Tag: Edith Wharton

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.

Backward glances

Backward-Glance

(My local backward glance)

Not far into Edith Wharton’s The Spark, one of the novellas in her 1924 volume, Old New York, I came across the young narrator’s query to Jack Alstrop about what Harvey Delane, a figure of great interest to him, has done in his life: ‘Alstrop was forty, or thereabouts, and by a good many years better able than I to cast a backward glance over the problem.’[1]

I was reading Old New York just then because of a hint from Guy Davenport (this story, ‘about a man who had known Whitman in the war’), and my attention had snagged on that phrase ‘backward glance’.[2]

In 1962, Allen Tate published an article responding to a new book of poems, The Long Street, by his friend of long standing, Donald Davidson. Its title was ‘The Gaze Past, The Glance Present: Forty Years After The Fugitive’. This last was the influential journal, published in the early twenties, which centred on poets and scholars at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Several of those writers associated with it (Davidson, Tate, Robert Penn Warren) were later part of the group called the Agrarians.

Ford-Gordon-Biala-Tate
(Caroline Gordon; Janice Biala; Ford Madox Ford; Allen Tate: Summer 1937, via Cornell University Library: https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:550910 )

Tate’s title indicated what he regarded as the disproportionate extent of Davidson’s steady backward gazing, his ‘opposition of an heroic myth to the secularization of man in our age’ – though Tate himself tended to see the fall of the South very much in mythic terms.[3]

Nearly twenty years earlier, another piece by Tate, ‘The New Provincialism’, had asserted that, ‘With the war of 1914-1918, the South re-entered the world—but gave a backward glance as it stepped over the border: that backward glance gave us the Southern renascence, a literature conscious of the past in the present.’[4]

That phrase in turn perhaps looked back a decade to Edith Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, which itself looked back to Walt Whitman. ‘A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads’ appeared in 1888 as a preface to November Boughs and was incorporated into the collected volume, Leaves of Grass, in the following year.

Wharton-Backward-Glance

Remembering an occasion on which someone had spoken of Whitman in the company of Henry James and herself, Wharton recounts how it was ‘a joy to discover that James thought him, as I did, the greatest of American poets. “Leaves of Grass” was put into his hands, and all that evening we sat rapt while he wandered from “The Song of Myself” to “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed” (when he read “lovely and soothing Death” his voice filled the hushed room like an organ adagio), and thence let himself be lured on to the mysterious music of “Out of the Cradle”, reading, or rather crooning it in a mood of subdued ecstasy till the fivefold invocation to Death rolled out like the knocks in the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony.’[5]

Wharton-via-BBC

(Edith Wharton via the BBC)

Whitman would die four years after his 1888 essay. ‘So here I sit gossiping in the early candlelight of old age—I and my book—casting backward glances over our travel’d roads.’ The roads are those to and through and from his great book, the difficulties of publication, the financial failure of his work, the critical attacks that have been made upon it. Yet the glance is just that: as so often, Whitman’s gaze is, in fact, to the future. ‘I look upon Leaves of Grass, now finish’d to the end of its opportunities and powers, as my definitive carte visite to the coming generations of the New World, if I may assume to say so.’[6]

Walt-Whitman

In ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1856), Whitman writes:

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d. [7]

As the White Queen remarks in Through the Looking-Glass, ‘“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”.’[8]

Alice_and_white_queen

(Alice and the White Queen by John Tenniel)

People have occasionally remarked in my hearing that there’s ‘no use in looking back’, that they ‘live in the moment, always in the present tense’. Well, that’s just dandy, they might see a tail or a trunk but they won’t be seeing the whole elephant any time soon. The backward glance is indispensable, I think, as resource, as collaborator, as partner; though best not, perhaps, as master. It’s all in the proportions. Francis Bacon observed that ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in its proportion.’[9] There are, though, strangenesses that appear to have little or no acquaintanceship with beauty.

It has been, in any case, a remarkable few years for backward glances and gazes, and for fixed, demented backward—and forward—stares too. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ George Santayana wrote, this famous aphorism inscribed on a plaque at Auschwitz.[10] In that context, of course, it’s very clear what past is being alluded to and the way in which it is and should be viewed. Elsewhere, though, pasts have a great many questions to answer and are subject to warring interpretations. Some of these are unambiguously wrong but others will continue to brawl like rats in a sack. We can only wait with keen interest, if not a great deal of optimism, to see what is glimpsed and held from now in some future backward glance.

 
Notes

[1] Edith Wharton, The Spark, in Novellas and Other Writings, edited by Cynthia Griffin Wolff (New York: Library of America, 1990),451.

[2] Guy Davenport, ‘Walt Whitman and Ronald Johnson’, The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Washington: Counterpoint, 1996), 250.

[3] Allen Tate, Memories and Essays Old and New 1926-1974 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1976), 36.

[4] Allen Tate, The Man of Letters in the Modern World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957), 330-331.

[5] Wharton, A Backward Glance in Novellas and Other Writings, 923.

[6] Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 656.

[7] Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 308-309.

[8] Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, edited by Martin Gardner (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 206.

[9] Bacon, ‘Of Beauty’, Essays, edited by Ernest Rhys (London: Dent, 1932), 129.

[10] Santayana, The Life of Reason. I: Reason in Common Sense (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 284.