the local author / anachronism

Katherine McMahon: After Mary (London: Flamingo, 2000)

This is a historical novel about English Catholics in the early seventeenth century. It is so well-written that we soon come to trust; here there will be no badly made scenes.

 

The dialogue is written in neutral modern English, always sharp and absorbing, yet somehow recalling Mills and Boon romances.

 

“But you must surely have longed to be more active all these years.”

“I’m not the adventurous type. I only do as I’m told.”

 

“Shall we go to the cathedral first? Shall we see what it’s like to be in a Catholic church?” Isabel asked.

“We’re expected in the Rue Grosse.”

“Ten minutes. Just to convince ourselves of where we are.”

 

But Isabel Stanhope’s story doesn’t lead in a conventional Mills and Boon direction, though it draws on that genre’s fire, idealism, and avoidance of the explicit.

 

The descriptive writing is like this:

 

Behind lacy iron gates the house was burnished the colour of toast.

 

He was a tallish man with a complicated face and flaky scalp.

 

He folded his hands and pom-pommed a little tune to himself.

 

When she pushed back the door the smell of raw wood and incense was at once replaced by a rush of autumn air.

 

 

The logic of Isabel and her world is that Shakespeare, in the book’s most nervous moments, can only be rejected with appalled incomprehension. But it is not the rejection of a pious seventeenth-century Catholic; it is the rejection of a modern awareness.

 

The brilliance of those descriptive sentences is inescapably linked to the anachronism of the dialogue and the implied conceptions of action. Nothing could have been thought in this way, yet these things (or something like them) must have happened. There is indeed a yawning void in our ability to grasp the everyday life of the past. The writers didn’t record it, though we sometimes devceive ourselves into thinking they did.

The effect of the anachronism is to make the book’s image a “fantasy” - a liberating effect when it is employed so seriously. I persistently question what (or where) the book is really about. The ending is thoroughly satisfying. Mary Ward’s project is feminist as well as (or perhaps more than) religious. All the male characters fail Isabel, unless perhaps Father Turner, who (with splendid anachronism) clinches matters thus:

 

Your penance, my dear Mistress Stanhope, and it is a heavy one, is to follow the dictates of your own conscience.

 

 

[Image source: http://www.optimamagazine.co.uk/read/features/people/213-creative-processes-katharine-mcmahon . Katharine lives in N. London.  This is from an interview with the author in a local magazine covering "S. Hertfordshire / N. Middlesex".]


*


After Mary draws on the historical figure of Mary Ward (1585 - 1645), a Roman Catholic nun who founded a non-contemplative women's community in St-Omer in 1609, to much conservative disquiet within the church. She conceived it as a sister movement to the Jesuits. The movement carried on after her death, though official status was withheld until 1703. As the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary / Sisters of Loreto,  it now runs 150 schools worldwide: Mary Ward was granted the title Venerable in 2009. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ward_(nun)).


Mary Ward was born in Mulwith, three miles SE of Ripon in North Yorkshire. Presumably this was at Mulwith Farmhouse, though the present-day building is a mid-18th-century construction. Mulwith is on the north bank of the river Ure.








*








Katherine McMahon's website: https://www.katharinemcmahon.com/ . Her tenth novel, The Hour of Separation, set in Belgium in March 1939, is just out.


Katharine McMahon's interesting article "Memory and Fiction: Why Historical Fiction is also Contemporary Fiction": https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/memory-and-fiction/


Katharine McMahon on her lifelong obsession with the Brontës: https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/haunted-by-the-brontes/ . 


(The Hour of Separation has submerged connections with Villette.)

Charlotte Brontë once more

Belshazzar's Feast, painting by John Martin (1820)

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belshazzar's_Feast_(Martin_painting) In the foreground are the sacred vessels of the temple, defiled by Belshazzar and his women.]






Lines Addressed to 'The Tower of All Nations'


Oh, thou great, thou mighty tower!
    Rising up so solemnly
O'er all this splendid, glorious city:
    This city of the sea ;


Thou seem'st, as silently I gaze,
   Like a pillar of the sky:
So lofty is thy structure grey ;
  So massive and so high!


The dome of Heaven is o'er thee hung
   With its maze of silver stars ;
The earth is round about thee spread
   With its eternal bars.


And such a charming doggerel
   As this was never wrote,
Not even by the mighty
   And high Sir Walter Scott!




(Charlotte Brontë, aged about 14)




A mezzotint (dating from about 1830) of John Martin's gigantic painting hung in Haworth parsonage. The young Brontës were duly impressed by the tremendous tower of Babel that looms in the background, and it became their model for the most imposing building in their imaginary world, the Tower of All Nations in Verdopolis.


[This information comes from Heather Glen's own essay (on Shirley and Villette)  in The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës (2002), a collection she also edited.  Stevie Davies, editing the poems in 1976, named a different (though equally spectacular) John Martin painting - also with a gigantic tower in the distance - , The Fall of Babylon.]

Mezzotint (1831) from John Martin's painting The Fall of Babylon (1818)

[Image source: http://www.urbanghostsmedia.com/2015/11/fall-of-babylon-epic-landscape-paintings-john-martin/ ]








*


"Villette is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power." (George Eliot in 1853)




If we can interpret  "preternatural", the second sentence seems to be a recognition, from the point of view of a future woman novelist who would herself be constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible, that she could neither have conceived beforehand the existence of such a book as Villette nor conceive now how such a book was written.




*

PAULINA.

Some days elapsed, and it appeared she was not likely to take much of a fancy to anybody in the house. She was not exactly naughty or wilful: she was far from disobedient; but an object less conducive to comfort—to tranquillity even—than she presented, it was scarcely possible to have before one's eyes. She moped: no grown person could have performed that uncheering business better; no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe's antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of home sickness than did her infant visage. She seemed growing old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted.

And again, when of moonlight nights, on waking, I beheld her figure, white and conspicuous in its night-dress, kneeling upright in bed, and praying like some Catholic or Methodist enthusiast—some precocious fanatic or untimely saint—I scarcely know what thoughts I had; but they ran risk of being hardly more rational and healthy than that child's mind must have been.

I seldom caught a word of her prayers, for they were whispered low: sometimes, indeed, they were not whispered at all, but put up unuttered; such rare sentences as reached my ear still bore the burden, "Papa; my dear papa!" This, I perceived, was a one-idea'd nature; betraying that monomaniac tendency I have ever thought the most unfortunate with which man or woman can be cursed.

What might have been the end of this fretting, had it continued unchecked, can only be conjectured: it received, however, a sudden turn.

One afternoon, Mrs. Bretton, coaxing her from her usual station in a corner, had lifted her into the window-seat, and, by way of occupying her attention, told her to watch the passengers and count how many ladies should go down the street in a given time. She had sat listlessly, hardly looking, and not counting, when—my eye being fixed on hers—I witnessed in its iris and pupil a startling transfiguration. These sudden, dangerous natures—sensitive as they are called—offer many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured from participation in their angular vagaries. The fixed and heavy gaze swum, trembled, then glittered in fire; the small, overcast brow cleared; the trivial and dejected features lit up; the sad countenance vanished, and in its place appeared a sudden eagerness, an intense expectancy. "It is!" were her words.

Like a bird or a shaft, or any other swift thing, she was gone from the room. How she got the house-door open I cannot tell; probably it might be ajar; perhaps Warren was in the way and obeyed her behest, which would be impetuous enough. I—watching calmly from the window—saw her, in her black frock and tiny braided apron (to pinafores she had an antipathy), dart half the length of the street; and, as I was on the point of turning, and quietly announcing to Mrs. Bretton that the child was run out mad, and ought instantly to be pursued, I saw her caught up, and rapt at once from my cool observation, and from the wondering stare of the passengers. A gentleman had done this good turn, and now, covering her with his cloak, advanced to restore her to the house whence he had seen her issue.

I concluded he would leave her in a servant's charge and withdraw; but he entered: having tarried a little while below, he came up-stairs.

His reception immediately explained that he was known to Mrs. Bretton. She recognised him; she greeted him, and yet she was fluttered, surprised, taken unawares. Her look and manner were even expostulatory; and in reply to these, rather than her words, he said,—"I could not help it, madam: I found it impossible to leave the country without seeing with my own eyes how she settled."

"But you will unsettle her."

"I hope not. And how is papa's little Polly?"

This question he addressed to Paulina, as he sat down and placed her gently on the ground before him.

"How is Polly's papa?" was the reply, as she leaned on his knee, and gazed up into his face.

It was not a noisy, not a wordy scene: for that I was thankful; but it was a scene of feeling too brimful, and which, because the cup did not foam up high or furiously overflow, only oppressed one the more. On all occasions of vehement, unrestrained expansion, a sense of disdain or ridicule comes to the weary spectator's relief; whereas I have ever felt most burdensome that sort of sensibility which bends of its own will, a giant slave under the sway of good sense.

(Opening of Chapter 2 of Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë, then aged about 36)

It was a lonely Charlotte Brontë who set about writing Villette. Since the time of writing "Lines Addressed to 'The Tower of All Nations'", composition had always been a family affair. A new novel had always been tried out on sisters, even Shirley, though by the end there were no sisters left. But now, according to a letter, she was deeply conscious of making her way unaided (her father apparently was no substitute, though we know his opinion had a modifying influence on the ending). 

There are many voices here. The author's wit, though no longer funny, brims with energy. The remarkably accurate observation of the child Paulina, her father, and later Graham, is hard to reconcile with the cool, judgmental Lucy Snowe. Surely such observation must imply tenderness? We're meant to notice Lucy, of course. At times it's a little unsubtle, for example the adverb "quietly" intruded into a remark that Lucy never even gets to make. At the end of the quoted passage we see how Lucy is oppressed by palpable emotion even more than by a blaze of passion, because she can't find the former ridiculous. But why this terror of emotion, if Lucy's unspecified tragedies are still in the future?

Lucy already, it seems, sees herself as something less than a human being. On the first page of Villette, she comments: "One child in a household of grown people is usually made very much of, and in a quiet way I was a good deal taken notice of by Mrs Bretton..." But why is Lucy "one child in a household of grown people" when she is only a year younger than Mrs Bretton's son Graham, who is still at school? Graham appears to regard Lucy as, if anything, rather older than himself: old enough, anyway, to safely pronounce her dull in contrast to little Paulina.

The anti-self-portrait of these opening chapters is sufficiently tortuous to draw the attention that it seems to want to hide from. The reader keeps wondering if Lucy is perhaps joking about her own cool nature, if she must mean us to interpret her as being full of the warm feelings that we like to think we feel ourselves when we read about Paulina and her father. The mystery is never, perhaps, quite resolved. Lucy holding Paulina in her arms on the night of her departure, or the dark-haired boy child a couple of chapters later, suggests a reasonably warm heart and more than usual consideration, where children were concerned. Yet both scenes also suggest that Lucy didn't feel the children were very fond of her.


In some way the apparent contradictions in the narrator are a searching self-portrait of Charlotte, very different from the passionate Jane Eyre. But not quite resolved. Lonely as she was, Charlotte was now a famous novelist, no longer hiding behind the name of Currer Bell, and made some short visits to London -- meeting Thackeray and G.H. Lewes, among others. Witnesses say she appeared grave and serious. She apparently found the presence of young children burdensome. Patricia Beer tells us that her late and all-too-brief marriage was a happy one.

jacket of a Spanish translation of Villette

another note on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - Naturalism

Penguin English Library jacket (1970s style) - turning a detail of Branwell's bad picture into an iconic image

[Branwell's painting of 1833-34, commonly referred to as the Gun portrait, showed himself and his three sisters. Emily was 15 or 16 at the time.

The Gun Portrait, from an old photo

Arthur Bell Nichols thought the painting so poor (or so unflattering to his late wife Charlotte) that he destroyed it, retaining only the part showing Emily, who definitely came out best.

Emily, from the Gun Portrait (NPG)

Even so, the portrait is markedly improved by the cracks (which, for instance, make her nose look interestingly snub instead of characterlessly straight). But what above all transformed the effect is the Penguin jacket-designer's crop.  This, by eliminating the back of Emily's head, conceals the Victorian sloping shoulder-line and the languid hair, and creates an altogether more forceful image. Here is a woman, we're convinced, who already has Wuthering Heights in her sights.]

*

This note is about David Daiches' 1965 Introduction to the Penguin English Library edition of Wuthering Heights.

And first some trivia.


DAVID DAICHES

1.  Professor Daiches was an interesting man - read his 2005 obituary in The Scotsman:

http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/professor-david-daiches-1-720657

His surname (Jewish/Yiddish rather than Scottish) is pronounced  "day chiz"  or "die chiz". That's probably how you pronounced it already, but it's good to know..!


NOVELETTISH

2.  Daiches (referring to an article by Thomas Moser, in which Heathcliff is identified with the Id) says:

This view involves an admission that the latter part of the book - Heathcliff's revenge and its final abandonment, the growth of love between the younger Catherine and a now-civilized Hareton - is inferior and indeed novelettish, the grafting on to the real novel of a conventional moral pattern ... etc etc. 

OED novelette, n. :

1. A story of moderate length having the characteristics of a novel. Now: a short, light, romantic, or sentimental novel (freq. depreciative).

These days the unusual word "novelette" is apparently still used in the world of writing competitions to refer to a fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novella, i.e. 7,500 - 18,000 words, approximately.

But generally the meaning of "novelette" over the past two centuries has been derogatory. Classically it evoked books that were typified by sentimentality, triviality, and trite morality.

The novelette of the 'eighties was a romantic love story, in which the poor governess always married the duke, or the lady of title the gamekeeper,  who always turned out to be a duke or an earl in disguise. Midway through the story there had to be a description of a ball, at which the heroine in her simple white gown attracted all the men in the room; or the gamekeeper, commandeered to help serve, made love to the daughter of the house in the conservatory. The stories were often prettily written and as innocent as sugared milk and water; but, although they devoured them, the women looked upon novelette reading as a vice, to be hidden from their menfolk and only discussed with fellow devotees. .... An ordinarily intelligent child of eight or nine found them cloying; but they did the women good, for, as they said, they took them out of themselves.

(Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, pp. 109-110)

Novelettes might be chauvinistically dismissed as reading material for young ladies or uneducated persons.  The novelette might be regarded as namby-pamby.  A typical example is A.A. Milne's send-up "The Seaside Novelette".

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/37693/

"Penny-novelettes" were, I suspect, the direct forebears of what my own generation called "Mills and Boon romances". Economics plays a big part in this. The novelette was cheap. Hence it tended to be short and written without much care. Appealing to connoisseurs was out of the question. Originality was out of the question. The skill was to hit off broad effects for a popular audience.

(The word novelette could also be used to mean trashy genre fiction, e.g. a "pornographic novelette").

Read more »

Note for "Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights" - the lost writings

[Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1992 movie).]

 I probably will write a post about Wuthering Heights one day. But for the moment:

It's always nice to recommend on-line material,  and I think the following is a terrific collection of biographical and critical ideas by Clare B. Dunkle (arising from her researches for a prequel to Wuthering Heights)

http://www.claredunkle.com/Design/maidsbrmaster.htm

She writes about the question of Emily's hypothetical second novel here:

http://www.claredunkle.com/Design/maidsbrmyths.htm#interpreter

Did it exist? 

Emily could have had more than two years for writing a second novel - i.e. from the time that Wuthering Heights was first packed off to publishers (July 1846?)  up to when she became ill on October 1st, 1848 (at Branwell's funeral).


[Can I complain here that Brontë chronologies on the web are incredibly inconsistent? Some say that Emily wrote Wuthering Heights between October 1845 and June 1846, some say it was written from December 1845 to July 1846, others again say it was probably begun in August 1845. Beware how your casual guesswork develops immortality! Again, some say that the agreement with Newby to publish Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey was in July 1847, others say August 1847 - this I'd have thought was a matter of record. Bloom's Notes* clearly states that it was on  July 15th that the sisters agreed to Newby's proposal that they bear part of the production costs.]

Juliet Barker says that Emily and Anne at first reacted to the many rejections of their first novels by retreating into the privacy of Gondal. She thinks both Tenant and Emily's possible second novel were begun around mid-1847. In The Brontës she says (re the coming year - 1848): "there was much to look forward to... Emily and Anne had got their first books in print and were both working on a second novel..."

Dear Sir,--

I am much obliged by your kind note and shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your next novel. I would not hurry its completion for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it, for much depends on your next work. If it be an improvement on your first you will have established yourself as a first-rate novelist, but if it falls short the critics will be too apt to say that you have expended your talent in your first novel. I shall therefore have pleasure in accepting it upon the understanding that its completion be at your own time.

Believe me, my dear Sir,
yrs. sincerely,
T.C. Newby

Feb. 15, 1848

Thomas Newby's letter of Feb 15th 1848 implies that Emily had definitely begun a second novel but not yet completed it. Of course Emily was under no compulsion to tell him the whole truth, she might in fact have practically finished it, or again, she might still have been only projecting it. The only thing that seems definite is she told him there was going to be a second novel. (The rascally Newby seems to me to give quite good advice.)

The letter has no addressee name on it, and it isn't absolutely conclusive that the letter IS addressed to Ellis Bell rather than Acton Bell. (It would of course make perfect sense if it was addressed to Anne, then midway through The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.) However, the letter was found in Emily's writing desk. Among other things in this desk there was also an empty envelope from Newby that is addressed to Ellis Bell. The letter and the envelope were separate, but the folding of the letter is consistent with it having arrived in this envelope.

Emily's last dated poem was Sept 14, 1846. So basically there is no known creative work from the last two years of Emily's active life.

According to Bloom's Notes* there is a conjecture that Emily spent some of her last years writing an "expanded version of Wuthering Heights", which of course does not survive. I have no idea of the source of this conjecture.

Charlotte could (as Clare says) have destroyed the putative second novel out of concern for Emily's reputation. "All the evidence suggests it," though, is too strong. It's also entirely possible that Emily ordered its destruction herself. We know she was a perfectionist and we know she had sensitivities about things being published without her control. Also, if Emily did order its destruction then  it might have been Anne she asked, rather than Charlotte. It's all speculation. (Margaret Lane, The Bronte Story, 1953. - quoted here: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/198483-was-emily-bronte-working-on-a-second-novel). 

If Charlotte did have any involvement in destroying Emily's last work then that would cast a certain irony on her words in the Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights. 

If the auditor of her work when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree, loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and experience alone could work: to the influence of other intellects, it was not amenable.  

(By the way, isn't it fascinating to think of Emily reading Wuthering Heights aloud to her sisters?)

Anyway,  Charlotte attributes the shocking aspects of Wuthering Heights to immaturity and claims Emily's writing would have mellowed had she lived. That claim of course does not fit in very well with the hypothesis that Charlotte had to destroy a second novel for being even more shocking than the first.

[This has become, for many, a matter of fact rather than speculation:

We'll never know how Brilliant Emily's next novel was, because her sister, Charlotte, destroyed it.
I believe one theory is that Charlotte was trying to protect Emily's posthumous reputation - the implication being that the second novel might have been even more transgressive than the first.

(Comments by BMacLean in a Guardian comments stream.) ]


I am inclined to believe in Charlotte's good faith here. I think that Emily's second novel never existed or never got very far (or if it did, Charlotte didn't know anything about it).

The disappearance of the Gondal prose writings is almost more painful still, because we know more about them. It's certainly possible that Charlotte destroyed them after the death of her two sisters, though I don't know if she would necessarily have thought them in any danger of being published. It's also possible that Emily and Anne took the decision to destroy them. After all that's the most common fate of adolescent writings - their authors get rid of them.

So I think the claim "Again, almost certainly, Charlotte disposed of them when she went through her sisters' papers" is overstated. Clare infers Charlotte' attitude from some minor edits (e.g. of poems and WH) and her public judgments of her sisters' work, which seem to many so distressingly lukewarm. But I don't know what evidence there may be that Charlotte did do any actual destroying. What I do know is that she didn't destroy the Angria work that she wrote with Branwell, though she might quite reasonably have thought of it as prejudicial to her own and her brother's reputation, if she was the kind of tender-minded tidy-upper who would worry about the Gondal writings. Who knows, maybe Charlotte was the family member who was least exacting when it came to tidying up papers? Against this, of course, you could argue that Charlotte might have been too ill to deal with her own juvenile work in the same way she had allegedly dealt with Emily's and Anne's.

As Ian Jack pointed out, Emily's sole literary remains consisted of Wuthering Heights and the poems, three letters and some remarks or opinions conveyed by family and acquaintances.

Coming back to the other side again, Charlotte re-edited Wuthering Heights in 1850, and though she made unauthorized changes to paragraphing and to the rendering of Joseph's dialect, her main intention was to put right the many errors in Newby's edition (Newby having ignored Emily's list of corrections). Was this evident care for her sister's work compatible with obliterating the bulk of her other writings? Perhaps. "'Wildfell Hall' it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve." There's a sinister ring to that remark. Suppression, though in this case impracticable, was apparently something Charlotte viewed without qualms.

Perhaps as a result of proprietorial remarks like that, we tend to assume Charlotte the famous novelist would naturally feel that she had control over the manuscripts left behind by her sisters. That may be right, but it is rather a big assumption. The unquestioned head of the family and the inheritor of Emily's and Anne's manuscripts would of course be her father, Patrick Brontë. (Charlotte's manuscripts, on the other hand, became the property of her husband, who published The Professor.) So perhaps it was Patrick who destroyed the Gondal prose and Emily's "second novel"; or again, he might have acted in collusion with Charlotte while she was still alive. There are doubtless facts here of which I'm ignorant.

We need to remember that we don't know. It's always tempting to put well-known individuals into the frame, just as anti-Stratfordians always imagine a nobleman must have written Shakespeare's plays, in line with Scott's observation :   "..vulgar fame, which is always disposed to ascribe remarkable actions to a remarkable name..." (1830 Introduction to A Legend of Montrose). But Emily's and Anne's papers could have disappeared or been destroyed without Charlotte's involvement, especially after Charlotte's death. Persons responsible unknown.

* Harold Bloom, ed. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (Bloom's Notes), 1996. I found this online, but I can't track it down again.

Charlotte Brontë's supposed sense-of-humour-failure.

Stevie Davies' excellent introduction to her selection of the Brontë poems begins with "First, their names have become a kind of sentimental public property, and interest in their nature as opposed to their work takes on the character of an assault"; and she goes on to evoke the crowds tramping through Haworth parsonage. But, she then goes on to demonstrate rather convincingly how commentary on the work benefits from thinking about the nature.

Take, for instance, Charlotte's mislaid sense of humour, the one she had as a child but which goes missing in her novels.

It's an additional burden for people with singularly unhappy lives that they end up being accused of being humourless as well. But we have the materials, Charlotte being a writer and all, to look into this a bit more deeply.

First, let's point out that the transformation - because there certainly is a transformation - is gradual. The Angrian books, and notably late ones like Stancliffe's Hotel, are often pretty funny. The Professor has humour too, especially in the person of the hero's sarcastic friend (I'm sorry, I've mislaid my copy), but now this is pushed to the edges of the novel. "I was glad of it": there's still a pertness in the young Jane Eyre. Compare this with the deep personal misery manifested in her poems around 1845, when things went wrong with M. Heger. By the time of Villette, Charlotte had suffered a trio of bereavements that together had torn out the heart of her home, certainly all its gaiety. Yes, it's the gaiety that goes, not the humour. Stevie Davies shows that this transformation is also the upsurge of a terribly restraining Reason.

But even in Villette she could still portray the lively give-and-take between Lucy and Ginevra (that vitally leavening presence). Lucy Snowe is as cold as her name, in many ways; the book is largely in her control, she possesses the author because in large part she is the author. But she isn't one-dimensional, and moreover she doesn't have absolute control. "Leave sunny imaginations hope" - isn't there, even in those last lines, a certain humour of contrariety, though it is coloured black?

tis distance lends enchantment to the view

Thomas Campbell, again.

This well-known line appears near the start of The Pleasures of Hope (1799).

At summer eve, when Heaven's ethereal bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky?
Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near?
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.

(The Pleasures of Hope, Part I, lines 1-8.)

OK, so the quote is much more fertile when it's taken away from the context of that poem and can breathe and develop its powers on its own.

Along with Hazlitt's remark about how we think of natural creatures as species rather than as individuals, this is about the only bit of aesthetic philosophy that I've ever taken on board. In compensation, I do think about both of them extremely often.

This morning, for example, because (in the office): the sudden stink of decay alerted me to a brief resumption of my sense of smell, for the first time since before Xmas. Perhaps what assaulted my suddenly-restored sense was the smell of my own trainers. Soon afterwards, we trooped along to the canteen on a tea-break - such an assault of smells. The jar of tea-bags smelt. The hot water smelt. The fridge made me feel like retching, and so did the distinct, personal odours emanating from the mouths of each of my friends.

Five minutes later, the olfactory system had all shut down again; I couldn't smell anything at all. This Brobdingnagian enlargement of sensory data is too much, too up close. In the circumstances, I drank it all in with enthusiasm, but it was not "beauty". "Beauty" in our present state of culture seems to require a desensitizing filter. That's what I take from Campbell.

 *

The remarks by Hazlitt are in the Lectures on the English Poets (1818), specifically the lecture on Thomson and Cowper, which Hazlitt concludes with an excursus (springing from Rousseau at Annecy) about love of Nature. He says:

"That which distinguishes this attachment from others is the transferable nature of our feelings with respect to physical objects; the associations connected with any one object extending to the whole class."

He gives an example about foreign-ness:

"I remember when I was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves, rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed to be as much English, to be as much the same trees and grass, that I had always been used to, as the sun shining over my head was the same sun which I saw in England; the faces only were foreign to me."

A closer botanist wouldn't perhaps experience that; Lucy Snowe in Villette, more sensitive to the distinction of a continental climate, restricts her sensation of "English-ness" to the moon. Still, Hazlitt is on to something.

"The same principle will also account for that feeling of littleness, vacuity, and perplexity, which a stranger feels on entering the streets of a populous city. Every individual he meets is a blow to his personal identity. Every face is a teazing, unanswered riddle. He feels the same wearisome sensation in walking from Oxford Street to Temple Bar, as a person would do who should be compelled to read through the first leaf of all the volumes in a library. But it is otherwise with respect to nature. A flock of sheep is not a contemptible, but a beautiful sight..."

"This nature is a kind of universal home, and every object it presents to us an old acquaintance with unaltered looks..."

If I'm always pondering Hazlitt's claim it's because I don't believe it to be wholly true or invariably true. I think Hazlitt's sense of the delightfull unvarying class of sheep is an accident of point of view; a shepherd would look at sheep differently. In that respect Hazlitt is himself a walking illustration of "Tis distance lends enchantment to the view".

As it happens, Hazlitt is fairly scathing about Thomas Campbell. That may be right, but when he notices these lines -

Some hamlet shade, to yield his sickly form
Health in the breeze, and shelter in the storm.

- notices them, in order to assert a failure in the antithesis (the shade brings shelter, but it does not bring health: the breeze does), I don't think most readers today will feel the force of that logic; I think they'd judge Campbell's lines to be rather improved by the failure of his antithesis; it makes them rangier, more comprehensive.

Villette

Sunday being a day of rest, I'm posting what I've written thus far about Charlotte Brontë's Villette:

Villette (1853)

More Penguin Introductions, this time by Tony Tanner, who specializes in psychologically-informed criticism, but is reliably boring, and fails to avoid such critical clichés of the time as “appropriately” and “serves to”.

I’m sorry to keep coming back to this thing about CB explicitly turning her back on the Angrian inspiration. That was a statement of intent, but the inspiration was evidently too powerful, because Villette returns to it. It is a book full of Angrian tricks.

Everyone remembers the final page, in which CB (in deference to her father, apparently) does not quite say what she so direly hints at – and, of course, reminds us that all is fiction.

But the performance in the open pages is equally “worked”. Lucy Snowe, girl, is the observing narrator; but as page follows page and the story of little Paulina and young Graham proceeeds, we become ever more uneasily aware of something missing that we expect to find. It is the complete absence of any account of Lucy’s background, parents, family or even age. (Graham is sixteen, Paulina is six – we will eventually infer that Lucy in these opening chapters is 14 or 15.) With the beginning of Chapter 4, Lucy returns “home”. This, then is surely the expected, if delayed, account of “I was born in __shire, my parents were poor but genteel,” etc. No – instead all we are given is a trickily evasive metaphorical account of generalized disaster, clad in maritime terms. The storm and the wreck appear, and the storm reappears later in the same chapter, when Miss Marchmont tells the story of Frank; all this foreshadows the storm, wrecks, and non-return of the lover in the novel’s Finis. So this active, tragic but occluded material supplies both the book-ends for the novel proper: Lucy is offered as a character without no known past or future. Rather as the indifferent Graham sees her, in fact; as society generally will see her. It’s striking, impressive, and rather artificial.

We are often told that it is a great and all too prevalent sin to read the Brontës’ novels as autobiographical documents, but I think it is quite right to read Villette in this way, and that’s one way to make sense of its artificial, pointedly un-naturalistic structure. I am not referring so much to Charlotte’s memories of her two stays in Brussels, I am referring to the much more recent catastrophe of losing her three lifelong companions in short succession. The occluded and secretive Lucy Snowe makes sense as a mouthpiece, to express it as crudely as possible, for giving vent to Charlotte’s sense of alienation, her resignation to having no clear future, and her consequently extremely critical and judgemental view of the life around her. Such story as Villette possesses is, I won’t say of secondary importance, but it is “worked” in a somewhat offhand manner (very Angrian, this) in pursuit of other more personally pressing goals. Do you think, reader, that this place Villette is truly a solidly wrought fictional scena possessing a sober truth in sharp contrast to those unreal heather moors and cities off the coast of Africa? Well, I do not. This Villette with its spectral nuns, its bejewelled hunchbacks, its fanatic priest, and its undisclosed Graham Bretton the first person that Lucy meets? Or what do you make of Madame Beck, a wonderfully elaborated image of surveillance and respectable selfishness who is constantly built up as if to play a part in some plot, yet is never really given any plotting to do? The naturalistic novel does not seem the best model for this disorientating waywardness.

close on me now.

Bit of a hiatus, but not of deep artistic, or any other, significance. It's been Christmas, and then before that it was moving home, back from the leafy walks of 2.4 West Swindon to the steeps of Frome (or as I prefer to think of it in limestone terms, from the Upper Jurassic to the Carboniferous).

Somewhere in the middle of this, I finished my essay about Harry Martinson and Chickweed Wintergreen and Karin Boye and Swedish popular song, and put it on Intercapillary Space (in a rudimentary form, it has been coming to birth here on this blog since August). I think I've managed to blend enough matters of acute personal interest into this essay to more or less defeat the well-intentioned interest of any other person on the planet.

Another great blog has come to an end, or to put it another way (because I'd like to see this in a celebratory rather than elegiac spirit), has been triumphantly completed. This is Chris Goode's Thomson's Bank of Communicable Desire. Does anyone ever read completed blogs, though? You should read this one. In principle, I am against blogs coming to an end. Death comes soon enough, so why forestall it? That's why I don't like themed blogs. Let your blog be anything, let it change and grow.

I am reading something you might not expect (or might you?): Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, the first of a long sequence of books for children written in the 1930s. Since I'm being opinionated, let me say that it usually makes me sad to see grown-ups reading books for children. The reason I got to this place was that I accidentally discovered that these books had been read not only by my grandmother (who lovingly collected them all), but then by my father and his brother, and then by my sister. As for me, I remember the books very well, as impressive physical objects (they are early, though not first, editions). As a child staying at my grandmother's house, I often used to linger over the maps in the endpapers, and I used to ask Mutti what the stories were about and I enjoyed her telling me and talking about which ones were her favourites. But I'm now certain that I never read them myself; the only page I recognized was the first one. I liked books, I was a bookish child, but it turns out that often I only dreamed over these family treasures. (In the same way I recently discovered that I never had read the whole of Selma Lagerlöf's Wonderful Adventures of Nils.) To read these books now is to be re-admitted to secrets of my own family history. I discover, for example, where my father learnt to fill a kettle from a lake; Ransome is very informative about sailing and camping. And I discover one constituent of the ideal of a family that my father had in his head; he had to find it where he could. I asked him if he and his brother ever got the chance to make use of all this sailing lore. He laughed wryly. Of course there was no possibility of that, there was no money at all. (But at some stage the boys found out that their estranged father, Mutti's ex-husband, had gone and bought himself a boat; it rankled.)

Around Christmas I also finished Villette, one of the few nineteenth-century classic English novels that for some reason I've missed out on up until now (most of the others I read in university days). - Perhaps I should qualify this by saying that I'm referring to the acknowledged list of classic novels as represented by the Penguin English Library, circa 1977. And even so, I can think of quite a few others: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, anything by Thackeray or Disraeli or Reade, Wives and Daughters, Jude the Obscure... But anyway, Villette's reputation was HUGE, even though a lot of people hadn't actually read it. Anyway I'm fitfully writing about Villette for the Brief Hist. (And, thanks to my other sister, finally listening to Exile On Main Street in the car, another masterpiece that I missed first time around and that I somewhat associate with Villette in terms of reputation, obscurity, sprawl, over-ripeness and a feeling about it that is half awed and half queasy.)

anne brunty

Reading Anne Brunty's Agnes Grey last night, because I couldn't sleep, and a chap from Nidderdale - I'll fill in the name when I get home* - complaining about Charlotte's undervaluation of both her younger sisters' writings. Which certainly is striking, and painful. Does anyone accuse Charlotte of having destroyed the Gondal writings? I feel almost certain of it - until I speculate that Emily, sufficiently rattled by Charlotte's publication of her Gondal poems, might on her deathbed have asked Anne to get rid of the rest. But he tells us as a certainty that at any rate Charlotte did destroy the manuscripts of their published novels, so I suppose that is authoritative, though I don't know on whose authority.

[Brontë - I know, they changed the last name like u creatively re-spell a first name today, Erykah. But "Brontë" is difficult to type into Blogger when you're in a rush.]

*[Arnold Craig Bell. An enthusiast from outside the universities, he lived in Nidderdale at Folly Lodge. Between 1950 and 1992 he wrote studies of Alexandre Dumas, Handel, the songs of Schubert, as well as Anne Brontë.. -- all published by small presses, e.g. Merlin Press in this case. Also several volumes of poetry, which were published by Outposts.]

Writing about Anne Brontë is almost inavariably about REPUTATION, because of her unusual situation, for a novelist, of being always damagingly compared with two more famous sisters. Not that you find many people explicitly stating that Anne is a lesser author than the other two. That is, as it were, a judgement that doesn't need to be spelled out. I suppose it is a judgement secretly felt - and thus made - even by those very people who are very fierce in her defence. Bell writes about reputation for pages. The Internet, as regards authors, is always boringly obsessed with this theme. I am thoroughly weary with hearing about George Moore. Subtract that theme from writing about Anne Brontë, and what else are you left with? That Agnes Grey is a powerful statement about governesses. That The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful statement about debauched behaviour and a wife's right to escape it. All this is true, but it's not very exciting or original. I should want to say something else, but I too feel the blankness, the - What to do with this text? What to do with this babied Anne, whom we must refer to by her first name?

Yet, after all, when we entered the lofty iron gateway, when we drove softly up the smooth, well-rolled carriage road, with the green lawn on each side, studded with young trees, and approached the new but stately mansion of Wellwood, rising above its mushroom poplar-groves, my heart failed me, and I wished it were a mile or two farther off.

(Chapter II)

This is Agnes, aged 18, arriving at the Bloomfields. "Wellwood" is one of those names that might in earlier fiction promise a Jonsonian image of abundance and moral strength. Here the symbolism is replaced by realism. Of course they would give it a nice name; they have a nice name themselves. "Lofty" and "stately" are staples of idealistic description, words later used in tourist literature. But somewhat complicating this is the daylight clarity of the estate's newness; those studded beginnings of a park, and the "mushroom poplar-groves". The adjective refers not to shape - these might well be Lombardy Poplars, widely planted after 1800 - but connotes "sprung up in a night" (poplars being all fast-growing trees).

Agnes' feelings are, naturally, aroused from the weary journey into active fear at the thought of meeting strangers and having to rely on unaided powers as never before. But this sentence also describes the dwindling of fancy into fact - not alarming fact, but specific, and different from what could have been imagined.

Her thoughts on education are about to be severely shaken up.

Whatever others said, I felt I was fully competent to the task: the clear remembrance of my own thoughts in early childhood would be a surer guide than the instructions of the most mature adviser. I had but to turn from my little pupils to myself at their age, and I should know, at once, how to win their confidence and affections...

(Chapter I)

Ideas beloved of authors and romantic poets, ideas supposed adequate, still, by most parents. In a family, buttressed by instinct, affection, and the child's utter dependence, they work out all right, a lot of the time. Agnes did not go to school herself, she was taught within the family. But now she is to find that the governess's role places her in the family but emphatically not of it. She is repulsed by these children, and all thought of identifying them with her own younger self is immediately blown away.

Relativism values All literature, in a way that is supposed to be unsustainable, like an economy with roaring inflation. Every instance of destroyed literature is thus equally regrettable, whether it's Anne's 4-volume Henry Sophona sensation or Byron's diary or the business papers drafts and junk emails that we destroy every day. In principle.

But ignoring those, what we might well excuse to ourselves on the basis that their composers probably have copies, and ignoring also our own writings, which we may feel are a special case that we are allowed to destroy without compunction - perhaps even meritoriously - we do sometimes end up being the sole possessor of papers with a little more relevance to the Gondal analogy - dead and not widely-remembered creative people who sometimes wrote things that looked like poetry. Sometimes I glance at those papers (e.g. when moving house) and I think, no-one cares whether this exists or not.

Or our children's drawings, how many boxes of them will we hang on to?

Selection is everywhere, tidily scissoring and sometimes leaving a bleeding lobe.

moonset and moonrise (literary)

It was the absence of a moon in the evening that made Jupiter shine so brilliantly last week. (On Sept 21st Jupiter was at its brightest for 47 years.) But anyway, here are some moon observations from the Brief History.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), from "Strange Fits of Passion" (1799):

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot
Came near, and nearer still.

Wordsworth wrote the Lucy poems while in Germany.

The moon sets every day, but we don’t often see it do so. Canonical literature, so loquacious about sunsets, virtually ignores the existence of moonsets, except in this poem.

We most usually notice the moon when it’s full, and we draw each other's attention to the big (or apparently big) moonrise that occurs soon after sunset. A moonset near the full, however, would occur around dawn, the coldest part of the night; when (at least in temperate climes) we tend to sleep on, and even if we happen to be out and about the spectacle of moonset is probably lost in the mist (if not in broad daylight). The most impressive moonset I've seen was a lazy moon on a cold winter night which became yellower and bigger, and finally just after midnight a smoky red as it dropped into the west. So rarely have I noticed a moonset in my fifty years that it hadn't really occurred to me that the setting moon must often go through the same colour changes as the setting sun.

If the moon is going to set earlier in the evening, not too many hours after sunset, it must be a brand-new sliver of a moon, which is probably not what most readers envisage while they're reading Wordsworth's poem. Yet evening, we imagine, is when the action takes place.

However, the hill makes a difference. After crossing the “wide lea”, with the moon spreading its light, the lover starts to ascend rather sharply, and “Lucy’s cot” is on a ridge. Thus the moon could seem to “set” when still comparatively high in the sky. Wordsworth had often noticed the sharpness of Lakeland’s high night-horizons, and e.g. famously written of how “the stars moved along the edges of the hills”.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.

To realize the emotional charge of this, it’s worth going out on a suitable clear evening and making it happen. The roof should be quite close, perhaps less than a hundred meters away; it happens just as the lover arrives. The moon falls “at once” because it is the lover’s own relatively rapid approach, not the moon’s descent, that causes it to drop out of sight. In those nights without any streetlights, the instantaneous change in the light would have been dramatic. If you are suitably sensitized, it still can cause a shiver.

*

A graveyard in moonlight, engraving by Thomas Bewick for his History of British Birds, Vol II (Water Birds), 1804).

[Image source: British Museum .]

In the opening pages of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë says (of the above Bewick engraving): "I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly risen crescent, attesting the hour of even-tide." In fact a crescent moon rises either early in the day (if waxing) or late in the night (if waning). The sharp crescent moon we see in the evening is not newly risen, it just seems that way because we only notice it when it gets dark; actually, it's getting ready to set. As for Charlotte's assertion that the crescent-shape implies even-tide, she's right in this case, because it's a waxing moon (horns pointing to the left); but a waning crescent would mean it's near dawn. 

And at the beginning of Chapter 5, the young Jane Eyre is leaving Mrs Reed's house for Lowood. "Five o'clock had hardly struck on the morning of the 19th of January, when Bessie brought a candle into my closet and found me already up and nearly dressed. I had risen half an hour before her entrance, and had washed my face, and put on my clothes by the light of a half-moon just setting, whose ray streamed through the narrow window near my crib." Well, wrong again! A waxing half-moon would have set at midnight; a waning half moon would still be on the rise. But a moon that sets some time between 5 and 6 in the morning (as we are later informed) would have to be almost a full moon - say, 90%. Here, and later (e.g. Chapter 9), Charlotte Brontë registers what a significant aid moonlight was for getting things done in the hours of darkness. There was more reason in those days for noticing the moon; evidently this didn't necessarily mean observing it. It's tempting to make more of these small inaccuracies than they probably merit: to be struck by the mixture, in Charlotte Brontë, of very close observation - we have just read the wonderful description of pine-tree debris clotted together by frost - combined with a certain proud inattentiveness to fact. It's no wonder to be ignorant of the moon's movements, but it does seem remarkable for someone to be so aware of the moon as a mobile creature and yet not to know its patterns. And I can't resist connecting this with how long the author had been satisfied with her Angrian settings of a Yorkshire landscape in Africa, in total defiance of what we suppose she must have known of African climates. Naturalism was a cloak she learnt to put on, but her imagination was always busy with other things than naturalism.

*

Perhaps the same can be claimed for the poet Charlotte Smith, though she was certainly a strikingly observant naturalist. 

And yet she has this stanza in her "Studies by the sea":

  What glories on the sun attend,

  When the full tides of evening flow,

  Where in still changing beauty, blend

  With amber light, the opal's glow;

  While in the east the diamond bow

  Rises in virgin lustre bright,

  And from the horizon seems to throw,

  A partial line of trembling light

To the hush'd shore; and all the tranquil deep

Beneath the modest moon, is sooth'd to sleep.

The issue here is "the diamond bow": that, I feel, has to mean a crescent moon. 

But crescent moons don't rise in the evening: full moons do. 

I feel sure that Charlotte Smith knew that. But somehow she was willing to have it both ways. To flood her seascape not with a mere orb but with a dazzling, impossible crescent. 

*

But a proud inattentiveness to fact isn't the right explanation for an even more affronting sentence, from a famous scene in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian:

As our heroine approached this ominous and unhallowed spot, she paused and looked to the moon, now rising broad in the north-west, and shedding a more distinct light than it had afforded during her walk thither. Eyeing the planet for a moment, she then slowly and fearfully turned her head towards the cairn, from which it was at first averted.

(Ch 14)

In this case, "north-west" is evidently just a slip of the pen: Scott meant to write "north-east", which is about where the full moon does rise. This is confirmed by what he adds straight afterwards: the moonlight had been obscured during Jeanie's walk from St Leonard’s (because of the ridge to the north of Arthur's Seat), but now that she's arrived at Muschat's Cairn, which is at the extreme north of Holyrood Park, her view to the north-east is uninterrupted. 

*

Here's a passage from the English translation of Amin Maalouf's 1989 novel Samarkand that got me puzzling:

That night, when he went back toward the belvedere which was serving him as a house, Khayyam did not take a lamp with him, telling himself that it was too late to read or write. However, his path was only faintly illuminated by the moon, a frail crescent at the end of the month of shawwal. As he walked further from the qadi's villa....  (p. 30)

Earlier, we heard that it's three weeks after Ramadan (the month that precedes Shawwal), but perhaps that shouldn't be interpreted too precisely. These are lunar months, each beginning with the first sight of the new moon. So now, if we were exactly at the start of the fourth quarter, the moon would be a half moon, but since we're told it's a crescent it must be a few days later. And this also means that it must be a long way through the night; 4 am, say.

I can't positively assert that there's any mistake but all the other indications are that this scene takes place in the middle of the night, not shortly before dawn. (Omar finds Jahan waiting for him in the belvedere. . .)

*

Finally, a poem that's very definitely observation. It may be titled "Moonset", but I'm not sure because the anthology where I found it sometimes makes up its own titles. 

Idles the night wind through the dreaming firs,

   That waking murmur low,

As some lost melody returning stirs

   The love of long ago;

And through the far, cool distance, zephyr fanned,

The moon is sinking into shadow-land.

The first stanza of three. It's by E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (1861 - 1914). A Canadian poet, popular in her lifetime, she was born on the Six Nations Indian Reserve in Canada West (Ontario), the daughter of an Englishwoman and a Mohawk chief. 

what i've read or looked at or listened to quite recently

Jim Goar - Seoul Bus Poems. I might review this, I like it. I also went to the ezine that he edits, which is called "past simple", and I read some of that, mainly the British-writers number. Out of what I browsed there it was Sean Bonney's contributions (not for the first time) that stood out for me. And in the most recent issue there's some Danish and Polish things that I enjoyed a lot. It's a top ezine.

John Gimblett's review in Stride talked about how Seoul Bus Poems took him into a "calmer personal space" and that was what I experienced too. Though I'd put it more materially, compare it to a kind of brain cleanser. These first impressions aren't always that important, but I suppose the question arises with a book like this, how many people will feel that there's anything more to be got out of a second reading: hasn't it delivered its cleansing effect fully and completely at first read, has it anything else to give me? Better to say "Cool. Highly recommended." and move straight on to the next book? A lot of good modern poetry is like that, it's a one-shot package.

I suppose I've read all these poems about twenty times, so let's see.

There's a beautiful transparency about the title. We're told, upfront, that many of the poems were begun on bus journeys; but Goar's untitled poems don't generally evoke the bus; it's only the poem's structure - or its pace, if that's a different thing - that derives from the bus-journey. Public transport and modern urban poetry have had a long association; you don't have to drive, and a lazy lulling sort of disjunction, the disjunction of urban life, infuses the writing.

And in a way, though they are not saying poems, you already know what the poems say, just as you would do with an Elizabethan sonnet sequence. Goar is a young poet with a sense of humour, he doesn't think his life is especially important, he sometimes forgets to shave, writing poetry is not a problematic activity, and the book ends with love and sleep, - for instance. They are not saying poems, but the autobiographical element has the same transparency as the title.

The blood will come and go
as children will go
out of the hamlet by a flute
played once upon a time
for style is straight or slightly bent
souls follow crumbs to the hut
where the oven is with tasty children
wrung dry of echoes the town falls silent
hails never weaken corn
shrugged and lost its yellow its
green a fire consumed
our houses of redemption

I wanted to choose a "typical" poem - that is what a reviewer ought to quote - but now I'm afflicted by doubts about whether this is a typical poem or not. In some ways it is. Most of the poems have a four-square look and are about this length; those that aren't are splatter-poems, you know, the ones where single words or phrases are placed all over the page, - the sort I try to get out of quoting, if I can, because the formatting is too much like hard work. It's one form or the other, nothing in between, and that has quite an interesting effect.

Jim Goar has a way of repeating words in more than one poem - my list of these repeats goes: dice, shrug, crumbs, blue, lemon, prancer, corn, bananas, shave, widow, crane, crow, table, chameleon, bell, trash, fist, bones, gin, knee, echo, leaves, toe, frozen, snow, eye, weep. All rather simple, colourful words, headings from a children's encyclopaedia. In this poem you can see four of those words: crumbs, echoes, corn, shrugged. The words begin to seem like dominoes patterned together. The opposite of a descriptive poetry of percepts. And looking into this poem specifically, there is a pattern of habitation-words - (hamlet, huts, town, houses) whose relation to each other is not obvious and may not exist at all. (Prancer, if you don't know, is the name of one of Santa's reindeers.)

This use of animal-words as tokens is also a feature of Goar's chapbook Whole Milk. It's not just about exact word repetitions. Here the egg of one poem ("Turn the egg over") becomes the bird-extravaganza of the next ("A pigeon broke its neck") and points obliquely, via a goose or two, into the sketchy short story of the next ("a twist a turn"). [NB "dirty Hanes" in that last poem = crew socks.]

But I don't want to talk about this only structurally. There is a pervasive atmosphere (OK, so you don't often hear "atmosphere" used as a technical term in poetry reviews!) of Seoul; and of being in a foreign city: as wide-eyed as you would wish to be (and Jim Goar is), it is still foreign. I want to find a political meaning for this - something about poetry for a semi-globalized world. I might not be able to. But if a book like this isn't political? - That's an issue isn't it?

Let's carry on. The way I see it is there a connection between the previous two paras. The connection, if you like, is the inadequacy of words to describe things: in particular, the inadequacy of English words to describe the experience of a city outside the English-speaking zone. One is inevitably tongue-tied. A few things mean something to you, but a lot of things don't. The world is more tangibly incomprehensible, and in an odd way simpler: because what is incomprehensible is not seen as having any features - is not well-seen at all - it is a billboard with no interpretable writing on it, a building with no known function or architecture. Things begin to assume merely childlike, unspecific shapes. Vocabulary becomes numb and fluffy. You can't call the building something culturally specific like a tanyard or a tollbooth or an orangery; you're not in the culture; you have to just call it a building.

But that's about foreignness. However we're semi-globalized now, and Seoul isn't by any means entirely foreign. International brands and commerce and technology create a lot of familiarity to counter-balance the foreignness. The streets are (culturally speaking) half-lit. To get an idea of what that means, you couldn't do better than read about Loren Goodman's visit to Costco. Increasingly, this is a paradigmatic experience for many people. And Goar's book seems to me to be poetry from that space. (Goar is a US poet who now lives in Norwich, which is another foreign spot.)

I got this book because I signed up for the Reality Street supporters thing. That was a no-brainer because I already knew I was going to buy Richard Makin's Dwelling, so I got the other vols almost free. We're still waiting for Dwelling, but the other volumes , Goar aside, were Bill Griffith's Early Poems - a totally crucial book if you're in any way involved with modern UK poetry - oh no, that makes it sound so boring, but you won't be bored - , and Fanny Howe's Emergence, small collection of what used to be called "fugitive" pieces. The only thing I thoroughly like about the latter volume is David Miller's and Ken Edward's jacket design. I'm not there with the poetry at all. Whatever, I like not liking it. Being a Reality Street Supporter is really a lot of fun.

David Harsent, Mr Punch (1984). Finished this last night. Poems about Punch, often in a modern domestic context. Obviously a violence-against-women collection, but that's just the surface. So you are on unsteady moral ground from the off, because how can violence against women ever be just a surface? and some of these bruised and battered lines are so beautiful. Harsent cuts a lot deeper (unfortunate metaphor) than many mainstream writers (or p-a writers, come to that), and I'm not surprised that Andrew Duncan singled him out for attention.

[You may not know, I certainly didn't, that David Harsent is also the crime authors Jack Curtis and David Lawrence, and (in the name of the latter) a prolific screenwriter for The Bill, Holby City, and Midsomer Murders e.g. the episode "Blood In The Saddle": "Ford Florey is a town with a Wild West Society and many grudges. During a Wild West show at the local fayre, the witch on the 'Dunk the Witch' stall is well and truly dunked. Laughter turns to horror when she doesn't get up and the water in the tank starts to turn red. Barnaby and Jones need to be quick on the draw to track down the murderer." A series currently in the news because of an inflammatory Radio Times interview with the producer Brian True-May, who praised its distinctly (and, it now seems, intentionally) whites-only vision of rural England... the subsequent media furore has made the story bigger than when it started, the most unpleasant development being the opportunity seized by the xenophobic Daily Express to see if it can't harden the opinions of Middle-England into something even nearer than they already are to the grand days of apartheid ("Midsomer Race Row: 99% of viewers insist the TV show should stay white"). I am greatly in favour of poets being involved in the monuments of popular culture, but it could be time to walk away from this one. - note added Mar 2011.]

George Eliot, Silas Marner. Audio book, read (brilliantly) by Andrew Sachs, though you would probably not admit all his voices in the Rainbow as pure Warwickshire. That there is already simplification of humanity in the ever-neutral Mr Snell and the ever-combative Mr Dowlas is justification. The slight difficulty in the novelist's approach is when the novelist's justifiable simplification becomes something that the characters themselves notice - as when the villagers, not unreasonably, suggest that so very timely a robbery as Dunsey's implies some preternatural power at work. The element of play in the fable is a way of seeing. Of seeing what, as Leslie Stephen remarked, a philanthropist or any other such public person wouldn't be able to see. The question about simplification arises again over Eppie's destiny. Of course we side hotly with the already settled relations of Silas, Eppie, Dolly and Aaron - why should their idyll be disturbed, these thrifty and wise working people? Well, because, as the novel itself has abundantly told us, they must remain for ever ignorant, unblessed by e.g. the author's own fluency in half-a-dozen languages; or because husbands like Ben Winthrop will spend their evenings in the Rainbow, and why wouldn't his own son Aaron? OK, you may think, but what worthwhile enlargement of Eppie's mind would the Casses supply, anyway? But wouldn't Eppie herself always think about this road not taken? These questions are not intended to be mean-spirited, they are what George Eliot's own tough-mindedness, coolly imbibed throughout the course of the book, are bound to provoke. Perhaps it's because we know that she knows, that this happiest of all endings is poignantly accepted.

Though the central message of love and community shines clearly, the behaviour of the older characters (not Eppie or Aaron) remains vexed and complicated. I'm thinking about the tree principals in the offer-scene. I just talked about Silas' need-love: what that leads to here is the lovely relationship between Silas and Eppie: what it could just as easily lead to is the tragic dysfunctionalism of the relationship between Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop. Godfrey Cass's faults are underlined by the author of course, his comments in the offer-scene detestable (e.g. about Eppie marrying a low labouring fellow), but still it seems to me that he is more aware than anyone else in the room about what's on offer and what's at stake - socially, materially, and more than materially. Nancy Lameter is admirable to us (when it's too late) for her easy forgiveness of what Godfrey supposed she would not forgive. And not just for that moment, either. Yet what to make of the author's insistent praise for her, when it has to do battle against our awareness of Nancy's capacity for being maddening: her severe and arbitrary notions of providence, her moral tyranny over an elder sister who has to dress like her and a husband who is not allowed to adopt children because Nancy thinks it isn't God's will, her attempt to persuade Eppie on the grounds of duty to the natural parent who has finally acknowledged her? You have to think that G.Eliot's admiring comparisons of Nancy's "wisdom" with other worthies more informed than herself are intended as ironic and a part of the book's ongoing critique of ALL such creeds and customs at whatever level of society.

Because although Silas Marner is in some ways a safe conservative vision, for example idyllicising aspects of a rural life that are totally unlike what GE herself would find tolerable, it nevertheless does conduct a running-battle with religion and tradition. Structurally the first half of the book is fantastic but the book drops in intensity once the redeeming miracle of the child has come to Silas. On a first reading we are, just about, sustained through the quiet domestic pages with Eppie by anticipating well-meant disruption from Godrey, or ill-meant disruption from Dunsey. On a second reading these pleasing terrors are absent and the result is just a bit dull, in a nice way. The first thing that strikes you about GE is what unique gifts she brings to novel-writing - the promise, indeed the fact, of going deeper and further than any other British novelist of her century (or later?). Yet she never wrote a novel that doesn't frustrate me.

Ménie Muriel Dowie, Gallia. New Woman novel of 1896, really good and interesting. I'm not sure if I wasn't even more interested in the author's life, though. She was a young explorer/writer whose book about her solo travels through Ruthenia made her an instant celeb, glitteringly married another explorer and travelled extensively, three well-received controversial novels, but published nothing after the age of 35, when she was divorced for adultery. She was unable to see her son until adulthood. She became a noted cow-breeder. She finally left her second explorer-husband, a violent drunk. Her son was killed during WWII and she died soon after, of a broken heart I believe. "Call no person happy until they are dead", as the Greeks used to say.

John Grisham, The Associate. "Nothing grips like Grisham" is the motto. But what impressed me about the book wasn't its grip, particularly. His stifling account of mega-corporate law (and the constant exhaustion of the associates) is what stays with me. The plot is really remarkably casual. From the moment that the hero, being blackmailed by mysterious all-powerful evil people, starts covert operations against them, we wait with pleasure and a little terror for the counter-operation, the slapdown that is certain to come. But it never does. The bad guys are simply caught cold and run for cover. And the hero, now honest with his father and the law, no longer even fears them. So it's more of a bildungsroman than a thriller. I was amused that the ultra-high-security custombuilt computers full of military secrets were in the end found crackable due to having an almost-hidden USB port discreetly placed near the power outlet.

Selma Lagerlöf, The Wonderful (and Further) Adventures of Nils, read in Sweden. Now, as in my childhood, in a translation which I suppose must be Velma Swanston Howard's adapted for a British audience and to a certain extent re-Swedishized - e.g. "Westbottom" became "Västerbotten" again. Impossible to be objective about this imaginative patchwork, which structures vast areas of my own brain.

Elisabeth Bletsoe, Landsacape from a dream, which I reviewed in Intercapillary Space.

Lawrence Upton, Wire Sculptures (2003) - on every page, that authority of being no mere poet. It makes me think I too would like to write poetry on those terms - not needing to make it poetic but only what it is, when you are out there and own your own tools.

Jeremy Reed, Selected Poems (Penguin). This is from the period in the 80s when he came in from the cold, though he didn't stay.

Two (buoys) I see wintering
at grass in a shipping yard,
veterans of long wars,
their grizzled tonsures hard

with resilience, awaiting
new paint, their cyclopean
eyeballs gone rusty from staring
unlidded at the ocean.

Judgments of this period are inevitably flecked with judgments of the political shift (in poetry terms). Setting that aside, so far as it's possible, this poetry continues to amaze me.

"Winter Mullet" (from Nero, 1985) has the author solitarily fishing the warm outflows of a power station and it climaxes in a truly outré simile:

I stay on, the cold chaps my fingers red,
its pimpling's like dried beads of black hemlock,
the fish have tightened now into a head,...

OK, so hemlock (Conium maculatum) is a common umbelliferous plant with a mousey smell and wine-spotted stems, highly toxic and evidently the source of the poison that was used to execute Socrates. (See
Enid Bloch's essay
Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?. It can also be used therapeutically, but hardly ever is because of the low therapeutic index.

Black hemlock is an alternative name for mountain hemlock, Tsuga mertensiana, a decorative tree of no great utility from the snowlines of the Rockies. The hemlocks are a genus of mostly New World coniferous trees that gained their name from a supposed resemblance of the scent of the foliage to hemlock.

It's from another of these, the Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), that the substance "black hemlock" (hemlock pitch, Pix Canadensis) used by perfumers and herbalists is made - it's made from the resin.

The name, of course, is replete with darkly glamorous potential. Thus Linda Pilkington's Ormande Jayne fragrance Ormande Woman uses black hemlock as one of its materials, and her publicity positively encourages a confusion with "Socrates' chosen poison". Likewise Boudicca's Wode is advertised as containing an extract of Queen Boadicea's death-potion. It's from here that the phrase "black hemlock" has slipped into popular culture, re-emerging in that popular piece of costume jewellery for Goths, the black hemlock poison ring, a large black crystal hingeing to reveal a secret compartment beneath it. It even turns up in footy talk, in this surprising demonstration of why Seneca was a Southampton supporter and all Saints fans are Stoics (red blood, white toga, black hemlock - get it?).

That artificial injection of West End glam seems entirely appropriate to Reed's poetry but what does he mean specifically? He must be referring to the herbalist's resinous substance, his numbed fingers feeling when they touch each other like they are touching, not each other, but something alien between them, while the poet takes on the semi-comatose trance of the fish themselves and is caught in shock by a man's torchbeam. But this simile is more important for its effect in focussing attention on the poet's conflicted performance than for its descriptive meaning. And though his swarming winter mullet are nearly as memorable as the lashing conger eel (in another of these poems), it's the performance that is mainly what I think is fascinating about the mainstream Reed.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Stolen Apples 1972. (his-own-choice selection translated by various US poets of "the first rank"). More controversial populism that I thoroughly enjoy. What I'm enjoying is a sort of welling out, the simplicity of it all, the poet's idea of himself, and a warm invitation to come on in, the water's lovely.

The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers. Well, it is their best album, even though it's also the most playable. (Hmm, bit of a theme developing here.) And a certain pleasure in its own arch fakery is inseparable from that. Attempts to ground judgement of the Stones in a moral solidity that is somehow attached to Keith and correspondingly denied to Mick - that's something I was a year or two too young to ever understand - for me the compromised nature of the enterprise was a key to it, kept the music secure from other British tendencies of earnestness and pomp.

Sara Wheeler, Terra Incognita. Travel book about Antarctica. Undeniably, I'm enjoying this, though I've got mixed feelings about the recent sort of travel book that mixes personal reportage with a lot of chattily recounting history, as if the impressions were only collected in order to frame library research. What the papers love to admire. Bruce Chatwin's got a lot to answer for.

Bill Oddie, Gripping Yarns. This is in fact (though not in origin) the book you've been waiting for ever since the Little Black Bird Book. Nature as a hobby for grown men acting like boys, with rather awesome expertise. The same kind of way in which enthusiasts write about rock-climbing or urban exploring.

Arthur Court, From Seedtime to Harvest and A Farmer's Diary. Books by a local dairy farmer for a local audience. George Henderson's The Farming Ladder is inevitably recalled as the apogee of farming autobiography; Court has no heroism or fierceness, was a more civic spirit altogether, a stalwart of amateur dramatics and later local TV - his account only rising briefly to expose deep-buried emotion when his herd had to be slaughtered during a foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Charlotte Bronte, Angrian novelettes and The Professor. This is as far as I've got in my plan of reading all her books in sequence. One of the strangest things about her was that after the immense output of Angrian novelettes (I have only read the last five) she went seven years without writing anything except a few poems before embarking on the Professor (probably not really true, doubtless there were destroyed abortive novels). Michael Mason in a very awkward introduction to a Penguin Jane Eyre argues against the temptation to link the Angrian works with what came later, apparently because he's worried that critics have always been a bit sniffy about Jane Eyre and this just plays into their hands. But the result is a vacuum, I think; it can't be right to discipline Bronte's novels into something befitting a sober tradition. Anyway. The Professor is a pretty good book, and it does makes me appreciate anew what it's possible to do in a novel that you can't do in a novelette, but it definitely isn't a revelation like e.g. Stancliffe's Hotel. I've started Jane Eyre now: Mr Rochester seems to me very Angrian indeed.

Bodil Malmsten, Mitt Första Liv (2004). Book about her childhood and youth, read because we passed close to Bjärme on the way to the fells. I have nothing objective to say about this, being merely delighted at my near-ability to read it without using the dictionary more than once or twice per page.

Gwendoline Butler, Coffin's Game (1997). Police investigation whodunnit kind of book, listened to as audio-book. Perhaps the last ever book to portray a "modern" London that is entirely white. OK, I admit it, there is a single mention of "ethnic troubles" in Swinehouse - just those two words. Otherwise, the only foreigners we glancingly encounter are a senior French policeman, an American FD, and a South African doctor (white). This is part of a long series of Coffin novels which are set in the "Second City", an imaginary slice of East London which has its own police force (apparently, this was based on an idea floated by David Owen back in the 80s). Mobile phones, word processors and AIDS have entered its pages, but the only industry in the second city is such immemorial pursuits as theatres, docks, shipping, prostitution and a coffin-maker. In case you haven't grasped it yet, the second city's modern trappings hide a substructure of pure 1930s Agatha Christie vintage. And to understand this book you need to understand that it's really about the life of its audience, domestic and suburban. A pet dog and a house mouse are important. The strongest scene, easily, is when Coffin's wife, who's gone missing, suddenly turns up again, and they're both so angry (yet relieved) that they can't help but attack each other. There's an odd social-ethical feature, which is also in Christie - the characters come across as incredibly cynical and judgmental. I'm talking about the innocent characters. While some of this is explainable by the author toying with the readers (we of course don't know who is innocent), I can't help thinking that a certain amount of cynicism is indeed commended. This particular ideal of humanity involves "realism", sharpness, wit, a contempt for any nonsense and pride in people not being able to pull the wool over our eyes. And while I'm unpleasantly struck by it, I can't deny that it involves taking a very acute interest in the personal lives of those around us. On the other hand, an ideal of sensitive non-intrusiveness, such as I'm more inclined to cultivate, can conceal both timidity and indifference.

I'm really pleased that Howard Jacobson won the Man/Booker Prize. I examine this feeling. After all I think poetry prizes are meaningless. But if you're a mainstream novelist like HJ, it makes a difference. I suppose what I'm really pleased about is that a whole new bunch of readers will now discover and relish books that I've previously discovered and relished (Redback, Coming from Behind) - before it's too late. The thing about novels is they date really quickly and then go into the doldrums for about fifty years, during which they're unread and almost unreadable. That's where Angus Wilson is right now. There's some egotism in this - in fact some loneliness. As we grow older we become fearfully aware of how most of the colleagues and friends we mix with every day, those that are twenty or thirty years younger, have never even heard of most of the things we've given our hearts to. So when even a minor presence in my life (like HJ) comes back into the spotlight, I feel a certain pleasure, the same thing that eventually makes people read obits. To assure themselves that what they remember as life really did happen, they did live.

(updated at various times, to March 2011)