Category: Literature

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.

Labyrinthine meanings

(Francisco Goya, Las Parcas: Atropos, or The Fates: Prado, Madrid)

‘Words of grief become almost meaningless in these days, they have to be used so frequently. But one does not feel any the less. Sorrows do not grow lighter because they are many.’[1]

Sitting in the kitchen, turning away from the seemingly endless and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, now extended to Lebanon, watching the rain or the gaps between the rain, I hear the Librarian coming into the kitchen, to announce another day of being baffled by the news that the American election is still ‘on a knife-edge’, the candidates ‘neck and neck’, when one of those candidates is evidently unhinged. ‘At his rallies, he just comes on and talks complete nonsense for fifty minutes.’ Similarly bewildered by this, I find it oddly reassuring that it’s not just non-Americans, looking in or on from outside, that share such feelings. Eliot Weinberger, whose devastating What I Heard About Iraq I still recall from nearly twenty years ago, summarises the matter with characteristic skill, in a piece dated 13 September:

‘It seems incredible that almost half the country still supports Trump, despite the felony convictions, the porn stars, the blatant graft, the endless lies, the allegations of assault and rape, the 6 January insurrection, the continuing refusal to accept his defeat in 2020, the classified documents in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, the vows to prosecute all his many enemies, including journalists, and to fire everyone in the government bureaucracy who is not loyal to him, the claims to dictatorial power. Even more incredible is that there is a slice of the voting population that is still “undecided”. Republican legislatures in various states have already set in motion procedures to keep people from voting and to deny the results if Trump loses’.[2]

There is, indeed, a report, more than one report, about highly suspect practices and preparations, changes of rules and the like, with reassuring headlines such as ‘Network of Georgia election officials strategizing to undermine 2024 result’: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/18/trump-election-georgia

I know there are Americans who believe wholeheartedly that the moon landings were faked and patched together in a Hollywood back lot, while others know for a certainty that giant lizards are the true masters of the world but seeing, back in the summer, footage of men and women at political rallies with wads of fabric or nappy liners stuck to the sides of their heads was somehow in another dimension: irrefutable, painfully visible, undeniably and palpably there. A full-throttle alternative reality in operation, for sure, and believable enough that it might be swallowed by a few hundred, even a few thousand. But millions? And all in tune with what used to be a major and mainstream political party?

‘It is very extraordinary’, John Dowell reflects as he looks at the mad Nancy, ‘to see the perfect flush of health on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise of the head upon the neck, the grace of the white hands—and to think that it all means nothing—that it is a picture without a meaning.’[3] We are frequently confronted either by pictures that may really have no meaning—in the sense of a rational, graspable, ideally paraphrasable, meaning—or have a meaning that cannot be understood, either because we lack the necessary contextual information or because removal from the immediate experience is required, granting us distance, perspective, the means by which to find the edges, the boundaries, and thus the true extent of what we have witnessed.

(Richard Westall, Theseus and Ariadne at the Entrance of the Labyrinth: North Lincolnshire Museums)

Edmund Blunden recalled the sight of flares on the Ypres battlefield on New Year’s Eve, 1917: ‘Their writing on the night was as the earliest scribbling of children, meaningless; they answered none of the questions with which a watcher’s eyes were painfully wide.’[4] A considerable number of people stared uncomprehendingly at the clay tablets Arthur Evans had unearthed at Knossos before the researches of Alice Kober and Michael Ventris eventually led to an understanding and decipherment of Linear B.

‘The contemporary is without meaning while it is happening’, Guy Davenport remarked, ‘it is a vortex, a whirlpool of action. It is a labyrinth.’[5] And Hugh Kenner remembered Wyndham Lewis observing that ‘The present cannot be revealed to people until it has become yesterday.’[6]

Some parts of the present, surely; and to some people. Historians will, we accept quite conventionally, see more—though in some cases, or in some senses, less. There is, after all, an increasingly clear and present danger now not only of misinformation being manufactured and widely (and rapidly) disseminated but also of witnesses being silenced (often permanently), of evidence being systematically destroyed, of commentary and analysis being censored or concealed. And yet, while it’s true that we are all in the labyrinth and that the Minotaur is real – some people, I persist in believing, still have hold of that crucial thread.

Notes

[1] Vera Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: Vera Brittain’s Diary 1913-1917 (London: Gollancz 1981), 206.

[2] Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Debate’, London Review of Books, 46, 18 (26 September 2024), 8.

[3] Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915; edited by Max Saunders, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 192.

[4] Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 234.

[5] Guy Davenport, ‘The House That Jack Built’, in The Geography of the Imagination (Boston: David R. Godine, 1997), 56.

[6] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 436.

Rosemary, responsibility


(Rembrandt van Rijn, Saskia van Uylenburgh in Arcadian Costume: National Gallery, London)

In the other park, which we traverse quite often, there are rosemary bushes to be discreetly ransacked – for potatoes, fish, meat, as well as for remembrance. ‘“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance”’, Ophelia says. And Laura Cumming notes that when Rembrandt’s wife Saskia van Uylenburgh died in 1642, at the age of 29 and after less than eight years of their marriage, Rembrandt ‘put a sprig of rosemary in her hand: rosemary for remembrance.’[1]

The weather forecast offers a 70% chance of rain. I add an umbrella to my tote bag and am soon walking uphill – in warm sunshine. Yes, the forecasts are more sophisticated these days, with many technical advances – on the other hand, I seem to remember that, in the days before we broke the weather, things were a bit more definite. Or did conditions appear to change every ten minutes then as well?


Under an abruptly darkening sky, I enter the park and the uncertain terrain of rosemary-picking. Plants in a public park: it would never occur to me to pick flowers in one and take them home since they’re for everybody to look at and enjoy. But a bush, herbs, green, largely unnoticed, simply wasted if not used. . . the case is altered, surely. Nevertheless, I aim for discretion and scan the park. Two women with dogs on the grassy slope; a woman with a child in a pushchair walking towards me on the path. Progress is arrested by the sight of a jay, landing on a nearby wooden post. It lingers for ten, fifteen seconds. I stand and stare. Eventually, it moves, I move. The woman says, in passing: ‘Pretty birds, aren’t they?’ Always the loquacious Englishman, I say ‘Yes, very’, moving on to stock up on rosemary and continue my walk into a sunshine resuming its humorous campaign.


In another campaign, the fallout from the presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday night was still dominating the media, and I could still amuse the Librarian by abruptly announcing: ‘They’re eating the dogs!’ but the joke, if that’s what it is, is a dark one. Like a great many other people – at least I hope so, I’m baffled by this stuff much of the time, by those ‘undecided voters’, let alone those determined to make America hate again.

I realised later that it was the birthday of Louis MacNeice, a fine poet who also kept a wary eye on the political weather and who died at the absurdly young age of 55. Thinking of how the wrong things keep happening and the wrong people ending up on top almost invariably, and how far, how much, if at all, the rest of us can be said to bear responsibility, I noted the lines in his Autumn Journal:


And at this hour of the day it is no good saying
            “Take away this cup”;
Having helped to fill it ourselves it is only logic
            That now we should drink it up.
Nor can we hide our heads in the sand, the sands have
            Filtered away;
Nothing remains but rock at this hour, this zero
            Hour of the day.[2]

‘Responsibility’ is a handy word. Delmore Schwartz’s famous short story, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, which gave his first volume its title, has the narrator watching, on a movie screen, the time just before the beginning of his own life, his parents moving towards their disastrous marriage, which will have a lasting and damaging effect on the poet. He’s ejected from the cinema after shouting at the screen—’“What are they doing?”’—and wakes up ‘into the bleak winter morning of my twenty-first birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.’[3]

But I was thinking too of the close of Robert Penn Warren’s fine novel, All The King’s Men : ‘soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.’[4] The connection is with MacNeice, because of that poet’s relationship with Eleanor Clark in 1939-40. When MacNeice was invited by F. R. Higgins to join the Irish Academy of Letters, it was to Eleanor that he wrote about it, saying that ‘The Irish Academy of Letters meets once a year in Dublin’s only decent restaurant and gets so drunk they have to send the waiters away.’[5] Clark grew up in Connecticut, went to  Vassar in the 1930s, and worked on their literary magazine with Elizabeth Bishop and Mary McCarthy, among others. She wrote for left-leaning magazines and journals such as The Partisan Review, thought of herself for a while as a ‘Trotskyite sympathizer’ and went to Mexico in the late 1930s. Apparently, she did some translating for Trotsky and was married for a while to his Czech secretary, Jan Frankl. She wrote novels, essays and reviews, children’s books and a memoir, but was probably best-known for her travel books, Rome and a Villa and The Oysters of Locmariaquer. She married Robert Penn Warren in 1952 and died in 1996, aged 82, seven years after Warren himself.


(Eleanor Clark and Robert Penn Warren at their summer home in West Wardsboro, Vermont, 1986: Kentucky Library and Museum)

The novelist Nicholas Mosley once wrote that ‘Humans can either learn – or refuse to believe that humans are responsible for themselves.’[6] My favourite use of ‘responsibility’, though, is probably that of the hugely influential Trinidadian radical historian, journalist and political theorist, C. L. R. James, who adopted, in his early years, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair as the book: ‘By the time I was fourteen I must have read the book over twenty times’. And he adds, a little later: ‘Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me.’[7]

That radical, Thackeray!

Notes

[1] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV. v.; Laura Cumming, Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death (London: Chatto & Windus, 2023), 61.

[2] Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), 111.

[3] Ilan Stavans, editor, The Oxford Book of Jewish Short Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 165.

[4] Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men (1946; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007), 661.

[5] Louis MacNeice, Letters of Louis MacNeice, edited by Jonathan Allison (London: Faber, 2010), 351.

[6] Nicholas Mosley, Efforts at Truth: An Autobiography (London: Minerva , 1996), 299.

[7] C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963; London: Vintage, 2019), 24, 52.

Words, things, words for things


(C. R. W. Nevinson, Any Wintry Afternoon in England: Manchester Art Gallery)

Walking on the wide path in the park, I see a football rolling determinedly towards me over the grass, two boys watching, a long way off. I trap it, nudge and kick. It travels a fair distance but nowhere near the waiting boys. A woman walking towards me on the path says: ‘One of my irrational fears, a ball coming at me like that.’ I say: ‘One of mine too now’, and she laughs. ‘Oh, you did okay.’

Did I, though? Not the kick, that was what it was but. . . irrational fears? If it were now one of mine because of that episode, it’s not irrational but quite rational, reasoned, based on solid, empirical evidence, so. . .Don’t overthink it! the Librarian says, often in person and now in my head. Don’t overthink things!

Ding, ting, chose, cosa, peth, rud, shay, hlutur: thing. . . ‘The distinguished thing’ was Henry James’s famous phrase for death. Did he actually say it? Following a reference to Edith Wharton’s A Backward Glance, I see that there’s an extra link or two: ‘He is said to have told his old friend Lady Prothero, when she saw him after the first stroke, that in the very act of falling (he was dressing at the time) he heard in the room a voice which was distinctly, it seemed, not his own, saying: “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”’ Wharton adds: ‘The phrase is too beautifully characteristic not to be recorded.’[1] It’s certainly wonderfully—and characteristically—indefinite, or at least, on a very convoluted path: ‘He is said’ to have told someone else that he heard a voice which wasn’t his own, the word ‘distinctly’ applied only to a negative, ‘not his own’ and, even then, ‘it seemed’.


(Edith Wharton via BBC)

Death as ‘the thing’ (Death! Where is thy thing?) – while for Edna St Vincent Millay, death was not the thing but the force engulfing it:

Death devours all lovely things:
   Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness,—presently
   Every bed is narrow.[2]

The line ‘Every bed is narrow’ I take to refer to coffins (rather than, or as well as, singleness or separation), and it also recalls Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. ‘We, in our narrow bed, turning aside from battles:/ Each man where he can, wearing out the day in his manner.’[3]

And yet – I was thinking, at the outset, more of things than of death; or rather, words and things, particularly the word ‘thing’. Impressively, its origin seems to embrace both ‘object’ and ‘parliament’. The definitions are lavish: an assembly, court, council, matter, affair, problem, fact, event, action, that which exists or can be thought of, a living creature, a piece of writing; in the plural, clothes, personal belongings. What a word, what a world, ‘thing’ is!

While an inmate of the Disciplinary Training Center at Metato, north of Pisa, in the autumn of 1945, Ezra Pound wrote:

   And for all that old Ford’s conversation was better,
consisting in res non verba,
          despite William’s anecdotes, in that Fordie
   never dented an idea for a phrase’s sake
and had more humanitas [4]

Things, not words for things. Pound was reiterating his belief in those opposing—or complementary—positions, Ford as realist, Yeats as symbolist, that he proposed on more than one other occasion.[5] Poignantly, they were both just six years dead – the length of a world war, say.

That ‘humanitas’ had led the youthful Ford to rashly discuss the conditions of the London poor with a young woman he took out in a boat, only to be reproved the next day by her mother, Lady Cusins: ‘“Fordie, you are a dear boy. Sir George and I like you very much. But I must ask you not to talk to dear Beatrice … about Things!”’[6]

(Iris Barry)

Ford had actually written to Iris Barry (4 July 1918): ‘I have always been preaching to people not to write “about” things but to write things—& you really do it—so I like to flatter myself that you are an indirect product of my preachings—a child of my poor old age.’ (He was still serving in the British Army, having by then reached the ‘poor old age’ of 44.)[7]

Ralph Waldo Emerson also fished in those waters: ‘The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language’ and ‘new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not’. But ‘wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things’.[8] This linking of words and things would have some later commentators and theorists tearing their hair out, words for them being quite arbitrary marks on the page, the word for something not otherwise  linked to that something. Lord Byron though, as so often, pursued his own path:

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.[9]

And as if by magic, an email just arrived from PN Review offers, from its archive, ‘Holà’, a short poem by C. H. Sisson from 1992, which is also concerned with words and things:

Words do not hold the thing they say: 
Say as you will, the thing escapes 
Loose upon air, or in the shapes 
Which struggle still before the eyes. 
Holà will run upon its way 
And never catch up with its prize.[10]


Later in my park walk, halfway down a steepish path, I see a woman ahead of me with a child in a pushchair and a dog crouched in the grass nearby, with a ball in its mouth. It looks at me inquiringly. ‘I’m afraid not’, I say. ‘You’re not my dog and that ball is covered with slobber, as we both know.’ The woman is partly blocking the path where it meets the wider track, talking on her phone and with her back to me, but moves to one side as I approach. The dog lies down close by her and lets the ball drop from its mouth. She half-turns and kicks the ball, which rockets cleanly away for a good distance – and apparently just where she meant it to go. Damn, I think, she only needed to be a bit better than me to make the point. What point? That I shall not overthink it. . .

Notes

[1] Edith Wharton, Novellas and Other Writings: Madame de Treymes, Ethan Frome, Summer, Old New York, The Mother’s Recompense, A Backward Glance, edited by Cynthia Griffin Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990), 1055.

[2] Millay, ‘Passer Mortuus Est’ (first of three stanzas), in F. O. Matthiessen, The Oxford Book of American Verse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 886. As is often noted, Millay here references Catullus 2, about the death of his lover Lesbia’s sparrow, her ‘plaything’: The Poems of Catullus, translated with an introduction by Peter Whigham (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), 52.

[3] Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 535.

[4] Canto LXXXII, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, fourth collected edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 525. I have tried—and failed—to insert the ideogram, ‘jen’.

[5] Ezra Pound, Polite Essays (1937; Plainview, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1966), 50; Pound/ Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, edited by Hugh Witemeyer (New York: New Directions, 1996), 187.

[6] Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 75.

[7] Ford Madox Ford, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, edited by Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 87.

[8] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, edited by Larzer Ziff (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 51.

[9] Lord Byron, Don Juan, III:88, edited by T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 182.

[10] PN Review 87 (September–October 1992), 28.

There not there


(Edmund Dulac, Frontispiece to Princess Badoura: A Tale from The Arabian Nights, by Laurence Housman)

‘The things you think of to link are not in your control. It’s just who you are, bumping into the world. But how you link them is what shows the nature of your mind. Individuality resides in the way links are made.’[1]

Bumping into the world, I noticed yesterday that I was reading A. S. Byatt on what would have been her 88th birthday. More, in the volume’s longest story, was the sentence: ‘And she waited for the sound of thunder, or worse, the silence of absence.’[2] I was struck (or bumped against) by that last phrase, having been thinking recently in similar terms. Sometimes the silence here is indeed the dictionary’s ‘absence of sound; complete quietness’ – but often something more. Silences have their own flavours, idiosyncrasies, tones, strengths and essences.

‘Throughout the house’, Patrick White wrote in  his story ‘The Night the Prowler’, ‘there were the sounds of furniture, and clocks, and silence.’[3] It has to be said that furniture was often on his mind, not least in populating Theodora Goodman’s world: ‘There is perhaps no more complete a reality than a chair and a table’ – though he adds there: ‘Still, there will always also be people, Theodora Goodman said, and she continued to wait with something of the superior acceptance of mahogany for fresh acts.’[4] When the painter Hurtle Duffield meets a man named Mothersole on the ferry, the printer asks what sort of things Duffield paints. ‘“Well! For some time now, tables and chairs.”’ Mothersole finds it a ’funny sort of subject’ and Duffield responds: ‘“Why? What could be more honest?”’[5]

There must be vastly fewer ticking clocks in the world now, timepieces having been widely and inescapably recruited to the cause of at least electronic silence. Ticking is a disturbing anomaly in this grave, enslaved new world. My maternal grandfather once owned several fish and chip shops in Portsmouth but, by the time I was of an age to notice such things, he had become a jeweller and watchmaker. The clocks that had audibly populated so much fiction through several centuries still kept the faith in his shop. He even had, at one point and appropriately enough, a grandfather clock. Ticks, tocks and chimes galore.


(The Clockmakers’ Museum. Musical table clock by Thwaites for Barraud. L2015-3473 Science Museum Group Collection Online.)

Thinking of silence, then, we often think of absence too, perhaps of the old saying that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ (or, as I once heard someone—probably of a poetic turn of mind—say, a few drinks in: ‘Absinthe takes the art au fond-er’). Old sayings, though. People sometimes ask: are they true? To which the answer is, can only be, it depends. For some yes, for others no.

Absence can be a source of amusement, an occasion for pleasure. Rudyard Kipling’s parents (John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald) were unable to attend a party given by Dante Gabriel Rossetti because the date of their sailing on the S. S. Ripon to Bombay had been brought forward by a day, to Wednesday 12 April, 1865. ‘In their absence, however, Ford Madox Brown proposed their health, in a speech throughout which, with his usual inability to remember names, he referred to the bridegroom as “John Gilpin”—to the delight of all present.’[6]

Annie Erneaux, though, recalled literally writing out her passion in Florence, being temporarily removed from an intense and wounding affair: ‘Those eight days on my own, without speaking, except to waiters in restaurants, haunted by the image of A. (to the extent that I was astonished to be accosted by men, could they not see him silhouetted inside my own body?) seemed to me an ordeal for the betterment of love. A sort of further investment, this time to imagination and craving through absence.’ And elsewhere she stated that:  ‘It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing.’[7]


(Franz Ferdinand & Sophie. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis via The Guardian)

When Stanley Weintraub wrote about the guns falling silent at the end of the First Word War, his book’s title, A Stillness Heard Round the World, looked back both to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Concord Hymn’, which included the phrase ‘the shot heard round the world’ and the fact that Emerson’s phrase has often been applied to the shot that began the war, fired at the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip, who killed both the Archduke and his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914. The significance of that incident was not widely grasped and reports of it were often to be found on the inner pages of the following day’s newspapers – a squabble in the Balkans! – but since then a great deal of writing about it has certainly been found possible.

Marcel Proust observed that ‘the absence of a thing is not merely that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a disruption of everything else, it is a new state which one cannot foresee in the old.’[8] We can, in fact, often foresee that absence, we grasp its inevitability, not least the inescapable end of every living thing but of course that single fact is not, cannot be, all there is. We distinguish between ‘surprise’ and ‘shock’ for a reason. Our awareness that something is coming, will inevitably happen, does not provide a thorough preparation for the event and its aftermath. Some effects are unscripted.

‘There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things’, Helen Macdonald wrote. ‘And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.’[9]


Yes. As Sarah Moss wrote, ‘One does not need to see ghosts, to know that people are haunted.’ And, a little further on: ‘It is not ghosts but absence that is harder to bear.’[10]

Notes

[1] Anne Carson, Paris Review interview (2004), quoted by Jennifer Krasinski in her review of Carson’s Wrong Norma in Bookforum, 30, 3 (Winter 2024), 13.

[2] A. S. Byatt, ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, in Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories (London: Vintage, 2023), 256.

[3] Patrick White, ‘The Night the Prowler’, in The Cockatoos: Shorter Novels and Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 149.

[4] White, The Aunt’s Story, (1948; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 141.

[5] White, The Vivisector (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 420.

[6] Roger Lancelyn Green, Kipling and the Children (London: Elek, 1965), 20, citing Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (1904), I, 290.

[7] Annie Erneaux, Simple Passion, translated by Tanya Leslie (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), 33; A Girl’s Story, translated by Alison L. Strayer (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), 143.

[8] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. 1: The Way By Swann’s, translated by Lydia Davis (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 308.

[9] Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014), 171.

[10] Sarah Moss, Signs for Lost Children (London: Granta Books, 2016), 64, 86.

Oxford Days (a few)


(Tom Quad, Christ Church College)

‘Even when we protested the invasion of Iraq’, I said to the Librarian, recalling that day some twenty years earlier when we shuffled along London streets in company with over a million others, ‘I think we moved more quickly than this.’

‘This’ was our glacial progress up St Aldates in Oxford on a sunny afternoon, together with residents, tourists, American and other participants in the Oxford Experience, or those embarked upon the countless other summer courses and programmes, and many hundreds of—mainly Japanese—children dressed in the Gryffindor house colours of scarlet and gold, concerned to take in the Harry Potter vibrations from New College, the Bodleian Library and Christ Church College. Tour guides in their dozens hoisted small flags or halted in gateways with uplifted arms. Lanyards in their hundreds bobbed or swung. Some individuals, either on home turf or away, looked vague, a little stunned, reminding me of the passage in Rory Stewart’s memoir, where he described Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s director of strategy, moving into the corridor and another room. ‘He seemed to be searching for something – although I couldn’t tell whether it was a cat, an idea, or his shoes.’[1]

On High Street or Broad Street, Broad Walk, Christ Church Meadow, by rivers and canals, on bridges and benches, crowds ebbed and flowed – but mainly flowed. We are soon to be visible in a thousand physical or virtual photograph albums. I said, at one point, ‘Okay, if it’s a child of ten or younger having a photograph taken, we’ll pause. Otherwise, we plough straight on.’ The Librarian agreed but soon lowered the qualifying age to eight, then six. Minutes later, it was down to zero. Thereafter, we ploughed straight on.


(Alice Liddell’s dad, Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church from 1855)

Oxford! The literary references the word throws up are astonishing, even excluding the people that only studied there. Lewis Carroll, or rather, Charles Dodgson, haunts the place, but other names rampage through a distracted memory: Philip Pullman, Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, John Wain, P. D. James, Iris Murdoch, Hardy’s Jude and Colin Dexter’s Morse, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. A random footnote fact I gathered since that visit was that Edward De Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was educated not at Oxford, as one might reasonably expect, but at Queen’s College, Cambridge. Attempts were later made to claim him as the ‘real’ author of Shakespeare’s plays, an idea launched by the splendidly named John Thomas Looney. De Vere was the nephew of Arthur Golding, translator of Ovid, his Metamorphoses ‘the most beautiful book in the language’, in Ezra Pound’s words.[2] A man skilled in ‘fourteeners’ (that many syllables in a line):

Then sprang up first the golden age, which of it selfe maintainde,
The truth and right of every thing unforst and unconstrainde.
There was no feare of punishment, there was no threatning lawe
In brazen tables nayled up, to keep the folke in awe.
There was no man would crouch or creepe to Judge with cap in hand,
They lived safe without a Judge, in everie Realme and lande.

Here Daphne flees from Apollo:

And as shee ran the meeting windes hir garments backewarde blue,
So that hir naked skinne apearde behinde hir as she flue,
Hir goodly yellowe golden haire that hanged loose and slacke,
With every puffe of ayre did wave and tosse behind hir backe.[3]

One name occurs on the ground as well as in the mind, the memorial plaque in Christ Church Cathedral (astonishing vaulted ceiling, stained glass by Burne-Jones and others, the St Frideswide Shrine). W. H. Auden came to the College to study biology, switched to English Literature in his second year and graduated (with a third class degree) in 1928. Nearly 30 years later, he became Oxford Professor of Poetry, and returned to Christ Church to live (part of the time) in 1972, the year before his death.


Wot, no Ford Madox Ford notes? Perhaps a sly one. In Some Do Not. . ., Christopher Tietjens, in a mood verging on ‘high good humour’, walks through a Kentish field with Valentine Wannop, a scene, a day, a walk which will recur in both their memories. Among those things that the best people must know are the local names (and the stories behind them) of the plants and flowers they pass. Tietjens—younger son, mathematician, member of the English public official class, who will also, in time, be lover, soldier and antique dealer—tells over to himself the words, the names, the language:

In the hedge: Our lady’s bedstraw: dead-nettle: bachelor’s button (but in Sussex they call it ragged robin, my dear: So interesting!) cowslip (paigle, you know, from the old French pasque, meaning Easter): burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, let not burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers of course over; black briony; wild clematis: later it’s old man’s beard; purple loose-strife. (That our young maids long purples call and liberal shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil!) …[4]

In the wonderful Botanic Garden, the country’s oldest, one section is the Literary Garden, featuring plants that occur in literature, Alice in Wonderland, Agatha Christie (a great user of poisons) and others, including William Shakespeare:

Yes, those liberal shepherds grossly naming again. Modernists though Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Wyndham Lewis and Ford were, they were not Futurists rejecting the past—a little more selective than that: ‘BLAST years 1837 to 1900’ and, indeed, ‘BLESS SHAKESPEARE for his bitter Northern Rhetoric of humour’—and they all had frequent recourse to that Elizabethan. . .

Notes

[1] Rory Stewart, Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within (London: Jonathan Cape, 2023), 100.

[2] Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 127

[3] Extracts in The Oxford Book of Classical Verse, edited by Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 394; The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, Chosen and Edited by Charles Tomlinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 38.

[4] Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not. . . (1924; edited by Max Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2010), 132.

Wording, birding


(Robert Wilson, Hadrian’s Villa, c.1765: Tate)

‘At night I trailed from one window recess to another’, the Emperor Hadrian recalls in Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel, ‘from balcony to balcony through the rooms of that palace where the walls were still cracked from the earthquake, here and there tracing my astrological calculations upon the stones, and questioning the trembling stars. But it is on earth that the signs of the future have to be sought.’[1]

So it is. ‘Ghosts await you in the future if they do not follow you from the past’, Sarah Moss wrote, and: ‘No one who knows what happens in the world, what humans do to humans, has any claim to contentment.’[2] Yes. I write pages and delete them, since they serve no real purpose except to relieve my feelings for a short while. The past is not always a foreign country and they do not always do things differently there. As Pankaj Mishra said in his recent ‘Winter Lecture’: ‘It hardly seems believable, but the evidence has become overwhelming: we are witnessing some kind of collapse in the free world.’[3]

Early summer creeps on, though fitfully. Watching rose petals fall from the bush in a light wind, I remembered Pound’s Canto XIII, the first in which Confucius appears, and which ends:

The blossoms of the apricot
            blow from the east to the west
And I have tried to keep them from falling.[4]


(Shen Zhou, ‘Apricot Blossom’, leaf from the album, Dreaming of Travelling While in Bed: Palace Museum, Beijing)

Ronald Bush observed that: ‘To keep the blossoms of the apricot from falling is to keep nature in a permanent vernal bounty.’[5] It also seems to me to signify cultural contact, the free exchange of ideas, without the limits of borders or nationalism. At that stage, Pound was using Guillaume Pauthier’s translation of Confucian texts in Confucius et Mencius: les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine and had written in ‘Exile’s Letter’:

Intelligent men came drifting in from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially
There was nothing at cross purpose,
And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship,
And we all spoke out our hearts and minds, and without regret.[6]

On the daily walks we speak our minds but, just lately, exchanges are punctuated by information from our newly downloaded Merlin app, available from Cornell University, which draws on a huge database of bird sounds, sightings and photographs to identify what you’re probably hearing in that nearby tree or passing overhead.


So we stroll along narrow paths thus:

Politics, dinner, politics. . .
‘Blue tit. Carrion crow. Wren.’
Politics, domestic details, politics, cat, literary chuntering. . .
‘Dunnock. Blackcap. Chiffchaff.’
Ash dieback, politics, university gossip, politics. . .
‘Blackbird. Herring gull. Great tit. Jay!’

Excuse me, sir, let me just ask about the birdsong: in a world both literally and metaphorically on fire, democracies hanging by a thread, war crimes, liars and knaves in public places – does it help?

Why, yes, a little – rather more than a little, in fact. . .

Notes

[1] Marguerite Yourcenar, The Memoirs of Hadrian, translated by Grace Frick, with Yourcenar (1951; Penguin Books, 2000), 82.

[2] Sarah Moss, Signs for Lost Children (London: Granta Books, 2016), 88-89, 97.

[3] Pankaj Mishra, ‘The Shoah after Gaza’ [Winter Lecture], London Review of Books 46, 5 (7 March 2024).

[4] The Cantos of Ezra Pound, fourth collected edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 60.

[5] Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 251.

[6] ‘Exile’s Letter’, Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 255.

Passing the critical stage, or not


RSPB: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/jay

The highlight of yesterday morning was the jay, garrulus glandarius, briefly perched on the high roof of the shed beyond our back fence, a bird we’ve seen high up in the trees of the Victorian cemetery but never so close to home. The lowlight, in the wake of the announcement of a forthcoming General Election, now a little over five weeks away, was probably the reported Tory proposals to cut taxes for the rich again and to bring back National Service. This last appears to be an attempt to outflank satirists with a first strike of absurdity and anachronism. We await with bated breath the reintroduction to the statute books of the death penalty for stealing a pocket handkerchief, damaging Westminster Bridge or impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner.

Reading the stories of  Somerville and Ross lately, I alighted on Major Sinclair Yeates, together with Flurry Knox and the visiting Englishman Leigh Kelway, taking refuge from the rain in a public-house, having failed to get to the country races: ‘The bread tasted of mice, the butter of turf-smoke, the tea of brown paper, but we had got past the critical stage.’[1]

On occasion, we – or certainly I – don’t get to the critical stage, much less past it. Some things, moments, sights, sounds, are merely to be experienced and enjoyed (or, occasionally, suffered), without evaluation or ranking or even attempted analysis. And sometimes, writing so good or so distinctive that it delays or disarms criticism.

After a recent lunch, the librarian lingered at the table, extending her familiarity with the work of Olivia Laing, occasionally pausing to tell me how good it—The Garden Against Time—was. On my side of the table, I was extending my familiarity with the work of Anne Carson (Wrong Norma), frowning occasionally, laughing often and muttering, not at all rarely, ‘Wonderful!’ None of which, I suppose, passes muster as incisive literary analysis or exegesis. Not all the world’s a critical stage, you might say. (I’ve since read the Olivia Laing myself, muttering ‘Wonderful’ from time to time.)


The authors: from Irish Memories (1919)

‘It has been said of Ireland that the inevitable never happens, and that the impossible invariably occurs.’[2]

The volume that contains the Somerville and Ross story was published 125 years ago and is dense with hunting and hunting lore: horses, hounds, whips, drags and the rest. I could hardly be further from the imagined target audience if an interest in, or sympathy with, hunting were assumed. But that, of course, is not the point. The point is the writing, the humour, the sharply drawn characters, the thorough, detailed knowledge of Irish people and culture with which it deals, the politics of the time not made central but subtly pointed up from time to time.

In the Laing book, in fact, there are hundreds of plant names that meant nothing to me, functioning rather as sound poetry, mantra or music. But then, as more than one critic has pointed out, you don’t need detailed knowledge of baccarat or poker to take pleasure in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale and, more broadly, the narrator or central character of a novel with whom we don’t sympathise, empathise, agree or even like at all is pretty standard. So too the frequent apparent gap between the maker and the made, and the recurrent agonising over how one can possibly read X’s writings or look at Y’s pictures or listen to Z’s music because they were such awful people doesn’t really connect with me. . .

On hunting, Walter de la Mare had a neat little poem:

Hi! Handsome hunting man,
Fire your little gun,
Bang! Now that animal
Is dead and dumb and done.
Never more to peep again, creep again, leap again,
Eat or sleep or drink again, oh, what fun![3]

In a New York Times Book Review piece, W. H. Auden quotes it and concludes: ‘A child brought up on such verses may break his mother’s heart or die on the gallows but he will never suffer from a tin ear.’[4]

Tin ears are very widely rampant just now (if ears can in fact ramp). But then, in the cemetery this morning: two jays in the same tree, quite close together. I doubt if the Tories, in their distorting lowlight mirror, can rival that.

Notes

[1] E. Œ. Somerville & Martin Ross, ‘Lisheen Races, Second-Hand’, in The Irish R. M. (London: Abacus, 1989), 102-103.

[2] ‘Major Apollo Riggs: Part III’, The Irish R. M., 518.

[3] Walter de la Mare, Rhymes and Verses: Collected Poems for Children (New York: Holt, 1988), 86.

[4] W. H. Auden, ‘An Appreciation of the Lyric Verse of Walter de la Mare’ (NYTBR, 26 February 1956), reprinted in Prose, Volume IV: 1956-1962, edited by Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 8. He noted that Randall Jarrell’s was ‘the only good American article about de la Mare’s recent work that I have come across’. This must be the piece published in The Nation (1946) and included in Poetry and the Age (1955; London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 137-141.

First lines, later thoughts


(Carson McCullers: Columbus State University via Library of America)

Rereading a Carson McCullers novel recently, I was thinking again about the curious affair of the opening line. Though I’m quite capable these days of forgetting someone’s name even while they’re still being introduced to me, I recall or recognise the openings of books read twenty, thirty, even forty years ago. Ford, unsurprisingly; Joyce, Faulkner, Patrick White, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, one or two, the famous ones by Beckett and by Camus (with translators and their reviewers jousting over the ‘correct’ Anglo-American equivalent to that one word, ‘maman’). Not always the ones I expect, sometimes books of which I remember practically nothing else. Here, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’s opening, ‘In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together’, was, I realised, already imprinted on one of the walls of my brain, perhaps a little faded after more than a quarter of a century, but still clearly legible.

First lines are frequently very far from first thoughts; and sometimes freighted, by writer or critic, with all manner of significance. Of the famous opening of John Keats’s Endymion:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing

Robert Gittings remarked that ‘Keats had not only found a first line and a beginning; he had found a principle that was to maintain him all through his life.’[1] That is, loving the principle of beauty in all things.

Also attentive to large implications, Hugh Kenner wrote of the eventual opening of Pound’s Cantos:

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea

that here the poet was pondering ‘a chord that should comprise four of history’s beginnings: the earliest English (“Seafarer” rhythms and diction), the earliest Greek (the Nekuia), the beginnings of the 20th-century Vortex, and the origins of the Vortex we call the Renaissance, when once before it had seemed pertinent to reaffirm Homer’s perpetual freshness.’[2] What actually precedes that first word, ‘And’, has also proved a fertile subject for discussion. One thing that precedes it, of course, is the section of Canto III in the 1917 Poetry publication, ‘Three Cantos of a Poem of Some Length’, that alludes to Andreas Divus, the Renaissance translator of Homer’s Odyssey into Latin and continues:

‘Here’s but rough meaning:
“And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers,
Forth on the godly sea”’[3]


That first line, in a prose work, can suggest tone, style, diction, even imply the extent or nature of the whole. It can also, of course, strike the wrong note with some readers. ‘By the way’, Penelope Fitzgerald wrote to the novelist Francis King, ‘wouldn’t you agree that the worst thing about the opening of Howards End isn’t so much the letter itself (as a method) as the “One may as well begin with”. It makes me feel resentful. Why begin at all, if that’s how he feels about it.’[4]

And, it hardly needs saying, there is often another issue about that first line to consider, specifically, is it in fact the first line at all? Is the first line of Byron’s Don Juan, the ‘Preface to Cantos I and II’—‘In a note or preface (I forget which) by Mr W. Wordsworth to a poem’—or the ‘Dedication’—‘Bob Southey! You’re a poet, poet laureate’—or ‘Canto I’: ‘I want a hero, an uncommon want’?  We all know that Melville’s Moby Dick commences dramatically: ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Except that it really begins: ‘Etymology (Supplied by a late consumptive usher to a grammar school.)’ This list is followed by a dozen pages of ‘Extracts (supplied by a sub-sub-librarian.)’ And then there are accretions: readers beginning Ford’s The Good Soldier will now, more often than not, reach its famous opening line (‘This is the saddest story I ever heard’) via the ‘Dedicatory Letter’, addressed to Stella Bowen, added to the 1927 edition (a dozen years after the first) and generally included in subsequent editions – the opening line itself having been altered from the serial version in Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, while the story of that alteration is contained in the letter (one version of the story, anyway, just to be clear).


(Frances Flora Bond Palmer, lithograph published by Currier and Ives, ‘Rounding a Bend on the Mississippi – The Parting Salute’, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Huckleberry Finn also has its prefatory matter and its own slight challenge to determine exactly how and where it begins. ‘You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter.’ This sentence is preceded by the ‘Notice’ warning against attempts to find motive, moral or plot in the narrative that follows and a note about the variety of dialects used in it, Twain adding (still funny, I think, 140 years on): ‘I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.’

D. H. Lawrence was sometimes prone to writing complete new versions of a text, rather than tinkering. Still, as Frances Wilson notes, in the case of the superb ‘Introduction’ to the Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by ‘M. M.’ (Maurice Magnus), ‘apart from revising his opening line and rethinking some later sentences, his sixty handwritten pages are as neat and unblotted as the work of a medieval scribe.’[5] Lawrence himself thought it ‘the best single piece of writing, as writing, that he had ever done’.[6]

Last words are, of course, a different matter entirely. . .

Notes

[1] Robert Gittings, John Keats (London: Pelican Books, 1971), 188.

[2] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 349.

[3] So one earlier thing is those quotation marks. The 1917 texts are included in Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 318-330, and discussed at length by Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

[4] Letter of 12 April [c.1978], So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 269.

[5] Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence (London: Bloomsbury,  2021), 153. Lawrence’s essay is reprinted in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence, Collected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (London: William Heinemann, 1968), 303-361.

[6] David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6. Lawrence said this to Catherine Carswell: see her The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence (1932; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 117.

Blackbird, macaroni

(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.

Notes

[1] Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), 9.

[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.