Lords and servants

(Nicholas Condy, Estate Staff in a Servants’ Hall: Mount Edgcumbe House)

As we get older – I’m warily assuming that I’m not alone in this – our reading habits tend to change. These days, I don’t even pretend to persevere with a work that bores me or that I find incomprehensible, while avoiding anything that smacks of the dutiful. I also have a small store of things that keep the reading wheels turning if I stall. Crime fiction, certainly, but also a few writers with a healthy backlist of novels and stories, always of, or above, a certain quality threshold, literary but not excruciatingly so, tending to the concise and accessible. My usual suspects include Graham Greene and Muriel Spark.

Reading recently Spark’s unsettling short novel Not to Disturb, I came across Lister, the Baron Klopstock’s butler, saying to the other household servants as they anticipate the incursion of the press: ‘“Bear in mind that when dealing with the rich, the journalists are mainly interested in backstairs chatter. The popular glossy magazines have replaced the servants’ hall in modern society. Our position of privilege is unparalleled in history. The career of domestic service is the thing of the future.”’[1]

Any close encounters with literature and history, up to and well into the twentieth century will bump up against the servants – or, very often, the silence and spaces where the servants would be. If domestic service of the old kind seemed until recently to have largely died out in this country, except in the homes of the immensely rich or ostentatious, in many other parts of the world, it seems never to have diminished much at all. Definitions of ‘servant’ and ‘service’ have shifted or dissolved, and the contemporary situation is complex and frequently alarming, riven with cancelled visas, failed safeguards and government inaction, while the exploitation and abuse reported from a great many countries seem indistinguishable from slavery.

(John Finnie, Maids of All Work: Museum of the Home)

Lucy Lethbridge observed that: ‘In 1900 domestic service was the single largest occupation in Edwardian Britain: of the four million women in the British workforce, a million and a half worked as servants, a majority of them as single-handed maids in small households. Hardly surprising then that the keeping of servants was not necessarily considered an indication of wealth: for many families it was so unthinkable to be without servants that their presence was almost overlooked.’[2]

In Dorothy Sayers’ childhood, her biographer wrote, ‘It was the period of wash-stands with jug and basin in the bedrooms, and chamber pots. The housemaid carried cans of hot water up to the bedrooms every morning. When baths were needed, hot water was again carried up and poured into a hip bath. ‘“Strangely enough, my mother used to say,” wrote Dorothy, “she never had a servant complain of this colossal labour in all the twenty years we were at Bluntisham.”’[3] Beside this might be placed Rudyard Kipling’s recalling, late in life, his dislike for those radicals who ‘derided my poor little Gods of the East, and asserted that the British in India spent violent lives “oppressing” the Native. (This in a land where white girls of sixteen, at twelve or fourteen pounds per annum, hauled thirty and forty pounds weight of bath-water at a time up four flights of stairs!)’[4] Twelve or fourteen pounds. . . At a private view, on 3 December 1898, Arthur Balfour, who would become Prime Minister in 1902, bought two of William Hyde’s pictures on the spot. Hyde’s collaboration with the poet Alice Meynell, London Impressions, her ten essays complementing his many ‘etchings and pictures in photogravure’ was published that month, priced at eight guineas, apparently ‘equal to a house servant’s wages for a year’.[5]

Some servants were more highly prized—and individualised—particularly butlers and manservants. E. S. Turner informed his readers that: ‘The butler wore no livery but was attired in formal clothes, distinguished by some deliberate solecism—the wrong tie for the wrong coat or the wrong trousers—to prevent his being mistaken for a gentleman.’[6] Always best to be on the safe side. In the household of Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones, ‘William, like all good butlers, was a depressive.’[7] Some butlers and valets had interesting family connections. In 1840, Benjamin-François Courvoisier was hanged outside Newgate Prison, before a huge crowd (among which were Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray), for the murder of Lord William Russell (he was suspected of other murders but never charged with them). The defendant’s legal representation was provided by Sir George Beaumont, the amateur painter, friend of William Wordsworth and art patron whose pictures were a foundational gift to the National Gallery. Beaumont’s butler was Courvoisier’s uncle.[8]

After the irruption of Sam Weller into the serial version of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and the contribution of Passepartout to Phineas Fogg’s trip Around the World in 80 Days, the most famous—and visible and audible—manservant, in or out of literature, is presumably Jeeves, Bertie Wooster’s valet, surely followed, if at a modest distance, by Lord Peter Wimsey’s ‘immaculate man’, Mervyn Bunter.[9] It’s been suggested that Bunter drew partly on P. G. Wodehouse’s creation though he certainly incorporated elements of a man named Bates, the ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ to an ex-cavalry officer, Charles Crichton, whom Sayers met in France; and Sayers’ husband, ‘Mac’ Fleming, who developed his own photographs and was a good cook (also Bunter attributes).[10] Bunter, Wimsey’s mother explains to Harriet Vane, was previously a footman but ended up a sergeant in Peter’s unit. They were together in a tight spot and took a fancy to each other – ‘so Peter promised Bunter that, if they both came out of the War alive, Bunter should come to him. . . .’ Wimsey’s nightmares about German sappers linger on for a few postwar years: he’s afraid to go to sleep and unable to give orders of any kind. ‘There were eighteen months . . . not that I suppose he’ll ever tell you about that, at least, if he does, then you’ll know he’s cured. . .’ In January 1919, Bunter turns up, on one of Wimsey’s worst days, takes charge and sees to everything, not least finding the Piccadilly flat and installing himself and Wimsey in it.[11]

In that postwar period, apparently, ‘as many as forty ex-soldiers would answer a single advertisement for domestic help.’[12] Though the widespread employment of domestic servants hugely diminished by the time of the Second World War, the habit sometimes persisted in individual lives. Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1974 letter to her daughter Maria, describing the guests at the ‘surrealist tea-party’ that took place during her visit to a friend in Rye, includes mention of ‘Henry James’s manservant (still living in Rye, but with a deaf-aid which had to be plugged into the skirting) who couldn’t really bear to sit down and have tea, but kept springing up and trying to wait on people, with the result that he tripped over the cable­ and contributing in a loud, shrill voice remarks like “Mr Henry was a heavy man – nearly 16 stone – it was a job for him to push his bicycle uphill” – in the middle of all the other conversation wh: he couldn’t hear.’[13]

(Marie Leon, ‘Henry and William James’, (c) National Portrait Gallery)

It occurs to me at this late stage that the matter of servants is not purely an historical issue in my own case since, for three years in Singapore, my parents had the benefit of a cook-boy and an amah, Goh Heck Sin and his wife Leo: cooking, cleaning, laundry all taken care of (had there been young children in the family, the amah would have looked after them too). My primary—and certainly not undervalued—inheritance from those years is my ability to attract the attention of cats by making the call that Sin always made when he summoned our three (Thai Ming, Remo, Tiga) to their meals of rice and steamed fish.

Notes

[1] Muriel Spark, Not to Disturb (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 83.

[2] Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 9.

[3] Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy Sayers: Her Life and Soul, revised edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), 24. Sayers was born in 1893.

[4] Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, edited by Robert Hampson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 87.

[5] Jerrold Northrop Moore, The Green Fuse: Pastoral Vision in English Art, 1820-2000 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2007), 90.

[6] E. S. Turner, What the Butler Saw: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Servant Problem (Michael Joseph 1962; reprinted with new afterword, London: Penguin Books, 2001), 158.

[7] Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), 223.

[8] Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (London: Harper Press, 2011), 202fn.

[9] Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question’, in Lord Peter Views the Body (1928; London: New English Library, 1977), 27.

[10] Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers, 112, 180.

[11] Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon,(1937; London: Coronet, 1988), 379-380.

[12] Turner, What the Butler Saw, 279.

[13] Penelope Fitzgerald, So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 150.

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.

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.

Words made flesh, flash, at a trumpet crash


(‘The Ash Yggdrasil’ from Aasgard and the Gods, by Wilhelm Wägner)

‘I remember going on to think that Ragnarök seemed “truer” than the Resurrection’, the narrator of A. S. Byatt’s story, ‘Sugar’, writes, having known, as a child, the 1880 book Asgard and the Gods.[1]

There’s a peculiar fascination about those moments in a work of art when other practitioners are evoked, quoted or alluded to, especially when the source is altered. Often enough, this is because the writer is quoting from memory: while George Orwell usually announces that he’s about to do so, others engage in the same practice without any such explicit statement, not infrequently getting things almost—but not quite—right. In a letter to G. K. Chesterton (6 July 1928), T. S. Eliot wrote: ‘The last time that I ventured to quote from memory in print, a correspondent [ . . . ] pointed out that I had made twelve distinct mistakes in well-known passages of Shakespeare.’[2] Joseph Conrad used lines from Spenser’s Faerie Queene (I, ix, 359-360) as the epigraph to his novel The Rover (1923), and the same lines were  later incised on his gravestone at Canterbury: ‘Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,/ Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please’. When they reappeared at the close of the ‘English’ text of Ford Madox Ford’s No Enemy (there is an appendix with the original French version of an earlier chapter in English), there were a few differences. ‘Sleep’ becomes ‘rest’ (a resonant word in Ford’s writings), ‘ease after warre’ is excluded, even though Ford wrote much of the book in 1919, having just been gazetted out of the British army after serving both at home and in France and Flanders, ‘death after life’ goes too, since he is celebrating survival, if among a number of ghosts. This is far from simple ‘misquoting’ or ‘misremembering’.[3]


There’s a moment in Dorothy Sayers’ 1934 novel, The Nine Tailors—‘O my, what a lovely piece of work’, Guy Davenport commented, having just read Sayers’ book—when Lord Peter Wimsey, watching a coffin go off up the road, slips into reverie, or stream of consciousness, and suddenly comes up with a chunk of what was immediately familiar to me, though it took a minute or two to identify it as a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’:

                            ‘In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
                            Is immortal diamond.’[4]

These are characteristically arresting lines, but the poem’s full title is ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’, and there is a striking gap, an elision, in the passage that occurs in Wimsey’s thoughts: the line, ‘I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and’, is missing.[5]

Hopkins wrote to his friend, the poet Robert Bridges, on 25 September 1888, that, while the sonnet he’d recently sent Bridges on the Heraclitean fire had distilled a lot of early Greek philosophical thought, perhaps ‘the liquor of the distillation did not taste very Greek’. He added: ‘The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise’—which seems eminently reasonable.[6]


(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Hopkins—Jesuit priest, classics professor—is, as W. H. Gardner wrote, ‘a religious, not merely a devotional, poet. Religion, for him, was the total reaction of the whole man to the whole of life’ (‘Introduction’ to Poems, xxxv). A good many of his poems are addressed directly and vividly to God, as in the first stanza of the first major poem, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’:

Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead
Thou has bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

‘The Windhover’ is dedicated ‘To Christ our Lord’, ‘Pied Beauty’ begins: ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’, ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’ is addressed ‘O Lord’ and a late sonnet begins: ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend/ With thee’. The ‘terrible sonnets’, evidence of great stress, even ‘desolation’, also centrally concern his relationship with God:

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.[7]


Religious themes featured early in Sayers’ writing life and became more central later, in her many plays and her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This rector’s daughter may have had both father and rectory in mind when she wrote The Nine Tailors. Mr Venables is scholarly, very amiable and extremely absent-minded, and Lord Peter Wimsey comes to regard him with affection and respect. Could Sayers have felt that the line she omitted from Hopkins’ poem might have seemed blasphemous to some readers, an issue further complicated by its occurring in her hero’s thoughts? At one point, Wimsey is confronted by a visiting card on a wreath, purporting to be from him but actually supplied by his manservant Bunter (who had been Sergeant to Major Wimsey in the First World War). The card includes a biblical reference, Luke xii, 6. ‘“Very appropriate,” said his lordship, identifying the text after a little thought (for he had been carefully brought up)’ (The Nine Tailors, 133). It’s probably safe to assume that Sayers too had been ‘carefully brought up’ in that respect.

Notes

[1] A. S. Byatt, Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories (London: Vintage, 2023), 37. Her Ragnarok: The End of the Gods was published in 2011.

[2] Quoted in a note to the epigraph of ‘Gerontion’, in The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 469.

[3] Paul Skinner, ‘Just Ford – an Appreciation of No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction’, Agenda, edited by Max Saunders, 27, 4/ 28, 1 (Winter 1989/ Spring 1990), 103-109 (105).

[4] Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Fourth edition, revised and enlarged, edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 105-106. These are the last lines of the poem.

[5] The Nine Tailors (1934; with an introduction by Elizabeth George, London: New English Library, 2003), 122. Davenport’s enthusiasm (he writes the title as The Nine Taylors) is expressed in a letter to Hugh Kenner, 10 April 1967: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward M. Burns, two volumes (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2018), II, 888.

[6] The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, edited by Claude Colleer Abbott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 291.

[7] ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’, Poems, 101.

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.

Burden of proofs


In the past couple of weeks, I’ve read a lot of tributes to, and memories of, Edna O’Brien, who died on 27 July. I know some of her books but clearly not enough of them. My favourite story about her is probably that in one of James Salter’s letters to Robert Phelps (a wonderful volume), dated 2 November 1972. Salter mentions at the top of the letter that Ezra Pound has died (it had happened the previous day) and reports on ‘Dinner last night with Edna O’Brien and her son.’ She was nervous about the play opening that night, A Pagan Place, from her novel of the same title. ‘She ate everything with her fingers’, Salter wrote, ‘lamb, clumps of spinach, they didn’t even have to wash her fork.’ O’Brien told him about a long story, ‘Over’, which the New Yorker was publishing. ‘She was marvelous, she could recite great passages, long pieces of her story, there was one sentence saying something like: I liked your voice and the way you poured things and your fingering.’ Her editor, ‘in the vastly inquisitorial galleys, wrote: “Mr Shawn [editor of the magazine, 1952-87] thinks this is a little too strong for us.” So Edna changed it to “and your fucking.”’[1]

Alas, ‘fingering’ seem to have made a comeback, certainly when the story was collected in A Scandalous Woman and other stories (1974): ‘Do you still use the same words exactly, and exactly the same caresses, the same touch, the same hesitation, the same fingering? Are you as shy with her as with me? If only you had had courage and a braver heart.’[2]

As for the change, was it made around that time, by reluctant but common consent, or later – perhaps at the proof stage? Proofs!

Looking for the umpteenth time at the draft of a Ford Madox Ford letter (its notes, rather), I wondered about an ‘enormous slap of cake’ and was dispirited by my glimpse of a poet named ‘William Worsworth’. In the first instance, I looked back to the original article and found—almost regretfully because I was warming to a ‘slap of cake’—that it was indeed ‘slab’. I didn’t need to check on the poet but simply inserted the missing letter. Any offended descendants of the poet Worsworth should write in.

Reporting on his struggle with the page proofs of The Pound Era (probably—but only probably—a longer book than this volume of letters will turn out to be), Hugh Kenner wrote to Guy Davenport: ‘It is demoralizing to find “viligance” for “vigilance” in a line one has already read 4 times.’[3] And any writer, editor or proofreader will be familiar with that feeling.


(Hugh Kenner via The National Post; photo by the scholar Walter Baumann)

Of an earlier book (on Samuel Beckett), Kenner had confided: ‘In accordance with my normal policy of imitating the specimen’s style, I rigorously trained myself to write dead-pan declarative sentences page after page, with here and there flickers of irony gleaming through the performance. I hope you like the effect.’ And proofs were not always an ordeal: fun was there for the taking, as he added to Davenport a week later: ‘I forget whether I told you that I have spliced bits of Happy Days into my Beckett proofs, so adroitly (I think) that no one will be able to tell they were not there all along.’[4]

In turn, Davenport mentioned, in his ‘Pergolesi’s Dog’—‘We are never so certain of our knowledge as when we’re dead wrong’—that ‘The New York Review of Books once referred to The Petrarch Papers of Dickens and a nodding proofreader for the TLS once let Margery Allingham create a detective named Albert Camus.’[5]

Sylvia Beach recalled the printer of Ulysses, Monsieur Dalantière, supplying as many sets of proofs as James Joyce wanted—‘he was insatiable’—and they were all ‘adorned with the Joycean rockets and myriads of stars guiding the printers to words and phrases all around the margins. Joyce told me that he had written a third of  Ulysses on the proofs.’ Right up to the last minute, ‘the long-suffering printers in Dijon were getting back these proofs, with new things to be inserted somehow, whole paragraphs, even, dislocating pages.’[6] My Viking Press edition of Finnegans Wake (New York: 4th printing, 1945) contains a list of corrections of misprints, made by Joyce: fifteen closely printed pages of double columns, in which such phrases as ‘insert comma’ and ‘delete stop’ abound.[7] The book was published in 1939, less than two years before Joyce’s death, after decades of eye trouble, cataracts, glaucoma and much else.


(Thomas Hardy, early 1920s via The Guardian)

For the professional writer, of course, proofs are a constant, whether burden or blessing. . ‘I am bringing out a stodgy novel this autumn’, E. M. Forster wrote to his friend Malcolm Darling (22 August 1910) ‘but I think I told you this. It’s called Howards End, and dealeth dully with many interesting matters. I am correcting proofs now.’[8] Sylvia Townsend Warner reported in her diary: ‘Proofs and ten thousand letters.’ She added the more specific news that: ‘Thomas Hardy has died. Dorset will mourn – a more rare and antique state of things than England mourning.’[9]

As yet, a very long way from reaching the proof stage, I am still inching through Word documents. As for the errors that other people have missed in the proofs of their texts, errors I come across almost daily in my reading, that would be altogether too long a tale to tell. . .

Notes

[1] Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps, edited by John McIntyre, foreword by Michael Dirda (Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, 2010), 95-96. Phelps, in his letter of 10 November, commented: ‘I’ll never forget Miss O’Brien’s way with spinach’ (97). ‘Over’ appeared in The New Yorker (24 November 1972).

[2] Penguin Books edition (Harmondsworth, 1976), 56.

[3] Letter of 21 June 1971: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward M. Burns, two volumes (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2018), II, 1357.

[4] Letters of 27 September 1961 and 6 October 1961: Questioning Minds, I, 37, 39.

[5] Guy Davenport, Every Force Evolves a Form (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), 145. Allingham’s Albert Campion would probably have been amused.

[6] Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, new edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 58.

[7] See, on Joyce ‘adding commas’, Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (new edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 731, 734.

[8] Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, Volume One: 1879-1920, edited by Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983), 114.

[9] The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Claire Harman (London: Virago Press, 1995), 11: entry for 12 January 1928. Hardy had died in Dorchester the previous day, at the age of 87.