newbolt, Geoffrey Household, Montague Summers, actors, musicians and an astonishing array of military, scientific and political notables). He joined the colonial service in Africa and fought in the First World War – with a Nigerian regiment in the Cameroon campaign. He seems to have largely dropped from view but was pretty well-known for a while, particularly for his novel The Horse’s Mouth, published in 1944 and reprinted as a Penguin book four years later.

(Alec Guinness and Kay Walsh in the 1958 film, The Horse’s Mouth)

I did read several of his other novels but that’s the one I remember best. It’s about a painter, Gulley Jimson, who has some diverting comments about the art that he practises. One day, he remembers, ‘I happened to see a Manet. Because some chaps were laughing at it. And it gave me the shock of my life. Like a flash of lightning. It skinned my eyes for me and when I came out I was a different man. And I saw the world again, the world of colour. By Gee and Jay, I said, I was dead, and I didn’t know it.’ A little later, ‘And then I began to make a few little pencil sketches, studies, and I took Blake’s Job drawings out of somebody’s bookshelf and peeped into them and shut them up again. Like a chap who’s fallen down the cellar steps and knocked his skull in and opens a window too quick, on something too big.’ But to a boy who keeps turning up, saying he wants to be a painter himself, Jimson tells him ‘“something for your good. All art is bad, but modern art is the worst. Just like the influenza. The newer it is, the more dangerous. And modern art is not only a public danger – it’s insidious. You never know what may happen when it’s got loose.”’[3]

(William Blake, engraving for The Book of Job)

Cookery and war, though. Conflict in the kitchen is familiar fare in several strenuous television series of recent years but there are other offscreen instances enough.

Joan Didion recalled being taught to cook by someone from Louisiana. ‘We lived together for some years, and I think we most fully understood each other when once I tried to kill him with a kitchen knife.’[4] And M. F. K. Fisher remembered a Mrs Cheever at Miss Huntingdon’s School for Girls: ‘She ran her kitchens with such skill that in spite of ordinary domestic troubles like flooded basements and soured cream, and even an occasional extraordinary thing like the double murder and hara-kiri committed by the head boy one Good Friday, our meals were never late and never bad.’[5]

In the First World War, as in so many other wars, cookhouses and dining halls were central to the military effort, both at home and abroad. If your medical category was C1, then cookhouse fatigues were likely to feature on your work rota, along with clerking, cleaning and gardening. The poet F. S. Flint did precisely that although towards the end of his war service in England and Scotland—brief enough since he was only called up in August 1918—he taught French to officers who were awaiting demobilisation. The novelist Edgar Jepson wrote of attempting ‘to diminish the gluttony of the British people.’ His masterpiece drew, he said, on the experiments of Mrs Peel in the basement kitchen: ‘I dwell at this length on the Cookery Book [The Win the War Cookery Book of May 1917] because I wish to make it wholly clear that it shares equally with the United States the glory of having won the war.’ He added: ‘Not that I would have it supposed that I reckon the months I spent at the Ministry of Food wasted: I acquired there a faith in human stupidity, which nothing will ever shake.’[6]

(Eugène Louis Bourdin, Étaples)

Closer to the scenes of combat, the young Wilfred Owen would discover in December 1916 that meals in the officers’ mess at Étaples in northern France—where a series of mutinies the following year resulted in executions and prison sentences—‘were cooked by a former chef to the Duke of Connaught and presided over by a baronet.’[7]

Midway through that war, in the same year as Owen’s sumptuous dinners, poet and novelist Robert Graves bought a small cottage from his mother. He wrote, a decade later: ‘I bought it in defiance of the war, as something to look forward to when the guns stopped (“when the guns stop” was how we always thought of the end of the war). I whitewashed the cottage and put in a table, a chair, a bed and a few dishes and cooking utensils. I had decided to live there by myself on bread and butter, bacon and eggs, lettuce in season, cabbage and coffee; and to write poetry.’[8]

War and the kitchen. Really not in my case; perhaps the nearest would be peeling a butternut squash, the culinary equivalent, I suppose, of fell walking or hill climbing, requiring as it does both stamina and occasional brute strength. And war has changed out of all recognition in the last hundred-odd years, sometimes seeming to be called ‘war’ only to spare the feelings of those on one side who are slaughtering, almost without resistance or effective means of defence, the other. And there was a time, after all, when ‘war’ meant men on horseback. . .

‘It was from the cavalry that the nation’s military leaders were drawn. They believed in the cavalry charge as they believed in the Church of England.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, when the future General Sir Ian Hamilton, as an English observer in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, reported that ‘the only thing the cavalry could do in the face of entrenched machine guns was to cook rice for the infantry’, his statement had the effect of ‘causing the War Office to wonder if his months in the Orient had not affected his mind.’[9]

Never underestimate the value to the world of getting the cooking time of your rice just right.

Notes

[1] Robert Phelps and Peter Deane, The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene from 1900 to 1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 54.

[2] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926; edited by Tony Tanner, London: Penguin Books, 2000), 65.

[3] Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1948), 70-71, 72, 24-25.

[4] Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook, foreword by Nathaniel Rich (London: Fourth Estate, 2017), 8.

[5] M. F. K. Fisher, ‘The First Oyster’ (1924), in Gastronomical Me (1943; London: Daunt Books, 2017), 26.

[6] Edgar Jepson, Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian (London: Richards, 1937), 193, 196. Mrs C. S. Peel was a prolific author of books about thrifty cookery, including The Eat-Less-Meat Book: War Ration Housekeeping (1917).

[7] Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002), 203.

[8] Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 252.

[9] Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August and The Proud Tower, edited by Margaret MacMillan (New York: Library of America, 2012), 593, 214.

Pilots, poets, bays

Alfred Lord Tennyson died on 6 October 1892, having served as Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate for over forty years, the longest ever tenure – though a later octogenarian, John Masefield, came very close. Tennyson’s funeral, which took place six days after his death, was a pretty grand affair. His remains were, the Times reported, ‘consigned to their last resting-place in Poets’ Corner, Westminster’ – the grave of Robert Browning, who had died three years previously, is immediately adjacent to Tennyson’s. All the leading members of the royal family sent representatives (Sir Henry Ponsonby, Sir Dighton Probyn, Lord Edward Cecil) and the place was thronged with bishops, lords and ladies, the pall-bearers including the Duke of Argyll and Lord Kelvin. Conan Doyle, Ellen Terry, John Burns, Frederic Harrison and Henry Irving were among the mourners. In the street outside, vendors were offering, for a penny, copies of the poet’s 1889 lyric, ‘Crossing the Bar’ (author portrait included):

Sunset and evening star,
   And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
   When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
   Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
   And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
   When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
   The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.[1]

Tennyson was 80 when he wrote it, so unsurprisingly aware that the encounter with his ‘Pilot’ was not that far off.

Edward Burne-Jones was particularly excited that the city of Mantua ‘had sent bay from Virgil’s birthplace to lay in the tomb.’ In fact, ‘bay’ and ‘pilot’ occurred in another ‘literary’ interment context a few years later, though William Morris’s ‘country funeral’, Fiona MacCarthy observes, ‘was the absolute antithesis of Tennyson’s burial in Westminster Abbey in 1892.’[2]

(William Morris, Fruit (Wallpaper): William Morris Society: Kelmscott House)

Morris died on 3 October 1896. He was only 62 but such a tireless worker, such a tireless maker, of pictures, poems, translations, tapestries, stained-glass windows, fabrics, carpets, furniture, illuminated books, wallpapers, prose romances and more that, as is often remarked, the primary cause of his death was simply being William Morris. His funeral took place on 6 October, exactly four years after the death of Tennyson. The body had to be transported from Paddington to Lechlade by train (a form of transport that Morris disliked intensely), then taken by cart to Kelmscott Church.

It was a cold wet morning, and the day turned stormy later. In that week’s issue of the Saturday Review (10 October 1896), there were pieces on Morris by George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Symons – and R. B. Cunninghame Graham, whose account of the day on which ‘the most striking figure of our times’ was buried, began with that weather. ‘As we never associated William Morris with fine weather, rather taking him to be a pilot poet lent by the Vikings to steer us from the doldrums in which we now lie all becalmed in smoke to some Valhalla of his own creation beyond the world’s end, it seemed appropriate that on his burial day the rain descended and the wind blew half a gale from the north-west.’ He noted of the arrival at Lechlade: ‘There, unlike Oxford, the whole town was out’, and added that the open haycart on which the coffin was transported to Kelmscott Church was ‘driven by a man who looked coeval with the Saxon Chronicle.’[3]

‘Over the coffin were thrown two pieces of Oriental embroidered brocade, and a wreath of bays was laid at his head’, the Daily News reported. The mourners included, alongside painters, publishers and printers, workmen from Merton Abbey (where the tapestry, weaving and fabric printing workshops were sited), Kelmscott villagers and members of the Art Workers’ Guild, all in their daily working clothes. The architect William Lethaby wrote: ‘It was the only funeral I have ever seen that did not make me ashamed to have to be buried.’[4]

(William Morris, Kelmscott Press Edition of ‘Godefrey of Boloyne’ by William Caxton: William Morris Society: Kelmscott House)

Morris continues to attract enormous biographical and scholarly interest, and warrants it all. So many arts, so many crafts, so many connections, so widespread and generative an influence, cropping up in all manner of places, often the expected ones, sometimes less so. Ezra Pound read Morris to the young Hilda Doolittle, ‘in an orchard under blossoming—yes, they must have been blossoming—apple trees.’ And: ‘It was Ezra who really introduced me to William Morris. He literally shouted “The Gilliflower of Gold” in the orchard. How did it go? Hah! hah! La belle jaune giroflée. And there was “Two Red Roses across the Moon” and “The Defence of Guenevere.”’[5] Pound read Morris to Yeats too, in Stone Cottage at the edge of Ashdown Forest, his translations of the Icelandic sagas.[6] Yeats would later recall of Morris’s prose romances that they were ‘the only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to the end.’[7]

(William Morris, La Belle Iseult: Tate)

Fiona MacCarthy remarks that ‘There was a neurotic basis to his fluency. On a good day he could write 1,000 lines of verse’, and some readers will find some of the longer poems soporific.[8] Penelope Fitzgerald wrote that the lyrics, in her opinion were ‘far the most important part’ of his poetry and, ‘If I could keep them I would cheerfully sweep all the sagas and Earthly Paradises under the carpet.’[9] Other readers, in Morris’s own time, and since, have felt quite differently. Yeats continued to be one of them. In October 1933, he reported to his old friend (and ex-lover) Olivia Shakespear (Pound’s mother-in-law) his attempt to read Morris’s long poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung to his daughter and then to his wife: ‘and last night when I came to the description of the birth of Sigurd and that wonderful first nursing of the child, I could hardly read for my tears. Then when Anne had gone to bed I tried to read it to George and it was just the same.’[10]

This is probably the passage he refers to, early in Book II:

Then she held him a little season on her weary and happy breast
And she told him of Sigmund and Volsung and the best sprung forth from the best:
She spake to the new-born baby as one who might understand,
And told him of Sigmund’s battle, and the dead by the sea-flood’s strand,
And of all the wars passed over, and the light with darkness blent.

So she spake, and the sun rose higher, and her speech at last was spent,
And she gave him back to the women to bear forth to the people’s kings,
That they too may rejoice in her glory and her day of happy things.[11]

For other admirers of Morris, it may be the campaigner, the Socialist, or perhaps the designer and producer of stained-glass, fabrics, stories, the late romances, the lectures and the essays:

‘To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make. That is the other use of it.’
‘Does not our subject look important enough now? I say that without those arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, our labour mere endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind.’[12]

Yes, the allusions to damaging and artificial divisions are often wonderfully suggestive of other divisions causing much wider harms – as, of course, they continue to do. And, though I may be prejudiced in this regard, I like his idea, in ‘The Beauty of Life’, of ‘the fittings necessary to the sitting-room of a healthy person’. The first of these is ‘a book-case with a great many books in it’. Oddly, he never seems to mention, let alone recommend, piles of books everywhere else. . .

Notes

[1] Tennyson: A Selected Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Longman Group, 1989), 665-666.

[2] Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), 631, 673-675.

[3] R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ‘With the North-West Wind’, Saturday Review (10 October 1896), Vol. 82, Issue 2137, 389-390.

[4] Quoted by Philip Henderson, William Morris: His Life, Work and Friends (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1973), 429.

[5] H. D., End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, edited by Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1980), 22-23.

[6] James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 142-143.

[7] W. B. Yeats, ‘The Trembling of the Veil [1922]: Four Years’, in Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), 141.

[8] MacCarthy, William Morris, ix.

[9] Penelope Fitzgerald to Dorothy Coles, 5 June [1992], So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 460.

[10] The Letters of W. B. Yeats, edited by Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 816.

[11] William Morris, The story of Sigurd the Volsung and the fall of the Niblungs (London: Ellis & White, 1877), 80-81.

[12] ‘The Lesser Arts’, in William Morris: The Selected Writings, edited by G. D. H. Cole (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1934), 496.

The one after the one after that: 1924

In a recent issue of Last Post, writing of Ford Madox Ford in 1924, Max Saunders remarked that it ‘certainly is an annus mirabilis for Ford; a year in which he launched the transatlantic review, and published two masterpieces: Some Do Not . . ., the first novel of his postwar Parade’s End tetralogy; and the brilliant critical memoir of his collaborator Joseph Conrad’.[1] He was pointing out the objections to the often feverish concentration upon that now-conventional annus mirabilis of modernism, 1922, in literary criticism and history, which has sometimes narrowed down to two particular gleamings in the gloaming, Ulysses and The Waste Land. It’s true that there were dozens of other remarkable works published in that year; lists can easily be constructed and I’ve been guilty of at least one myself. Tempted to do the same thing for 1924, I sailed past a couple of dozen before accepting that 1924 was also guilty of producing an absurd number of interesting items, in addition to the previously mentioned Fordian masterworks.

I leave aside, for the moment, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, W. B. Yeats, a posthumous Herman Melville, T. E. Hulme, Ernest Hemingway, Glenway Wescott, Marianne Moore and the bestselling The Green Hat by Michael Arlen (formerly Dikrān Kuyumjian) to mention, among my personal favourites, R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm, first volume of a trilogy (the second and third followed in successive years) and winner of that year’s Hawthornden Prize. It focuses primarily not on trench warfare but rather on the narrator’s dealings with the local inhabitants, their claims for loss and damage against the British forces, and the relationship between an English officer and the daughter of the Ferme d’Espagnole. The trilogy was deservedly successful—and published in an omnibus volume in 1927—but has since seemed to drift out of view, only scholars of the period paying much attention to it lately. The one-volume edition was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 1979 but is long out of print and the only editions currently on offer all look pretty nasty. Mottram was closely identified with Norfolk and sometimes nudged by the familiar British ‘regional novelist’ elbow into some cultural annexe or other. But see Craig Gibson’s piece here: https://norfolkrecordofficeblog.org/2021/04/14/forgotten-r-h-mottram/

Also in this year: John Buchan’s The Three Hostages (Dr Greenslade to Richard Hannay: ‘“Have you ever realized, Dick, the amount of stark craziness that the War has left in the world? . . . I hardly meet a soul who hasn’t got some slight kink in his brain as a consequence of the last seven years”’). There was D. H. Lawrence’s long ‘Introduction’ to Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by Maurice Magnus; Rudyard Kipling wrote four fascinating stories, ‘The Wish House’, ‘The Eye of Allah’, ‘The Bull That Thought’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ (especially the first two), and Stanley Spencer began The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard in February 1924 (finished in 1926, it was shown at his first one-man exhibition in 1927).

In April, before a crowd of 120,000 people, George V opened the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, put together by 18,000 workmen: Palace of Art (and Palace of Beauty), Never Stop Railway, Queen’s Doll’s House, butter sculptures, elephants, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, massed choirs in white surplices. Poet and publisher Harold Monro was, apparently, impressed by its patriotic glitter and ‘in one of his satiric dream poems he envisaged an exhibition of the future, where the last Georgian Nature Poet would be on show, dressed in tweed and sipping beer, in a specially designed case.’[2]

The narrator of Edith Wharton’s ‘The Spark’ comments that ‘People, I had by this time found, all stopped living at one time or another, however many years longer they continued to be alive’.[3] D. H. Lawrence announced to Middleton Murry that he wanted ‘to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard, waiting to pounce. The heart of the North is dead’.[4] Ezra Pound, well-embarked upon The Cantos by now, was looking back as well as forward, writing in a letter of 3 December to Wyndham Lewis: ‘We were hefty guys in them days; an of what has come after us, we seem to have survived without a great mass of successors’.[5] E. M. Forster published A Passage to India: his next novel, Maurice, would appear 47 years later, following its author’s death. In February 1924, acknowledging Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon, Lawrence wrote to him: ‘To me you are the last Englishman. And I am the one after that.’[6]

In the journal that he kept for a short period, the poet John Clare wrote (30 November 1824): ‘Read the Literary Souvenir for 1825 in all its gilt & finery what a number of candidates for fame are smiling on its pages – what a pity it is that time should be such a destroyer of our hopes & anxiety for the best of us but doubts on fame’s promises & a century will thin the myriad worse than a plague.’[7]

One hundred years on from 1924, the authors and titles of that period present a dazzling image of astonishing abilities and achievements. As to whether, another century on (assuming the continued existence of books, readers or, indeed, people), any of the current ‘candidates for fame’ will be visible to (some version of) literary historians, I have no settled opinion. Let me get back to you.

Notes

[1] Max Saunders, ‘Ford in 1922’, Last Post: A Literary Journal from the Ford Madox Ford Society, 1, 8 & 9 (Spring & Autumn, 2022), 1-19 (2). His essay concentrates on what Ford was writing, rather than publishing, in 1922.

[2] Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew And Her Friends (1984; London: Flamingo, 2002), 209.

[3] Edith Wharton, Old New York (1924), in Novellas and Other Writings, edited by Cynthia Griffin Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990), 467.

[4] The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, compiled and edited by James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 284.

[5] Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, edited by Timothy Materer (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 138. His possible exceptions to this statement were the composer George Antheil and the writer Robert McAlmon.

[6] The Letters of D. H. Lawrence IV, June 1921–March 1924, edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 584. The term has since been applied to Arthur Ransome and J. L. Carr by their biographers, and to Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle by himself. The day the other Lawrence (T. E., ‘of Arabia’) died, Forster was on his way to see him.

[7] John Clare, Journals, Essays, Journey from Essex, edited by Anne Tibble (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1980), 54.

Dusting the monument

Let not a monument give you or me hopes,
Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops.
(Byron, Don Juan, I, 219)

Walking to and from the Watershed, meeting my elder daughter, prior to her birthday, and her travels to Germany and France, we cross Queen Square. It’s a famous Bristol feature, dating in its present form from 1700 and named after the queen two years later. The statue of William III, ‘Dutch William’, by John Michael Rysbrack (originally Jan Michiel Rijsbrack), stands in the centre. The Bristol riots of October 1831, following the House of Lords blocking a Reform Bill, left nearly a hundred buildings in the square burned to the ground, their cellars looted, including the Mansion House. Four rioters were hanged and scores sent to prison. Estimates of those who actually died in the riots ranged up to 250. The rebuilding went on for decades.

Approaching the monument, I felt a flicker of uncertainty as to whether I would pass it on the left or the right. It really doesn’t matter to me but it certainly did to William Faulkner’s Benjy Compson, 33 years old but with the mind of a child and no sense of time. The closing pages portray, you might say, Benjy’s sound and his brother Jason’s fury. Luster, 14 year old son of the Compson family’s black servant Dilsey, in the driving seat, swings the horse, Queenie, to the left at the Confederate monument. ‘For an instant Ben sat in an utter hiatus. Then he bellowed. Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound’ – provoking Jason to rush furiously across the square and on to the step. ‘With a backhanded blow he hurled Luster aside and caught the reins and sawed Queenie about and doubled the reins back and slashed her across the hips. He cut her again and again, into a plunging gallop, while Ben’s hoarse agony roared about them, and swung her about to the right of the monument. Then he struck Luster over the head with his fist.
‘“Don’t you know any better than to take him to the left?” he said.’
When the horse moves again Ben hushes at once. ‘The broken flower drooped over Ben’s feet and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place.’[1]

(The Colston statue taking a dip, Bristol, June 2020)

Monuments (not just Confederate ones) are a tricky business, of course. Rysbrack also produced a sculpture of Edward Colston, the Bristol slave trader and philanthropist, another statue of whom, created in 1895 by John Cassidy, was toppled into Bristol Harbour by protesters in June 2020. There have been many other contested monuments, Cecil Rhodes, Columbus and James Cook among them.

But other figures, perhaps in other ages, provoke quite different, and often more positive, emotions and reactions. Of the stone monument of Tsubo-no-ishibumi on the ancient site of the Taga castle in the village of Ichikawa (about six feet tall and three feet wide), Bashō wrote:

‘In this ever-changing world where mountains crumble, rivers change their courses, roads are deserted, rocks are buried, and old trees yield to young shoots, it was nothing short of a miracle that this monument alone had survived the battering of a thousand years to be the living memory of the ancients. I felt as if I were in the presence of the ancients themselves, and forgetting all the troubles I had suffered on the road, rejoiced in the utter happiness of this joyful moment, not without tears in my eyes.’[2]

Also in Japan is the monument to Ernest Fenollosa, in Uyeno Park, Tokyo. He had suffered his final, fatal heart attack in September 1908, at his home in London, while his step-daughter Erwin Scott (‘Noshi’, aged sixteen), was reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ to him. His ashes remained for a short while in Highgate cemetery but were then transported to Japan, to the hills overlooking Lake Biwa and the gardens of Miidera Temple, where they were reburied on the first anniversary of his death. The inscription, chosen by his students, read: ‘To the merit of our Sensei [teacher], high like the mountains and eternal like the water.’[3]

(Ernest and Mary Fenollosa)

It is not always a case of a specified and designated monument, but may be something that becomes so, such as the Esnoga synagogue that Steven Nadler wrote of: ‘Almost alone among the synagogues of Holland, this unmistakeable monument to Jewish achievement was left standing, undamaged, by the Nazis. Inside the hechal [ark of the Torah] is a Torah said to be the one brought to Amsterdam from Emden in 1602 by Moses Uri Halevi.’[4]

A monument might also serve as a complex representation of parallels and comparisons, whether discerned or imposed, as in Ezra Pound’s focus upon—or obsession with—the condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta’s monument to his wife Isotta. Pound was writing the Malatesta Cantos in the early 1920s and, Lawrence Rainey writes, ‘On the simplest level Pound seeks to suggest that the Tempio’s construction heralds a new cultural era, the dawn of the Renaissance and the spring of a neopagan revival.’ Of more urgent personal interest, though, he wished ‘to discern a parallel between himself and Sigismondo Malatesta’, and ‘between the magnum opus he wished to write and the unfinished monument of Rimini.’[5] That the Cantos (like the Tempio) ultimately remained unfinished was not then envisaged, and remains a curious historical irony.

‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius’, Horace wrote (Odes, Book III), and Pound translated it:

This monument will outlast metal and I made it
More durable than the king’s seat, higher than pyramids.
Gnaw of the wind and rain?
Impotent
The flow of the years to break it, however many.[6]

One might argue of some of these names that it’s a bit soon to tell – but Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) has lasted over 2030 years so far, and seems to be holding on quite well. . .

Notes

[1] William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929), in Novels 1926-1929, edited by Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk (New York: Library of America, 2006), 1123-1124. In ‘Appendix. Compson: 1699-1945’ (1141), Faulkner wrote of Luster that he was ‘a man, aged 14’, who was ‘not only capable of the complete care and security’ of Benjy, a man ‘twice his age and three times his size, but could keep him entertained.’

[2] Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other travel sketches, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 113.

[3] Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 211, 35.

[4] Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 162.

[5] Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 38, 43.

[6] Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 1146.