Horse traffic

I've read somewhere that a century ago almost every male adult could ride a horse; now, hardly any can. It was one of the least remarked of social revolutions.  (The author must have meant in parts of the world where there were plenty of horses, not e.g. tsetse areas of Africa where horses catch nagana.)

Few people in the west can now remember the time of horse-drawn vehicles, though even in the 1960s they still vied with motor vehicles in remote communities e.g. in the rural north of Sweden, as I discovered from reading Bo R. Holmberg's Dagsmeja. In cities the most dramatic decline in horse traffic followed the appearance of electric trams (from 1890). 

Through the nineteenth century some of the quintessential elements of motoring were already appearing in the car's horse-drawn predecessors. 

Their two head lamps reached out yellowish fingers of light on to the road, with its thin coating of rimy ice. The cones of illumination raced ahead, picking out the ditches on either side with jerky bounds.

Every motorist will recognize that, but it's from Zola's Madeleine Férat (1868). Guillaume and Madeleine are travelling from Vétheuil towards Paris. (The D147 joining the A13 at Mantes, I see on Google Maps, and, so to speak, nod understandingly. I was on the A13 at nightfall myself, a week ago.)

Their vehicle was "a two-seater with a collapsible leather hood". Alec Brown mistranslates it as a "brougham" but Zola's original word is "cabriolet". A brougham was a specific brand, four-wheeled with paired horses, and the passengers were enclosed with the driver outside; but a cabriolet was two-wheeled, drawn by a single horse, and it seated just two people, one of whom drove.

(Brown was anglicizing, as when he turned the inn at Mantes from the Grand-Cerf to The White Hart.)

I didn't know any of this carriage info until now. In all my years of reading nineteenth-century novels I've blanked the innumerable hansoms and gigs and dogcarts and troikas and whatever, barouche or surrey with the fringe on top, treating them all as basically interchangeable. But for contemporary readers these would have been precise terms carrying a host of connotations, like Citroën or  Mitsubishi.

Apparently Jane Austen mentions horse-drawn traffic over 400 times. 

This cabriolet has two relevant connotations in Zola's novel.  Guillaume is really starting to lose it. A cabriolet is a far from ideal vehicle for driving all the way to Paris through a winter night, it's a slightly crazy idea, verging on desperate (they were too late to get the last train). And it shows how Guillaume in acute distress always clings to the idea of solitude with his wife. Just the two of us; that's his recipe for security. 

Apart from head lamps, the horse days were also like ours in terms of traffic accidents. The vehicles didn't travel so quickly, but they had minimal protection, horses were unpredictable and so were the roads. Geri Walton has an interesting post about this:

https://www.geriwalton.com/carriage-accidents-and-remedies/

The topic often appears in local history, e.g. here from New Hampshire and Maine:

https://eu.seacoastonline.com/story/news/local/exeter-news-letter/2011/01/07/historically-speaking-dangers-horse-buggy/51322350007/

where I learned that Sarah Orne Jewett's writing career ended with a carriage accident in 1902. Her horse slipped on a loose stone and she sustained head and spinal injuries. Here's her entry on Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sarah-orne-jewett

She was one of many, I mean as regards the accident.  

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life was doubtless shortened on October 24 1776 when he got trapped between a speeding carriage and the Great Dane that was running alongside it; a head injury again. 

The profoundly deaf Ludwig van Beethoven was reported as being struck by a carriage in 1819, but this report may be rather exaggerated or even founded on a mere tumble.  

https://bibliolore.org/2011/10/15/beethovens-traffic-accident/

In July 1890 César Frank received a head injury when his cab was hit by a horse-drawn trolley (goods vehicle with a platform body). The accident is usually seen as an indirect cause of his death, four months later. 

In the days when horses were essential working animals many people found it convenient to regard them as undifferentiated disposables, like the nags in a bullring or like the contents of a burger. Some people even got off on the spectacles of cruel mistreatment at London's many horsefairs, as I learned here:

https://www.thehistoryoflondon.co.uk/horses-and-carriages-in-the-victorian-era/

But horses were also the focus of the first glimmerings of more humane sentiments, which I wrote about here: 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-silent-cry.html

Guillaume's neurotic sensitivity doesn't seemingly extend to the horse that he urges "to faster gait with flicks of the whip" and the occasional "sharp word of encouragement". It's 66 kms from Vétheuil to Paris, which is no way to treat a horse, 30 miles is usually considered the upper limit for a single horse-drawn journey, but maybe Guillaume was reckoning on changing horses. That's if he was thinking clearly at all. (In fact, the ill-fated couple will get no further than Mantes.)

The other book I've been reading recently, Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960), might be regarded as a sort of apocalyptic epitaph to the horse age, amid the carnage of anachronistic French cavalry in the early days of WW2. This extract from Georges' thoughts begins with a race meeting before reverting sharply to the present.

... and she (she hadn’t turned her head either, hadn’t shown that she had seen him) sitting on one of those iron chairs in the shade, and perhaps in her hand one of those yellow or pink sheets with the last odds written on them (but not looking at that either), talking desultorily with (or listening desultorily to, or not listening to) one of those men, one of those retired colonels or commandants never seen except in such places, wearing striped trousers, a grey bowler (and probably stored away somewhere, fully dressed, for the rest of the week and taken out only on Sundays, quickly dusted off, smoothed out and set here along with the baskets of flowers on the balconies and the staircases of the grandstand, and immediately afterwards stored away in their box again), and finally Corinne standing up casually, moving calmly – her vaporous and indecent red dress swaying, swirling around her legs – towards the grandstand… 

But there was no grandstand, no elegant public to look at us: I could still see them silhouetted ahead of us (Quixotic shapes diminished by the light that gnawed, corroded the outlines), ineffaceable against the blinding sunlight, their black shadows sliding beside them on the road like their faithful doubles, now foreshortened, hunched or rather telescoped, dwarfed and deformed, now stretched, spindly and distended, repeating in miniature and symmetrically the movements of their vertical doubles to which they appeared to be joined by invisible links: four points – the four hoofs – ....... the four hoofs and the four telescoped shadows separating and rejoining in a kind of motionless oscillation, a monotonous trampling, the dusty ground the cobblestones or grass running underneath like an ink blot spreading and shrinking, leaving no trace on the rubbish, the dead, the scar, the stain, the wake of wreckage war leaves behind it, and that must have been where I saw it for the first time, a little before or a little after we stopped to drink, discovering it, staring at it through that kind of half-sleep, that kind of brownish mud in which I was somehow caught, and maybe because we had to make a detour to avoid it, and actually sensing it more than seeing it: ... (like everything lying along the road: the trucks, the cars, the suitcases, the corpses) something unexpected, unreal, hybrid, so that what had been a horse (that is, what you knew, what you could recognize as having been a horse) was no longer anything now but a vague heap of limbs, of dead meat, of skin and sticky hair, three-quarters-covered with mud – ... 

(from Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960), translated by Richard Howard)

Simon's prose is endlessly quotable but interlaced in a complex way. From the midst of that passage I reluctantly omitted a wonderful and painstaking description of rain dripping from a roofline; it could have formed the centrepiece of another post.

*

Sarah Orne Jewett was an unknown author to me, and of course I couldn't leave it like that, so I've just finished her best-known novella, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), an absorbing and beautiful book. 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/367/367-h/367-h.htm

[The fir in question is the conically-shaped Balsam Fir (Abies balsamea), which along with the Black and White Spruce is a principal component of Maine's heavily wooded landscape.]

Given today's topic, I've chosen an extract where they're discussing having to borrow the grocery wagon rather than the chaise. 

MRS. TODD never by any chance gave warning over night of her great projects and adventures by sea and land. She first came to an understanding with the primal forces of nature, and never trusted to any preliminary promise of good weather, but examined the day for herself in its infancy. Then, if the stars were propitious, and the wind blew from a quarter of good inheritance whence no surprises of sea-turns or southwest sultriness might be feared, long before I was fairly awake I used to hear a rustle and knocking like a great mouse in the walls, and an impatient tread on the steep garret stairs that led to Mrs. Todd's chief place of storage. She went and came as if she had already started on her expedition with utmost haste and kept returning for something that was forgotten. When I appeared in quest of my breakfast, she would be absent-minded and sparing of speech, as if I had displeased her, and she was now, by main force of principle, holding herself back from altercation and strife of tongues.

These signs of a change became familiar to me in the course of time, and Mrs. Todd hardly noticed some plain proofs of divination one August morning when I said, without preface, that I had just seen the Beggs' best chaise go by, and that we should have to take the grocery. Mrs. Todd was alert in a moment.

“There! I might have known!” she exclaimed. “It's the 15th of August, when he goes and gets his money. He heired an annuity from an uncle o' his on his mother's side. I understood the uncle said none o' Sam Begg's wife's folks should make free with it, so after Sam's gone it'll all be past an' spent, like last summer. That's what Sam prospers on now, if you can call it prosperin'. Yes, I might have known. 'Tis the 15th o' August with him, an' he gener'ly stops to dinner with a cousin's widow on the way home. Feb'uary n' August is the times. Takes him 'bout all day to go an' come.”

I heard this explanation with interest. The tone of Mrs. Todd's voice was complaining at the last.

“I like the grocery just as well as the chaise,” I hastened to say, referring to a long-bodied high wagon with a canopy-top, like an attenuated four-posted bedstead on wheels, in which we sometimes journeyed. “We can put things in behind—roots and flowers and raspberries, or anything you are going after—much better than if we had the chaise.”

Mrs. Todd looked stony and unwilling. “I counted upon the chaise,” she said, turning her back to me, and roughly pushing back all the quiet tumblers on the cupboard shelf as if they had been impertinent. “Yes, I desired the chaise for once. I ain't goin' berryin' nor to fetch home no more wilted vegetation this year. Season's about past, except for a poor few o' late things,” she added in a milder tone. “I'm goin' up country. No, I ain't intendin' to go berryin'. I've been plottin' for it the past fortnight and hopin' for a good day.”

“Would you like to have me go too?” I asked frankly, but not without a humble fear that I might have mistaken the purpose of this latest plan.

“Oh certain, dear!” answered my friend affectionately. “Oh no, I never thought o' any one else for comp'ny, if it's convenient for you, long's poor mother ain't come. I ain't nothin' like so handy with a conveyance as I be with a good bo't. Comes o' my early bringing-up. I expect we've got to make that great high wagon do. The tires want settin' and 'tis all loose-jointed, so I can hear it shackle the other side o' the ridge. We'll put the basket in front. I ain't goin' to have it bouncin' an' twirlin' all the way. Why, I've been makin' some nice hearts and rounds to carry.”

(The Country of the Pointed Firs, opening of Ch XVI.)

It's strange how randomly assembled authors may suddenly reveal curious resemblances to each other. You could say of Sarah Orne Jewett, as of Claude Simon, that she was one of those novelists who had no particular interest in or talent for making up stories, she worked with her own experiences. And what's immediately arresting about both authors is their styles, so different yet both distinguished for a certain effortless buoyancy and a constant flow of insight. 

*

Or consider this surprising crossover, when Guillaume and Madeleine reach Mantes and put up at an inn:

This room, which the innkeeper had thought he had made most comfortable by putting a mat under the round table, exuded that indefinable odour which is common to all such places. That is, it was redolent of airlessness and mould, plus a vague suspicion of old linen, threadbare upholstery and damp dust. Big, ramshackle and chilly, it was like a public hall through which the whole world had passed without anybody leaving behind anything of his heart or his habits. It had the vacant commonplaceness and the stupid bareness of a dormitory in any barracks. Here, in this narrow bed, half-way between double and single in size, men and women, old and young, had spent their passing nights, and all left it as cold as a bench in a public vestibule. No doubt both sorrow and delight had sojourned here, but the room had absorbed no trace of either any tears or laughter which had passed through it. ...

(from Émile Zola's Madeleine Férat (1868), Ch 9, translated by Alec Brown)

Cut to Claude Simon:

... and he floating in the shadows, listening to the silence, the night, the peace, the imperceptible breathing of a woman beside him, and after a while he made out the second rectangle of the wardrobe mirror reflecting the dim light from the window – the eternally empty wardrobe of hotel rooms with two or three hangers dangling inside, the wardrobe itself (with its triangular pediment framed by two pineapples) made of that urine-yellow wood with reddish veins which is apparently used only for this kind of furniture doomed never to hold anything except its own dusty void, the dusty coffin of the reflected ghosts of thousands of lovers, thousands of naked, furious and clammy bodies, thousands of embraces absorbed, mingled in the glaucous depths of the cold, unalterable and virginal mirror – and he remembering:) ...

(from Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960), translated by Richard Howard)

The passage from Madeleine Férat proves ironic: in this novel of ripped-down defences, Guillaume will soon learn that he is not insulated from the past, the room is not silent and its previous occupants are not without trace.

But bringing Claude Simon alongside Zola provokes another line of thought, that novels like hotel rooms are not impermeable, that every writer is unwittingly contributing to a vast communal book, and every reader's occupation consists of reading that one book to the best of their ability, and in fact all our lives are part of one single life, the subject of the one book that we can only gesture at comprehending.

Autumn cleardown

Brewer Spruce (Picea breweriana). Victoria Park, Frome, 11 September 2023.

Preparing for a road trip. Every bit of space in the van is important, so I've been emptying the accumulated cultural artefacts into self storage or giving them back to their owners. Yesterday I finished Karen Joy Fowler's 2013 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a sort of dark family comedy that keeps disclaiming what it's doing, as it quietly unwraps the delusions and horrors of animal research. That was borrowed from Laura, and I've given it back, but I'll drag the internet for a quotation or two. The novel has touched a nerve, evidently; there are more than 30,000 Amazon reviews.

The first few chapters: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/312665/we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves-by-karen-joy-fowler/9780142180822/excerpt

Language does this to our memories – simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture...

 

There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. When humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science....

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me....

The only book left in my bag right now is a miniscule Troilus and Cressida, but I reckon I've already said all I can about that.

I've reduced the CDs in the van from twenty to five; when we travel we don't listen to anything except the landscape. So it doesn't really matter that what's left is a strange unbalanced mix; Mildred Bailey, Mattias Eklundh, Duffy, The Jam, and Liszt's Années de Pélerinage (the Swiss part). (Last time I listened to "Vallée d'Obermann" I felt suddenly sure that this piano piece was the key inspiration for Wagner's Tristan and Isolde music.) It seems strange not to be carting around armfuls of Haydn, my current delight. 

It would be nice to say more about that. Alas, my classical music thoughts amount to little more than "Oh my God I bloody love Haydn..." (or Chavez, or Berio, or Andrea Torrodi, or whatever is currently playing). Maybe that's the place of music in my cultural life, an art I can truly surrender to without being the least bit preoccupied with what I'm going to say about it.

Well, if I need any Haydn there's always YouTube. But we won't be using our phones very much either, the charging is a bore and reception is fitful. The latter, at least, won't get in the way of finally finishing Claude Simon's The Flanders Road and probably immediately starting over. My Kindle download dates from last year's trip, when I found myself eating quiche outside the house of this amazing author that I knew nothing about.

[Basically, you stop at the Aire du Château de Salses on the A9, take a short walk across fields to the stupendous Fort de Salses, a massively fortified stronghold of Ferdinand and Isabella, then keep on walking into the village. Claude Simon's house is in the village square. (In Salses he was principally a winegrower, only secondarily a Nobel prize-winning author.)]

When I'd written this much, I decided I'd gone too austere. I should take at least one paper book for when I didn't want to use the phone, I thought. So I revisited self storage and picked up an early Zola novel (Fatal Intimacy (Madeline Férat)). It was published in 1869; weird to think that's only twenty years after Cousin Pons.

In the first chapter (in Alec Brown's translation), it says "Skirting under the hill where those enormous castanea Robinsonia chestnuts rear their domes, they reached Aulnay". I know this has nothing to do with the story, but I'm instantly intrigued, having totally failed to find any reference to such a tree. *

For good measure, and because it was so slim, I also grabbed Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1971). I hardly ever read that kind of book of ideas -- it's something to do with distrust; as soon as someone delivers their opinions in their own voice, I worry that it's a performance, or not what they really think. Consequently, such ideas as I receive from books usually come from novels or poetry. But I'm hoping that, in the bubble of travelling, I might be more receptive. 

[I read a couple of pages of Deschooling Society, enough to see that this was a most inapposite rant. Illich's book was the fruit of vast experience and its ideas emerged communally from much debate with colleagues. All the same, I left my copy in Spain and who knows when or if I'll get back to it.]

This will be the last blog post before we set off. Probably there won't be much for the next month or two.

*

* I think I've worked it out now. Alec Brown invented the quasi botanical Latin; he didn't know what else to make of "châtaigniers de Robinson" in Zola's original text. Consulting the map of SW Paris made it clear. The lovers are walking from Fontenay (Fontenay-aux-Roses) to Aulnay by a direct route avoiding Sceaux. To their right is the area still known as Robinson. It was named for a well-known guinguette (cabaret) called Le Grand Robinson, opened in 1848. Unlike most guinguettes this one didn't have a waterfront location; instead, its iconic feature was the interconnected "tree-houses" set among large chestnut trees. The guinguette's  name alludes to the tree-house in The Swiss Family Robinson (1812 novel by Johann David Wyss), whose own title is an allusion to Robinson Crusoe. Anyway, those are the chestnut trees that Zola is talking about.

Brewer Spruce (Picea breweriana). Victoria Park, Frome, 11 September 2023.

In its native Klamath Mountains (N. California,  Oregon), the striking growth form of Brewer Spruce is an adaptation to heavy snowfall.

So another trip to London

The growth of the capital, a view from Leman Street, Aldgate.

So I had with me, for the train and tube, two small-format books: a selection of Francisco de Quevedo's love poems (Poesía amorosa), and a Gale Nelson pamphlet from 2000 called in it.  

I began to read Quevedo's Endechas (unrhymed lines of six or seven syllables) beginning "Estaba Amarilis...". 

  Estaba Amarilis, 

pastora discreta,

guardando ganado 

de su hermana Aleja, 

  sentada a la sombra 

de una parda peña, 

haciendo guirnaldas 

para su cabeza.

  Cortaba las flores 

que topaba cerca, 

veníanse a sus manos 

las que estaban lejas. 

  Las que se ceñía 

siempre estaban frescas, 

mas las que dejaba, 

de envidiosas, secas.

There was Amaryllis,

discreet shepherdess,

guarding the flock

of her sister Aleja,

   sitting in the shade

of a brown rock,

making garlands

for her head.

  She cut the flowers

that grew close by,

while those more distant

came themselves into her hands.

  And those she wore

stayed ever fresh,

but those she left aside

withered from envy. ...

"Aleja" is the Spanish equivalent of "Alexa".

Amarilis falls asleep, and a number of bees descend on her, mistaking her cheeks for roses and lilies, her lips for carnations, her breath for jasmine and violets, etc. The poet intervenes, telling the bees that they're fools trying to make beeswax out of marble, and it's a bad idea to make honey from flowers that produce poison. Amarilis wakes up and the bees, blinded by her two suns (eyes), flee murmuring away. I think the poem ends with the poet saying that the honey they hoped to gather from her garments was obtained just by looking at her. Some of this is beyond my Spanish (and Google Translate's, too), but I'm guessing there's a joke in there about premature excitement. 

My eye caught on the name Pisuerga: it is the river that runs through Valladolid, I have swum in it. That is near the bottom end, just before it joins the Duero. Quevedo's poem must be set up-river, on the plains of Castilla y Leon or even in the mountains of Cantabria, not so very far from his birthplace. 

But in the course of looking this up I also read about Quevedo's (1580 - 1645) lifelong antisemitism; not the passing insults that you can expect in e.g. every dramatist of Shakespeare's time, but the chillingly programmatic antisemitism that dreams up Jewish conspiracies and solutions for dealing with them.

I found I could no longer focus on Amarilis, despite the rousing beauty of the verses, so I took a look at Gale Nelson's in it instead. Here's the beginning:

for the that in it

from our of than in

free for the that then

then the it then

then that then in

then that in then that

that then then then in

in it it in it it then

then the it

then the then

then the then then

then the then for

for the that it it

from our of in

from of in our than

then our of it then

our of it

then that of

If you're curious to read more of it, well, you can. The entire text is printed on the jacket of the booklet as well as within it, so you can see the second half in the photo at the bottom of this post. (But the jacket version doesn't show that the poem is in five numbered sections.)

 I wanted to quote as far as the fourth stanza so you could see the argument of the poem starting to develop. For there certainly is an argument: most obviously it's about form and freedom, both in art and in life. But there's more to it, because this necessarily leads into why we do art, in fact why and how humans do things at all. So it becomes a very broad topic. And  it's quite funny and quite impressive that it's conducted using a vocabulary of just fifteen words.

Much of Nelson's writing employs the idea of a limited pool of vocabulary; a "source-text", in Jackson Mac Low's terms. 

Eleven of those words make their appearance in the first three lines. The remaining four words, when they show up, have the force of detonations, or perhaps water-drops on a parched tongue.

The words aren't used with anything like equal frequency. Perhaps the engine-room of the poem is then and that, words with such a powerful range of uses. The words strain into each other (for-form-from-free, the-then-than-that, it-in-is-this) and they talk about each other, turning each other into nouns ("from our of then / this then our then / that then is our that / then is in our then"). Reaching the end, I knew that I had read not just an argument but a poem as fresh and lively as the Cantabrian rivers, in its own way.  

The White Tower, built by William the Conqueror in the 1080s

"To all intents and purposes, the Tower of London may be said to be the beginning of our London..." (E.V. Lucas, London Afresh (1936)). 

Heading home

By the return journey I felt I had enough phone battery left to drop into Kindle and indulge in a few pages of Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (Richard Howard's translation). I won't say anything more about that yet, but here's a sample of what I read:

and then she blew the lamp out, turned away and went out into the bluish dawn that was like a cataract on a blind eye, her figure silhouetted a moment while she was still in the darkness of the barn, then, once across the doorstep, seeming to vanish, although they continued to stare after her, not walking away but apparently dissolving, melting into what was really more grey than blue and was undoubtedly the day, since after all it had to come, but apparently without any of the powers, the virtues inherent in the day, although a little wall was discernible now on the other side of the road, the trunk of a big walnut tree and behind that the trees of the orchard, but everything flat, without colours or values, as if wall, walnut tree and apple trees (the girl had disappeared now) were somehow fossilized, had left only their imprint on this spongy and uniformly grey matter that now gradually crept into the barn, Blum’s face like a grey mask when Georges turned round, like a sheet of paper with two holes torn for the eyes, the mouth grey too, Georges still saying the words he had started to speak or rather hearing his own voice saying them (probably something like: Say did you see that girl, she…), then his voice stopping, his lips still moving perhaps in the silence, then they stopping too while he looked at that paper face, and Blum (he had taken off his helmet and now his narrow girl’s face seemed still narrower between the unstuck ears, not much bigger than a fist, above the girl’s neck coming out of the stiff wet coat collar as though from a carapace, miserable, mournful, feminine, stubborn), saying: “What girl?” and Georges: “What…What’s the matter with you?” Blum’s horse still saddled, not even tethered and Blum simply leaning against the wall as if he were afraid of falling, with his rifle still over his shoulder, without even the strength to take off his pack, and Georges saying for the second time: “What’s the matter with you? Are you sick?” and Blum shrugging, moving away from the wall, beginning to unbuckle the saddle girth, and Georges: “For God’s sake leave the horse alone. Go lie down. If I pushed you you’d fall over…” he himself almost asleep on his feet, but Blum did not offer any resistance when he pushed him away: the hair on the horses’ coppery rumps was pasted down by the rain, dark, flat and wet under the saddle blanket, giving off a harsh acrid odour, and while he set their two bundles of harness along the wall he still seemed to be seeing her, there where she had been standing a moment before, or rather still seemed to feel her, perceive her like a kind of persistent unreal imprint, stamped not so much on his retina (he had seen her so briefly, so little) as, somehow, on himself: a warm white thing like the milk she had come for at the moment they had arrived ...