Literature – Reconstructionary Tales

Birth days (and other kinds)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Ford via New York Review of Books)

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

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

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

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

A whole eighth. Some photograph, some smile.

Notes

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

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

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

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

[5] Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, edited by Mary de Rachewiltz, David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 358.

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

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

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

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

Lessoning, lessening, listening

(William H. Clarkson, Floods in the Arun Valley, Brighton & Hove Museums)

Two years after the end of the Second World War, Aldous Huxley wrote: ‘The most important lesson of history, it has been said, is that nobody ever learns history’s lessons.’[1] A decade on, in Iris Murdoch’s fourth novel, she wrote of one of her young characters, ‘Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment, one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people’s imperfection.’[2]

Those rising waters would not have struck quite the note they would today, when the human species seems uncertain of whether to burn the planet or to drown it. (Recently—18 November—was the anniversary of the day on which, in 1929, Jonathan Cape published 5000 copies of a book by Robert Graves, with the reassuring title of Good-bye to All That.)

Lessons, though. Trying to think of life lessons I’d learned over the years, I could only initially come up with two: first, if at all possible, do the washing up before going to bed; and second, take the time to empty your bladder completely (if you’ve had one urinary infection in your life, you sure as hell don’t want another one). There must be more, surely. But then, looking around at some of my fellow-creatures just now, I think even two is probably pretty good going. Thus prompted, I remember a third: actually knowing or taking the trouble to find out who is to blame. A great many people in this country and elsewhere are angry, many of them with good reason, but astonishingly often that anger is effortlessly exploited by grifters, charlatans, gangsters, snake oil salesmen and rabblerousers with their own agendas, and the anger diverted to scapegoats rather than focused on the actual culprits.

(Guercino, Saint Cecilia: ã Dulwich Picture Gallery)

I see that today is the feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of musicians, of whom I’ve written before—https://reconstructionarytales.blog/2019/11/22/camelot-and-st-cecilia/—John Dryden’s ‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day 1687’ and its connections with Ford Madox Ford’s work—a day on which so many anniversaries jostle for position: the assassination of President Kennedy, and the deaths, on precisely the same day, of Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis and, three decades later, Anthony Burgess (who was born in the same year as Kennedy). More cheerfully, it’s the birthday of Benjamin Britten, George Eliot and André Gide.

I used to let such dates be prompts quite often when I was writing this blog frequently if not regularly, both birthdays and deathdays, letters or diary entries. I liked too the comforting examples of writers and artists breezing (or bruising or boozing or cruising) into their eighties. Today, of the seven named figures, only Gide comes up to snuff (so to speak) in that respect.

Infrequent, irregular—but still extant, looking and listening.

And yes, there are rumours—even recent claims—of ‘peace’. In The Agricola, Tacitus sets down, or even, as has been suggested, devises—a speech (‘the substance of what he is reported to have said’) by one of the Britons, a military leader named Calgacus, ‘a man of outstanding valour and nobility’, to the crowds of warriors ‘clamouring for battle’. Part of the way through come the phrases familiar to many people, some of whom are probably hazy about the context: ‘auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant’, ‘To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of “government”; they create a desolation and call it peace.’[3] There are probably as many suggestions about the translation of ‘solitudinem’ as there are about the first word (‘maman’) of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger—usually rendered as ‘desert’ but ‘desolation’ seems even more actively desolate than that. The poet and artist David Jones, wrote of ‘all the desolation peculiar to things that functioned in the immediate past but which are now no longer serviceable, either by neglect or by some movement of events.’[4]

(David Jones via Apollo)

It is, to be sure, immensely tiring to find that the constant contemporary echoes and resonances of past events or states of mind or actions seem always to be of a maleficent or destructive or stupid kind rather than constructive, benevolent or intelligent. But we can hardly pretend to be surprised. I try to find a positive in the Labour government’s relentless efforts to prevent my ever voting for them again in a general election. I think the latest vicious policy announcements with regard to the immigration ‘crisis’ may have ensured that.

Otherwise, when not engaged with the reliable humanitas of Ford Madox Ford, I seem to be edging further from the arena and back in time, currently with the young William Hogarth in Smithfield. . .

Notes

[1] Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace (1947), 32.

[2] Iris Murdoch, The Bell (1958; London: Vintage, 2004), 163.

[3] Tacitus, The Agricola and The Germania, H. Mattingly’s translation revised by S. A. Handford (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 81.

[4] David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937; Faber 1963), 21.

‘So they came to the end of that year’

(Jan Josef Horemans the Younger, A Merry Party: Hackney Museum)

‘For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.’—John Milton, Areopagitica

How was it for you?
Bad. How could it not be? Our cat died.
And—more broadly?
Some good connections, some good work done, some good books read.
More broadly still?
Pretty bad. The end of all rules-based international order. Genocidal violence, unchecked. Countries losing their minds, wars waged on children in the modern fashion. The usual stupidity, greed, aggression, corruption. Electorates incapable of paying attention. Cyclists on footpaths; cars on the pavement. Dante knew where to put those people. . .
And next year?
Ah well.
Better or—?
Ah well.
Give me a word.
Attention.
Give me a number.
Two. Three with a cat.
Give me a blessing.
May you always be threefold, even if alone.

I read a lot of books this year and see that just over half of them were by women (which I find significant primarily by virtue of its non-significance now), despite Fords, Simenons, Herrons and the like. Hmm. A recent one was Charlotte Wood’s novel, Stone Yard Devotional, which I’d say is about acceptance and forgiveness, of oneself and of others—and of those who die or disappear before forgiving or being forgiven. That in itself reminds me of another novel recently read, the reissue of Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia: ‘It was Janet’s view that forgetting was the only possible way of forgiving. She did not believe in forgiveness; the word had no meaning.’[1]

Leaning towards Janet – but here’s Willie:

MY SELF:
I am content to follow to its source,
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.[2]

Ali Smith was also a little more, ah, yielding than Elspeth’s Janet: ‘many things get forgiven in the course of a life : nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right’.[3]

Would I be that forgiving were I a victim of the numberless war crimes, sexual assaults, racist attacks, domestic outrages? Frankly, no. But we are at year’s end and, by the sound of it—bears of little brain letting off fireworks as though it were that day in November—it’s an evening of celebration.

Here’s the laureate of cheerfulness, J. G. Ballard: ‘It is a misreading to assume that because my work is populated by abandoned hotels, drained swimming pools, empty nightclubs, deserted airfields and the like, I am celebrating the run-down of a previous psychological and social order. I am not. What I am interested in doing is using these materials as the building blocks of a new order.’[4]

The eminent literary critic Frank Kermode did get to the celebratory stage but seemed to find the steps to it a little surprising. At Liverpool University, he was taught Latin by F. W. Wallbank, J. F. Mountford ‘and, rather surprisingly, George Painter’ (the celebrated biographer of Marcel Proust). ‘I took up Italian, under the instruction, also surprisingly, of the future father of Marianne Faithfull. Indeed, I drank wine in celebration of his wedding and continue to take comfort from this connection with true fame.’[5]

(Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (The Courtauld: Samuel Courtauld Trust)

We are rather more low-key here. A bottle of champagne, some rye bread with smoked salmon, and sitting in front of University Challenge, lamenting (that is, me lamenting) the fact that, while the contestants can answer obscure questions about astronomical phenomena, Third World flags or physiological irregularities, they are all at sea with literary questions that I vaguely assumed to be common knowledge even among household pets.

‘New Year’s Day, for us, is All Souls’ Day’, the Goncourt brothers wrote, 1 January 1862. ‘Our hearts grow chill and count those who are gone’.[6] Ah, well and ah, well. Best wishes to all, wherever you may be, and may 2025 lean more towards Life than the other thing. . .

Notes

[1] Elsbeth Barker, O Caledonia (1991; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2021), 116.

[2] W. B. Yeats, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, Collected Poems, second edition (London: Macmillan, 1950), 142.

[3] Ali Smith, How to be both (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014), 95.

[4] J. G. Ballard, interview with Peter Rǿnnov-Jessen (1984), cited by John Gray, ‘Crash and Burn’, New Statesman (5-11 October 2012), 52.

[5] Frank Kermode, Not Entitled: A Memoir (London: Harper Collins, 1996), 78.

[6] Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, Pages From the Goncourt Journal, edited and translated by Robert Baldick (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 66.

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.

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.

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.

Reliably unreliable

(Horatio McCulloch, Loch Katrine: Perth Art Gallery; managed by Culture Perth and Kinross)

(‘Bussoftlhee, mememormee!’ James Joyce, Finnegans Wake)

I was reading Rosemary Hill’s review of a recent book by Steven Brindle, Architecture in Britain and Ireland: 1530-1830, and the extent to which Henry VIII’s break with Rome was an ‘unmitigated disaster’ for architecture. ‘“The dissolution of the religious houses”, Steven Brindle writes, “tore the heart out of the patronage of … the arts” as it had existed for nine centuries and brought about “the largest redistribution of land since the Norman Conquest”. It would take three generations to begin to recover from this “colossal self-inflicted cultural catastrophe”’.[1]

In the current painful condition of the United Kingdom, the notion of colossal self-inflicted catastrophes brings to mind most readily the ill-conceived and dishonestly presented referendum of 2016, although, with the example in mind of Kipling’s phrase in ‘With the Night Mail’, ‘the traffic and all it implies’,[2] we tend to reflect on Brexit and all it implies. The implications are not pretty. A part-time television critic of my acquaintance, who’d watched a series called ‘The Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson’, observes that it’s very easy to forget how simply and thoroughly ‘a small group of men fucked this country over’. Indeed it is.

Memory is fickle, quite easily manipulated (as is blindingly obvious in our time) but, in any case, a fiction writer of great, if sometimes wayward, abilities. It can also perform extraordinary feats. Katherine Rundell, writing of John Donne’s age, describes how‘ [a] school system which hinged on colossal amounts of memorisation had built a population with the kind of mammoth recall which is, in retrospect, breathtaking’ – listeners returning home to argue over sermons, plagiarise them, make them ‘part of the fabric of their days.’[3] Sylvia Beach recalled reading a line at random from “The Lady of the Lake” – and James Joyce then reciting the whole page and the next ‘without a single mistake’.[4] Scott’s poem is in six cantos, the first of which has 35 stanzas, the second 37 – and the stanzas are not short ones. As for its author’s own powers of recall, James Hogg, in his Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott, ‘tells of how he once went fishing with Scott and Skene [James Skene of Rubislaw]. He was asked to sing the ballad of “Gilmanscleuch” which he had once sung to Scott, but stuck at the ninth verse, whereupon Scott repeated the whole eighty-eight stanzas without a mistake.’[5]

Jenny Diski wrote that ‘there is nothing so unreliable or delicious as one’s rackety memories of oneself.’[6] And we certainly hear and read a lot about ‘unreliable narrators’. Memory is, of course, both narrator and reliably unreliable. This applies both to ourselves and the wider world (perceived and processed by those same selves). In the ‘Foreword’ to Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook, centred on her trip through the deep South in 1970, Nathaniel Rich discussed how a view of ‘the past’ had been relegated to the aesthetic realm and Didion herself remarked on ‘[t]he time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.’[7]

Oddly (though probably not), memory delayed a little in reminding me that my remark about unreliable narrators may be more or less purloined from an essay by Frank Kermode, revisited when I went back to a Conrad novel last year. Nearly one-third of the books I read in 2023 I’d read before, largely due to working on Ford Madox Ford, of course; they were either his own books or Ford-related, directly or tangentially.

Unsurprisingly, they included ‘that finest novel in the English language’, as Ford once described it. And again: ‘[F]or me, Under Western Eyes is a long way the greatest—as it is the latest—of all Conrad’s great novels.’[8] Once more: ‘That is to say, in common with myself, he regarded the writing of novels as the only occupation for a proper man and he thought that those novels should usually concern themselves with the life of great cities.’ There were two such novels. ‘But although The Secret Agent was relatively a failure, Under Western Eyes with its record of political intrigue and really aching passion has always seemed to me by a long way Conrad’s finest achievement.’[9]

I had read Conrad’s novel of pre-revolutionary politics, betrayal and assassination so long ago that it might almost have been for the first time – almost. It is, no doubt, a tribute to the writing that I found myself consciously offering advice to the student Razumov during his interview with Councillor Mikulin: Shut up! Don’t say another word! Hold your tongue! He can’t, of course. And Ford saw the driving force of much of the book to be personal honour. Of Razumov’s ploy to ‘add a touch of verisimilitude’, having a foolish boy rob his own rich father but then tossing the money from a train window, Ford comments: ‘And the same unimaginative cruelty of a man blindly pursuing his lost honour dignifies Razumov to the end.’[10]

My surviving sense of the book had included Conrad’s known antipathy to Russia (hardly surprising in a Pole born in the Ukraine, part of the Russian Empire but once part of Poland) and his contempt for revolutionaries, which was evident in The Secret Agent. Under Western Eyes was written between two Russian revolutions, published (1911) exactly midway, in fact. But notions of nationality, allegiance and bafflement also shouted aloud ‘Conrad’! Or, perhaps, ‘Konrad Korzeniowski!’ Much of this was to do with that complex process of holding onto a strong sense of one’s native country and culture, while adopting a second language (retaining fluency in the first) – and then a third, while settling in another country and choosing to write in that third language. None of this was made much easier for Conrad by his being attacked on occasion by Polish compatriots for deserting both language and country. Not that migration is ever only a matter of language. H. G. Wells had a couple of digs at Conrad, not only that he spoke English ‘strangely’ but also that ‘[o]ne could always baffle Conrad by saying “humour.” It was one of our damned English tricks he had never learned to tackle.’[11] Under-westernised?

Kermode’s celebrated essay, ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’, I’d also read a long time ago.[12] Briefly, he argues that Conrad’s text shows itself obsessed with certain words and images which wholly evade orthodox, ‘common sense’ readings. More, he suggests that the book’s ‘secrets’ are in fact ‘all but blatantly advertised’ (99) and from which, by a curious process of collusion, ‘we avert our attention’ (95). He is pointing to the novel’s constant references to ghosts or phantoms, souls, eyes and, perhaps above all, to the art of writing, more, the materials of writing: black on white, ink on paper, shadows on snow, notebooks, a journal wrapped in a veil. I went back to the essay after reading the novel. It’s true that I found it difficult to see how critics had not seen and grasped – or sought – the significance of the astonishing frequency of such images. Souls, ghosts and related words occur a hundred times, references to eyes more than sixty times, and so on. This is bound to snag the attention of a reader of Ford’s The Good Soldier, an even shorter novel, I think, in which the verb ‘to know’ in its various forms, occurs not far short of three hundred times. ‘What I ask you to believe’, Kermode writes, ‘is that such oddities are not merely local; they are, perhaps, the very “spirit” of the novel’ (97). Difficult not to notice, I said, but cannot be sure of how much that noticeability is related to residual memories of his essay. With a fistful of exceptions, I’m unacquainted with the secondary literature on Conrad which is, I’ve learned, ‘huge, approximately 800 monographs, biographies, edited collections, volumes of letters and catalogues, without counting the hundreds of peer-reviewed papers in the general and specialist literary journals, the untranslated material and the unpublished doctoral theses.’[13]

Richard Parkes Bonington, La Place du Molard, Geneva (Victoria & Albert Museum)

St Petersburg, Geneva. The book is centrally concerned, of course, with Russia: its psychology, Conrad himself suggested, more than its politics. There is also the essential complicating factor of the narrator—‘all narrators are unreliable, but some are more expressly so than others’, as Kermode remarks (yes, that’s the one).[14] A language teacher, English, in love with Natalia Haldin, sister of the executed assassin Victor Haldin, and friendly with their mother. Speaking sometimes in his own voice (whatever the extent to which it’s borrowed) and sometimes through the medium of Razumov’s journal, he repeatedly asserts an inability to understand the Russian character, the Russian soul. He glances down at the letter Natalia is holding, ‘the flimsy blackened pages whose very handwriting seemed cabalistic, incomprehensible to the experience of Western Europe.’ At one point, ‘I could not forget that, standing by Miss Haldin’s side, I was like a traveller in a strange country.’ Again, ‘The Westerner in me was discomposed’ and: ‘I felt profoundly my European remoteness and said nothing, but I made up my mind to play my part of helpless spectator to the end.’ And: ‘To my Western eyes she seemed to be getting farther and farther from me, quite beyond my reach now, but undiminished in the increasing distance.’ One more: ‘And this story, too, I received without comment in my character of a mute witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my Western eyes.’

Continually asserting his incomprehension, the unfamiliarity of what he is observing, he does, of course recall Ford’s John Dowell, to whom it is all a darkness and who repeatedly asserts: ‘I don’t know’. And yet, and yet. There are many suspicious readings of The Good Soldier, some of which ask if Dowell is as unknowing as he appears to be and also, perhaps, what kind of knowledge he does not possess. It is, unusually for Ford, narrated in the first person. In any case, it is fatally easy, waltzing among thornbushes, to catch one’s sleeve on that knowledge of knowing nothing, to recall the famous moment in Eliot’s The Waste Land—‘I knew nothing,/Looking into the heart of light, the silence’—and, remembering his interest in eastern thought and religion, wonder if that knew should be stressed infinitely more than the nothing.

(J. M. W. Turner, Sunrise with a Boat between Headlands: Tate)

Kermode notes that, when Conrad began the book, he called it Razumov: ‘but when it was done (on the last page of the manuscript, in fact) he changed the title to Under Western Eyes. He had found out what he was doing’ (98). I remember the pleasure with which I came across that last sentence: the recognition of the fact that, so often, we find out not only how to do something but what it is we are actually doing – only by doing it. And this, certainly, not just in art.

The novelist and playwright Enid Bagnold described how: ‘Beauty never hit me until I was nine.’ When she arrived in Jamaica as a child: ‘this was the first page of my life as someone who can “see”. It was like a man idly staring at a field suddenly finding he had Picasso’s eyes. In the most startling way I never felt young again. I remember myself then just as I feel myself now.’ She adds, a little later: ‘And what you remember is richer than the thing itself.’[15]

Well, sometimes.

Notes

[1] Rosemary Hill, ‘Des briques, des briques’, London Review of Books, 46, 6 (21 March 2024), 13.

[2] Rudyard Kipling, Actions and Reactions (New York: Scribner’s 1909), 148.

[3] Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (London: Faber, 2023), 223.

[4] Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, new edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 71.

[5] John Buchan, Sir Walter Scott (London: Cassell, 1932), 131. The ballad was included in Hogg’s first book, The Mountain Bard (1807).

[6] Jenny Diski, In Gratitude (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 187.

[7] Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook, foreword by Nathaniel Rich (London: 4^th Estate, 2017), xviii, 104.

[8] Ford, Thus to Revisit (London: Chapman & Hall, 1921), 90-91; Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 193.

[9] Ford, ‘Introduction’ to Joseph Conrad, The Sisters, edited by Ugo Mursia (Milan: U. Mursia & Co., 1968), 11-30 (14).

[10] Ford, ‘Joseph Conrad’, English Review, X (December 1911), 68-83 (71).

[11] H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (1934; London: Faber, 1984), 616, 622.

[12] Frank Kermode, ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’, Critical Inquiry, 7, 1 (Autumn 1980), 83-101 (references are to this); reprinted in Essays on Fiction, 1971-1982 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 133-155.

[13] Helen Chambers, review of Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), Last Post: A Literary Journal from the Ford Madox Ford Society, I, 4 (Autumn 2020), 124.

[14] Kermode, 89-90; and see footnote 7: ‘The trouble is not that there are unreliable narrators but that we have endorsed as reality the fiction of the “reliable” narrator.’

[15] Enid Bagnold, Autobiography (London: Century Publishing, 1985), 14, 100.