Hetty Sorrel's lack of sympathy

Adam Bede (1859) is a terribly irritating book. A book full of wonderful things, and it might be nice to write more appreciatively about those one day. But a first and perhaps only post shouldn't trivialize and evade the issue. It has to be about Hetty Sorrel. (Spoilers will follow immediately, by the way.)

The tools of the joiner, from Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Art (1703 edition)

[Image source: Woodworking Tools 1600 - 1900, by Peter C. Welsh (1966), who tells us that the illustration shows the "workbench (A), fore plane (B. 1), jointer (B. 2), strike-block (B. 3), smoothing plane (B. 4 and B. 7), rabbet plane (B. 5), plow (B. 6), forming chisels (C. 1 and C. 3), paring chisel (C. 2), skew former (C. 4), mortising chisel (sec. C. 5), gouge (C. 6), square (D), bevel (F), gauge (G), brace and bit (H), gimlet (I), auger (K), hatchet (L), pit saw (M), whipsaw (N), frame saw (O), saw set (Q), handsaw (unmarked), and compass saw (E)".]

George Eliot was writing her novel in Munich, Dresden and Richmond; a world away, in a more than geographical sense, from anything Hetty could comprehend. Yet she set out to comprehend Hetty with the same almost reckless ambition to write the impossible that gives us e.g. Poyser's labourers at the Harvest Supper (Ch 53). 

We know how magically George Eliot can bring out a character who can talk: Adam's querulous mother Lisbeth is the best example in this novel. Lisbeth is self-pitying and bullying and obsessive but no-one could mistake her for being narrow; George Eliot shows us how in spite of her shortcomings, in fact because of them and inseparably from them, she has a terrifyingly keen perception. 

But Lisbeth uses her voice as a weapon. With Hetty the challenge was quite different, to portray one of the many people on this earth who have very little to say, whose life and interests have no use for talk. (Hetty and Arthur in the wood are pure chemistry.) George Eliot chose to make a central character of a type that, I think, she could not understand and so could only describe by negatives; vain, self-absorbed, motivated by shallow triumphs over her peers, hard-hearted, narrow, uneducated and ignorant. No amount of defensive persiflage can hide those judgments. 

Poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded childish face and the hard, unloving, despairing soul looking out of it—with the narrow heart and narrow thoughts, no room in them for any sorrows but her own, and tasting that sorrow with the more intense bitterness! My heart bleeds for her as I see her toiling along on her weary feet, or seated in a cart, with her eyes fixed vacantly on the road before her, never thinking or caring whither it tends, till hunger comes and makes her desire that a village may be near.

What will be the end, the end of her objectless wandering, apart from all love, caring for human beings only through her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded brute clings to it?

God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such misery!

(Ch 37)

I'm annoyed by this, for example. The narrator claims that his heart bleeds for Hetty, yet his unsparing judgments don't really back that up: it suggests that he falls for Hetty, as people do, merely because she gives off so kittenish or duckling-like an air (see Ch 7). And it's quickly apparent that the narrator's present concern is with educated people, with the potential Arthur Donnithornes who might thoughtlessly bring misery on girls like Hetty; he simply cannot maintain interest in Hetty for her own sake, she must be used to underline a moral. (I think this narrator is plainly intended to be male, like the author's pseudonym.)

And I'm not sure if the author herself sees that these judgments of Hetty in fact rebound on the Poysers who Hetty is so ungrateful to. If Hetty has grown up so self-absorbed and alienated, explanations aren't far to seek (especially in Ch 31). The underlying lack of sympathy between the good Poysers and their orphaned dependent is, after all, mutual: but old Martin is the only person who is barefaced enough to say it like it is; that is, until Hetty's arrest; then they throw her off entirely. 

Thus the Poysers confer (in the midst of calmly dismissing Hetty's request to "go as a lady's maid"):

“Thee’dst be sorry to part wi’ her, if it wasn’t for her good,” said Mr. Poyser. “She’s useful to thee i’ the work.”

“Sorry? Yes, I’m fonder on her nor she deserves—a little hard-hearted hussy, wanting to leave us i’ that way. I can’t ha’ had her about me these seven year, I reckon, and done for her, and taught her everything wi’out caring about her. An’ here I’m having linen spun, an’ thinking all the while it’ll make sheeting and table-clothing for her when she’s married, an’ she’ll live i’ the parish wi’ us, and never go out of our sights—like a fool as I am for thinking aught about her, as is no better nor a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside it.”

(Ch 31)

Surely the categorical judgment outweighs the alleged foolish fondness, for which Mrs Poyser can offer no explanation. I infer that it's important for her to believe in her own fondness for her husband's niece and to talk it up. Perhaps because she really feels that Hetty's neatness in the dairy and exceptional beauty enhances her household's prestige. Perhaps because fondness is what she obscurely senses she ought to feel though she doesn't. Perhaps because a general belief in her fondness for Hetty is important to the Poysers' credit in the community. Or perhaps Mrs Poyser too isn't immune to the charms of kittens and ducklings. 

*

Doesn't the book's judgment, in seeming defiance of its author, fall just as heavily on her hero Adam, besotted with a pretty trophy of whose life and interests he knows nothing? (Adam is apt to assume Hetty might share his own interest in geology, ants, etc.)

Far more so, in my opinion, than on Arthur Donnithorne, who acts by his own selfish nature, but therefore naturally, and who alone gives Hetty what she has lived for. Yes, he would have abandoned her in due course. We know that Hetty feels she could have borne being cast aside, if he was still kind to her, as he would have been (Ch 35). And would he ever have allowed his child to die and his forsaken lover to be wandering the roads alone? Certainly not; it was only Adam's violent and misguided and - yes - selfish - intervention that precipitated all that. 

The warning to the do-gooders was there, earlier, in Hetty's response to Dinah (for even Dinah doesn't escape stricture):

... and for the first time she became irritated under Dinah's caress. She pushed her away impatiently and said with a childish sobbing voice, --

'Don't talk to me so, Dinah. Why do you come to frighten me? I've never done anything to you. Why can't you let me be?'

(Ch 15)

It's a good point, and a good question. Hetty has assuredly not done anything to Dinah. So it's reasonable to suppose that Dinah's unquietness is about what Hetty may do to her in the future. Which is, to bring shame on her family...  Would that be such an unfair inference? 

*

Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot.... they are enormously different authors, not least in their contemporary reputations... yet it's interesting to trace some parallels.

They both began as translators from the German. (Bear with me, I know this isn't serious ... at least not yet.)

They were both late starters, as novelists. Scott was nearly 42 when Waverley was published; when Adam Bede appeared in February 1859, George Eliot was 39. As novelists they were beginners, but as writers they had secure reputations, though of extremely different kinds. Neither put their real name on the title pages. 

Accordingly, the youthful leads of their debut novels were a lot younger than the authors were. 

And perhaps because of that remarkable psychological inhibition that makes writers very nervous about trying to portray a later era than their own, both authors chose to set the action of their novels well back in time. We don't readily think of Adam Bede as a historical novel, but it too might have borne the subtitle, 'Tis Sixty Years Since: it begins in 1799. 

The deeper and more troubling relationship, however, is with The Heart of Midlothian (1818). Hetty's hopeless journey to Windsor is like a dreadful parody of Jeanie Deans' journey to the south; though it was not at Windsor that Jeanie met Queen Caroline, but at another royal residence, Richmond Lodge. (Coincidentally or not, George Eliot was actually living in Richmond when she wrote this part of her novel.) 

Both novels arose from actual infanticide cases. Scott based The Heart of Midlothian on the story of Helen Walker of Irongray, Dumfries, who in around 1730 obtained a pardon for her sister Tibby, under sentence of death for infanticide. John McDiarmid wrote this account of the case in 1830: 
http://www.kirkcudbright.co/historyarticle.asp?ID=143&p=25&g=4 .

Adam Bede drew on the case of Mary Voce, "Executed on Nottingham Gallows, on Tuesday, March 16, 1802, for the MURDER OF HER OWN CHILD". I quote from Henry Taft's contemporary broadsheet , celebrating Mary's penitence and turning to God. George Eliot's Methodist Aunt Samuel had been one of the devout visitors to the condemned cell. (The two novels are also connected by the devout religious temperaments of Jeanie / Dinah. And -- but maybe I'm becoming frivolous again -- by taking an unconscionable time to end.)

Effie Deans had a sister to walk south on her behalf. Hetty had no-one. She may have an aunt and uncle, but no brother or sister. Nor is there any hint that she ever had a friend. No-one, least of all Dinah or Adam, has ever interested themselves in Hetty's interests, in her elegance and deftness and dreams, foolish or otherwise. The lack of sympathy that Hetty evinces is a perfect mirror of the lack of sympathy shown to her by her "family".  

*

The story turns on sex and pregnancy, topics on which, in the usual Victorian manner, nothing can be said outright except by coded hints and significant silences. That's irritating, too. (This same kind of information management contrives to prevent us finding out if Hetty's baby was a boy or a girl.)

How do the Poysers and Adam fail to notice that Hetty is pregnant? It seems incredible, but I must admit that George Eliot does her best to account for this. Hetty herself isn't sure she's pregnant until November, shortly after Adam's proposal. Then Mrs Poyser is confined to her room from Christmas until early in February*, so she doesn't see much of Hetty, who is working unusually hard downstairs (maybe hoping to induce a miscarriage). It's when Mrs Poyser becomes active again that Hetty's agitation becomes unendurable: she must kill herself or run away. (The Hall Farm is an exemplary shame culture; Hetty has thoroughly taken that on board, if nothing else.)

[*The same reason Mrs Saddletree, in The Heart of Midlothian, is unaware of Effie Deans' pregnancy.]

And Hetty is not yet in such a very advanced stage of pregnancy. The most likely date when she becomes pregnant is the first of August, when Arthur arranges to meet her at the end of the coming-of-age party (Ch 26). At the beginning of February, she's perhaps just six months pregnant. 

It follows that her baby, born around the first of March, is seriously premature, a birth brought on by the terrible stresses of Hetty's wanderings. Even in those days, a seven-month baby might survive; this was reputedly the case for both Kepler and Isaac Newton. But it wasn't very likely, especially in Hetty's circumstances. 

*

I've questioned how far George Eliot herself would have subscribed to the things I've been arguing here. One reason to think that she might have done, is the extraordinary way in which the novel treats Hetty's story from the moment when she's on the condemned cart and Arthur Donnithorne rides in, a Jeanie Deans of sorts, waving the pardon that is no pardon. Hetty's transportation keeps her alive in our minds, but softened heart or no -- and the author is too honest to pretend that Hetty really experiences any religious emotion, even if Dinah has persuaded her into confession -- no-one at Hayslope forgives her for what she's done or expresses the slightest wish of seeing or hearing of her again. It's we the readers who would like to know more of Hetty's story, but the novel baulks us cruelly: "... And the death of the poor wanderer, when she was coming back to us, has been sorrow upon sorrow" (Dinah, in the Epilogue). Whatever Hetty found in Australia, it wasn't apparently a new life. It must have been desolate enough, to want to come back to Hayslope.  In the mean time, no-one mentions her name. I'd like to think that the author (recalling The Heart of Midlothian, perhaps) perfectly intended that uncomfortable shadow to lie across her quiet ending.

View from the bench behind the church at Ellastone

(Image source: https://walkswithwelf.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/ellastone-and-the-weavers/ . Photograph by Dave Welford, illustrating his lively account of a ramble from Ellastone to the Weaver Hills.)

Hayslope is generally accepted as being based on Ellastone, Staffordshire (close to the Derbyshire border). George Eliot's father, Robert Evans, spent the early part of his life there, working as a carpenter. Her uncle lived there, and Mary Ann Evans did visit the area several times, in particular in 1839-40 (See http://moorlandsoldtimes.blogspot.com/2013/04/george-eliot-and-staffordshire.html).  She must surely have passed through Ellastone with her father on their journey from Ashbourne to Alton Gardens (letter to Miss Lewis, 23 June 1840).

But though Hayslope is based on Ellastone it is not Ellastone. Ellastone's proximity to the River Dove is its major topographical fact, but George Eliot didn't want a river playing in the background of Dinah's preaching. Hayslope is a dry-sounding name. In the landscape of Adam Bede there is only the brook (Chapter 4) in which Thias Bede drowns, and the pool in the Scantlands (Chapter 35) where Hetty thinks of drowning herself. It is not just at Hayslope; the novel is everywhere shy of rivers. Hetty's journey takes her to Stratford-upon-Avon  (a painful mistake) and eventually to Windsor, beside the Thames, but the imaginative vision of Adam Bede blanks out those rivers, too. There's something thirsty about Adam Bede; a spiritual thirst. It's strikingly in contrast to George Eliot's next novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860). 

*

Adam Bede: complete online text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/507/507-h/507-h.htm#link2HCH0004

I stayed away from the wider conversation while I tried to gather my thoughts and write this post. Now I'm dipping in and, of course, discovering that I'm not being very original.

I was pleased to find that much of what I've said was more comprehensively laid out in Jennifer Gribble's "The Hidden Shame: Telling Hetty Sorrel's Story" (Sydney Studies, 1996):  https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229391466.pdf .

And this is a brilliant exploration of the contradictions in Adam Bede, George Eliot and Victorian society: Rosemary Gould's "The History of an Unnatural Act: Infanticide and 'Adam Bede'" (Victorian Literature and Culture Vol. 25, No. 2 (1997), pp. 263-277): https://www.jstor.org/stable/25058389 .

I also enjoyed reading R.E. Sopher's "Gender and Sympathy in Adam Bede: The Case of Seth Bede" (George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies No. 62/63 (September 2012), pp. 1-15): https://www.jstor.org/stable/42827899 ; focussing on another character who troubles our idea of the values Adam Bede may seem to uphold. 

Notes on "I Stood Tiptoe..."

 

Part of Keats' draft of "I Stood Tiptoe..."

[Image source: https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/fragment-of-keats-poem-sells-for-world-record-breaking-price-3444706 . Charles Cowden Clarke cut Keats' draft into thirteen fragments and distributed them to friends. This particular fragment sold for £181,250 in April 2013. See end of post for an image of both sides of the fragment. The side shown above is lines 181-195 (the beginning of the Endymion section); on the other side is lines 157-173 (Syrinx and Narcissus).]

[Keats calls the story of Endymion "the sweetest of all songs", something I discussed in another post: 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/11/all-tendrils-green.html .]

The poem we call "I Stood Tiptoe" had no title when it opened the Poems of 1817. Keats himself seems to have referred to it as "Endymion", until he conceived his larger poem. 

Leigh Hunt says "this poem was suggested to Keats by a delightful summer-day, as he stood beside the gate that leads from the Battery of Hampstead Heath into a field by Caen Wood" (Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828), I, page 413). In fact the references to violets, bluebells, hawthorn, laburnum, etc generally imply a day in mid-May.  However there's some intrusion from slightly later flowering seasons; honeysuckle, and especially evening-primrose. (Keats is usually said to have begun the poem in Margate in August 1816. He completed it in November.)

I stood tip-toe upon a little hill, 
The air was cooling, and so very still. 
That the sweet buds which with a modest pride 
Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside, 
Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems,       
Had not yet lost those starry diadems 
Caught from the early sobbing of the morn. 

...

So I straightway began to pluck a posey 

Of luxuries bright, milky, soft and rosy. 

(Lines 1-7, 27-28. Text from Poems (1817), by John Keats, on Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8209/8209-h/8209-h.htm  .  I've yet to track down an image of this page in the original 1817 edition, so I don't know if the full stop at the end of line 2 is an old mistake or a new one.)

Keats doesn't name the plant with the "sweet buds", nor is it clear if his "posey" is a literal one and refers to the same plant. But taking them both together, I'm thinking of Wood Anemone (Anemone nemorosa), whose stems taper and have only a single pair of leaves. Also, the buds "pull droopingly", though the stems become erect when the flowers open fully. It's one of the common spring plants that you might well be inclined to gather a posy of, and "milky, soft and rosy" could describe the petals, flushed with pink on the outside. 

The buds are still dewy; dew is one of the images that keeps recurring in Keats' early poems, like the moon and swans. The poem begins here, well before noon presumably. By line 107 it will reach evening, but this is not a steady progress through a day. Neither time nor place stay fixed for very long. There is a fitfulness and spontaneity to Keats' early poetic; he writes about writing narrative, but he doesn't do it. Anbd there's a basic incompleteness to all the poems in Poems 1817. With Endymion he set about writing something complete: and he duly completed his task, but immediately un-completed the poem with his own dismissive comments on it. 

A bush of May flowers with the bees about them; 

Ah, sure no tasteful nook would be without them;         

And let a lush laburnum oversweep them, 

And let long grass grow round the roots to keep them 

Moist, cool and green; and shade the violets, 

That they may bind the moss in leafy nets. 

 

A filbert hedge with wildbriar overtwined,         

And clumps of woodbine taking the soft wind 

Upon their summer thrones; there too should be 

The frequent chequer of a youngling tree, 

That with a score of light green brethen shoots 

From the quaint mossiness of aged roots:       

Round which is heard a spring-head of clear waters 

Babbling so wildly of its lovely daughters 

The spreading blue bells: it may haply mourn 

That such fair clusters should be rudely torn 

From their fresh beds, and scattered thoughtlessly         

By infant hands, left on the path to die. 

(lines 29-46)

May flowers: Hawthorn blossom. 

Filbert: Hazel.

Wildbriar: Dog Rose. (In contrast with "sweet briar", line 135)

Woodbine: Honeysuckle. Flowering generally starts in June. 

The youngling tree and its light green breth[r]en: "Any body who has seen a throng of young beeches, furnishing those natural clumpy seats at the root, must recognize the truth and grace of this description" (Leigh Hunt in The Examiner).

... Something like this (but these are Sweet Chestnut, not Beech). Powdermill Wood, Battle, 3 September 2022.

Blue bell: The plant now known as Hyacinthoides non-scripta has been assigned to various genera. The fact that one of its names is Endymion non-scriptus is a total coincidence, I suppose: it only acquired that name in 1849 (Garcke). When Keats wrote "I Stood Tiptoe", the bluebell would have been Hyacinthus non-scriptus (Linnaeus, 1753) or Scilla non-scripta (Hofmannsegg and Link, 1803). Torn-up bluebells scattered along a path is still a commonplace sight each spring; they are the kind of plant that attracts childish hands. Like the non-native plants it's a reminder that Keats' nature has a pervasively urban quality. His personification of the spring-head has a certain jocularity, but perhaps also a certain credibility, because it lies so close to a great metropolis. At any rate this image of man's agency will be followed by renewed emphasis on the agency of plants and animals. Nature is all in motion:  marigold flowers spread to the sunlight, sweet peas catch and bind, evening-primrose buds flip open for the moths, minnows switch position in response to a shadow, goldfinches skim over the water to sip and sleek their feathers. 

Open afresh your round of starry folds,

Ye ardent marigolds!

Dry up the moisture from your golden lids,

For great Apollo bids

That in these days your praises should be sung

On many harps, which he has lately strung;

(lines 47-52)

The flowers of Calendula open in bright daylight. The first allusion to the poets mentioned in the epigraph ("Places of nestling green for Poets made") arrives with a couple of trimeters that evoke something like Lycidas; the only other trimeter is line 184, near the start of the Endymion section.

 The tension of the "strung" harps is carried through into the lines about the sweet peas, which like this poet are on tip-toe; we're in fact no longer securely located on the little hill of the opening lines, but are already taking a flight. In the midst of the next scene (the stream with its minnows and sipping goldfinches), Keats says "Were I in such a place" (93). We have been transported to a scene of imagination, not record.

What next? A tuft of evening primroses, 

O’er which the mind may hover till it dozes; 

O’er which it well might take a pleasant sleep, 

But that ’tis ever startled by the leap         

Of buds into ripe flowers; 

(lines 107-111)

A striking phenomenon, if you ever happen to sit beside an evening-primrose plant in the evening. There are various YouTube videos showing the buds "leaping" into flower. Here's one by BocaJoe:

These North American plants had been introduced into Britain in about 1600. Maybe Keats was familiar with them from his apothecary studies. The flowers lead us into twilight, to moths and to another transforming moment, the moon. 

Of buds into ripe flowers; or by the flitting

Of diverse moths, that aye their rest are quitting;

Or by the moon lifting her silver rim

Above a cloud, and with a gradual swim

Coming into the blue with all her light.

O Maker of sweet poets, dear delight

Of this fair world, and all its gentle livers;

Spangler of clouds, halo of crystal rivers,

Mingler with leaves, and dew and tumbling streams,

Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,

Lover of loneliness, and wandering,

Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!

Thee must I praise above all other glories

That smile us on to tell delightful stories.

For what has made the sage or poet write

But the fair paradise of Nature's light?

In the calm grandeur of a sober line,

We see the waving of the mountain pine;

And when a tale is beautifully staid,

We feel the safety of a hawthorn glade:

(lines 111-130)

This is also about agency. Does nature play an active role in making poetry? If nature is evoked when we read, is it evidence that nature also played a part in creating the poetry? Keats thinks so, and after several more lines about the audience's feeling suddenly switches to the author's feeling and finally to the characters' feelings:

When it is moving on luxurious wings,

The soul is lost in pleasant smotherings:

Fair dewy roses brush against our faces,

And flowering laurels spring from diamond vases;

O'er head we see the jasmine and sweet briar,

And bloomy grapes laughing from green attire;

While at our feet, the voice of crystal bubbles

Charms us at once away from all our troubles:

So that we feel uplifted from the world,

Walking upon the white clouds wreath'd and curl'd.

So felt he, who first told, how Psyche went

On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment;

What Psyche felt, and Love, when their full lips

First touch'd;

(lines 131-144)

And flowering laurels spring from diamond vases: 

I abandon with regret the thought that Keats might have meant the mountain laurel Kalmia latifolia, native to the eastern USA and introduced to British gardens in the eighteenth century. (As it happens Kalmia's attractive flowers have their own special dynamic feature: their stamens are tensed, so pollen is flung onto visiting insects.) Anyway, from what I can see all previous uses of "flowering laurel" are American and refer to Kalmia.  (I think we can ignore Cherry Laurel (Prunus laurocerasus); the blossom isn't very beautiful and it has a piercing scent; bringing it indoors is a recipe for a nasty headache.) 

Anyway, Keats means Sweet Bay (Laurus nobilis), the classical laurel of poetic triumph (also the bay-leaf of aromatic stews). Compare:

O Poesy! for thee I grasp my pen

That am not yet a glorious denizen

Of thy wide heaven: yet to my ardent prayer,

Yield from thy sanctuary some clear air,

Smooth'd for intoxication by the breath

Of flowering bays, that I may die a death

Of luxury, and my young spirit follow

The morning sunbeams to the great Apollo

Like a fresh sacrifice; or, if I can bear

The o'erwhelming sweets, 'twill bring to me the fair

Visions of all places ...

(Sleep and Poetry, lines 53-63)

The emphasis on flowering is odd; flowering had not usually been regarded as an important element in the plant's iconography. Sweet Bay flowers are very small, but a spray with this golden bloom might be considered pretty enough to go in a vase. Perhaps the Sleep and Poetry passage accounts for it by implying that the plant's aroma is at its most overwhelming when in flower.  Leigh Hunt picked up on Keats' insistence on "flowering" laurel when he wrote his sonnet "To John Keats":

'Tis well you think me truly one of those,

Whose sense discerns the loveliness of things;

For surely as I feel the bird that sings

Behind the leaves, or dawn as it up grows,

Or the rich bee rejoicing as he goes,

Or the glad issue of emerging springs,

Or overhead the glide of a dove's wings,

Or turf, or trees, or, midst of all, repose.

And surely as I feel things lovelier still,

The human look, and the harmonious form

Containing woman, and the smile in ill,

And such a heart as Charles's, wise and warm,--

As surely as all this, I see, ev'n now,

Young Keats, a flowering laurel on your brow.

This was in early December 1816 (Keats first met Hunt in October 1816). A laurel crown was given to the winner of Hunt's sonnet-writing competitions, and indeed Keats did go on to win one, as recorded in Keats' sonnet "On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt". 

Keats later came to regret his involvement in these Huntian pantomimes and laurel crownings, when they were derisively seized on by hostile critics.

*

Perhaps the "flowering laurel" phrase had a brief vogue at this time. It shows up in these somewhat cloudy lines:

Few, happy few, whose soul inspiring course

Has proudly centered in that sacred source,

Whose flowering laurels shade the idol'd fane,

And Fame, and Wit, and Worth, and Honour reign.

From Robert Waln, Jr (1794 - 1825),  American Bards, A Satire (Philadelphia, 1820), quoted in a review in The Analectic Magazine, 1820. The author, son of an eminent and wealthy Quaker, was first a satirist and then a social historian: you can read more about him in this 1952 article by William S. Hastings: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20088327 . Short-lived like Keats, he never found the key to literary immortality, but I should like to read more of his work. 

*

sweet briar (line 135). 

Rosa rubiginosa, a wild rose, also known as eglantine, that in my experience crops up much more often in English literature than in real life. It's native to chalk and limestone country. It is "sweet" because the leaves and stems have apple-scented glands. If Keats knew the plant directly, it might be as a garden plant, in contrast to the "wild briar" of the opening lines on Hampstead Heath (Dog Rose, Rosa canina). But "sweet briar" might equally have come to Keats out of the pages of Spenser or Thomson. In this passage he is after all talking about the sensation of reading "luxurious" poetry, not directly describing nature. Here sweetbriar combines with jasmine and laurel to envelop us in fragrance, along with bloomy grapes and dewy roses to suggest a quasi-sexual transport.

So felt he, who first told, how Psyche went

On the smooth wind to realms of wonderment;

What Psyche felt, and Love, when their full lips

First touch'd; what amorous, and fondling nips

They gave each other's cheeks; with all their sighs,

And how they kist each other's tremulous eyes:

The silver lamp,—the ravishment,—the wonder—

The darkness,—loneliness,—the fearful thunder;

Their woes gone by, and both to heaven upflown,

To bow for gratitude before Jove's throne.

(lines 141-150)

The story is told at length by Apuleius (2nd century CE) in The Golden Ass, though there are artistic representations that are much older. Keats' emphasis here is on their kisses, as, more subtly, in the Ode to Psyche (lines 17-20):

      Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,

As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,

And ready still past kisses to outnumber

       At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:

Somehow that Keatsian emphasis made its way down to Arthur Donnithorne, as he takes hold of Hetty Sorrel:

Ah, he doesn’t know in the least what he is saying. This is not what he meant to say. His arm is stealing round the waist again; it is tightening its clasp; he is bending his face nearer and nearer to the round cheek; his lips are meeting those pouting child-lips, and for a long moment time has vanished. He may be a shepherd in Arcadia for aught he knows, he may be the first youth kissing the first maiden, he may be Eros himself, sipping the lips of Psyche—it is all one.

(George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), Ch. 13)

Title page of Keats' Poems (1817)

[Image source: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2019/fine-books-and-manuscripts-including-the-olympic-manifesto/keats-john-poems-london-c-j-ollier-1817 .]

The epigraph shown here (but missing from my copy of Keats' Complete Poems) is 

"What more felicity can fall to creature,

"Than to enjoy delight with liberty." 

                           Fate of the Butterfly. -- SPENSER.

Also missing is this note, on the reverse of the title page:

[The Short Pieces in the middle of the Book, as well as some of the Sonnets,

were written at an earlier period than the rest of the Poems.]

The top of the first page looks like this: 

POEMS.

"Places of nestling green for Poets made."

                           STORY OF RIMINI.

I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,

The air was cooling, and so very still.

That the sweet buds which with a modest pride

Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside,

Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems,

Had not yet lost those starry diadems

Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.   ... etc

Endymion on the left, Syrinx and Narcissus on the right

[Image source: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/01/09/john-keats-poem-auction_n_2437184.html .]

*

I learned a lot from the splendid site Mapping Keats's Progress: A Critical Chronology , by G. Kim Blank of the University of Victoria (Canada). At first I was a bit misled by its uncluttered interface; don't make the same mistake! To drill down to the rich detail you need to click first on a year (e.g. 1818), then a month (e.g. JUN), and finally a post title (e.g. 22 June 1818: Keats's Northern Expedition Begins). 

*

My posts about Keats' poems:

On "I Stood Tiptoe..."
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/08/notes-on-i-stood-tiptoe.html
On Endymion:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/12/john-keats-endymion-1817.html
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/11/all-tendrils-green.html
On Isabella, or The Pot of Basil:
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-pot-of-basil.html

On Lamia:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2026/01/on-john-keats-lamia.html

Plato's fiction

Others again affirm that he [Plato] wrestled in the Isthmian Games -- this is stated by Dicaearchus in his first book On Lives -- and that he applied himself to painting and wrote poems, first dithyrambs, afterwards lyric poems and tragedies. ... Afterwards, when he was about to compete for the prize with a tragedy, he listened to Socrates in front of the theatre of Dionysus, and then consigned his poems to the flames, with the words: Come hither, O fire-god, Plato now has need of thee.

Diogenes Laertius (3rd century CE), Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers III, 4-5.

This story is probably worthless as evidence. Yet it's likely enough that Plato would have tried his hand at tragedy in his youth. He was a gifted writer and tragedy was a dominant form. But the point of the story is I suppose to express a paradox: that Plato pursued an entirely different path from the tragedians, yet his dialogues evince considerable dramatic gifts. Especially in the Symposium, where he brings half a dozen characters together in a highly developed scene. (Two of them, Aristophanes and Agathon, are dramatists.) The result is serious philosophy that is potentially enhanced, and potentially undercut, by the competing insights of fiction.

Das Gastmahl des Platon (The Symposium of Plato), painting by Anselm Feuerbach (first version, 1869)

[Image source: Wikipedia . The painting is in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe. It shows Alcibiades and his drunken revellers (left) bursting in on the symposium, just after Socrates has given his speech. The young man wearing the laurel wreath in the centre is clearly Agathon, the owner of the house where the symposium is taking place (and the recent recipient of dramatic honours). Socrates is identifiable as the lit-up figure between the two lamps, conspicuously ignoring the newcomers (as was also the case in Pietro Testa's 1648 etching). Feuerbach did not explicitly identify the other figures, but we can make some inferences. One of the lamps has a caduceus design, and suggests that the nearest head to it, that of the man sprawling with his back to us and gazing at the revellers, belongs to the physician Eryximachus. The bearded man in animated conversation with Socrates is surely Aristophanes (according to Aristodemus the revellers bang on the door while Aristophanes is trying to say something in response to Socrates' speech, and later we'll learn that these two, with Agathon, carry on talking all through the night). Pausanias is perhaps the balding man seated behind Agathon's right arm, a proximity reflecting their status as lovers. Of the speechmakers this only leaves Phaedrus, who I reckon is most likely to be the grey-headed man with his back to us who is sharing a bench with Eryximachus; although in 416 BCE, the supposed date of the Symposium, Phaedrus was probably still under thirty.  Several very similar-looking young men are attentively listening as Socrates chats to Aristophanes. These presumably represent Socrates' youthful devotees; Aristodemus is usually identified as the figure standing behind Socrates. (I don't think it's worth trying to reconcile Feuerbach's painting with the seating arrangement described in The Symposium itself, i.e. Phaedrus on the far left, then Pausanias, etc. It's not as if Feuerbach's furniture is really practical for a drinking party, except of the park bench variety.)]

*

Back in university days I flew through those Platonic dialogues that a non-philosopher can hope to get anything out of; the ones in Penguin Classics, in other words. Forty years later, The Symposium has come back into my life, in the same 1951 translation, by Walter Hamilton. After reading through it a couple of times I ran across Philip Krinks' Developing A Defence Of Eros: The Unity of Plato's Symposium (2011 PhD thesis, University of London), which I've learnt a lot from. Least important, but worth mentioning, I learned that I shouldn't take Hamilton's renderings for granted. For example, Agathon says "Homer describes Infatuation as being not only divine but sensitive" (softly stepping on the heads of men); The Greek is Ate, rendered by Krinks as "Madness". Alcibiades says (addressing Socrates): "For one thing you're a bully, aren't you?" Krinks translates the word as "transgressor", a word with a much wider range of possible meanings. (Krinks' translations build on C.J. Rowe's 1998 translation.) 

So Alicibiades is probably referring to the kind of accusations that would lead to Socrates' downfall, and not to his dialectical method, which may well strike us as bullying when, e.g. he belabors Agathon into conceding that Love lacks beauty on the grounds that He desires beauty and must therefore  lack it. Which, first of all, confuses love itself with a human lover. Which, second, fails to contend with the observation that beautiful people usually fall in love with beautiful people; it is not their own beauty they love! Which, third, confuses desire with love. We do not stop loving someone or something as soon as we possess this someone or something. Our love often deepens, and this "love" of what we already possess cannot be equated (as Socrates claims) with "desire for continued possession", however often those two feelings may coexist. Happily, there isn't very much of this tendentious dialectic in The Symposium. 

Perhaps erōs shouldn't be simple-mindedly translated as "love" and this could be relevant to the third of my objections. Anyway, erōs is the topic of the evening. 

Erōs, the unconquered in battle, Erōs, you who descend upon riches, and watch the night through on a girl’s soft cheek, you roam over the sea and among the homes of men in the wilds. Neither can any immortal escape you, nor any man whose life lasts for a day. He who has known you is driven to madness.

(from Sophocles' Antigone) 

Philip Krinks points out that in such tragedies as survive to us, plays like Sophocles' Antigone and Euripides' Hippolytus, love is characterized as a force of terrible power: irresistible, invasive, catastrophic. There is admittedly a noble self-sacrificial aspect, too, seen e.g. in the Alcestis. But it seems fair to see the catastrophic aspect as predominant from the tragedians' perspective, and to note also Thucydides' use of erōs to describe the Athenians' crazy enthusiasm for their ruinous Sicilian venture. In this context love may well seem to stand in need of defence, but it's a context that The Symposium totally neglects to mention. It's as remarkably absent from the dinner-party as, on the other hand, the practice of paiderastia is remarkably absent from the tragic corpus. We seem to have crossed over into a different world, in which the love in question, until hauled by Socrates up to the heights of mysticism, is actually treated as somewhat mundane; something that aristocratic males partake in at certain ages, potentially with benefits to society, but not usually lifelong and not usually transformative or life-threatening.  The Aristophanes of The Symposium portrays sexual satisfaction as a release valve from insatiate desire, allowing people to get on with the business of life. Socrates (or rather, Diotima) indeed talks of falling prey "to a violent love-sickness" -- but s/he is only talking about beasts and birds. We seem to be contemplating love from a certain cool distance, a bit like legislators (as in Pausanias' speech) or like physicians (Eryximachus). I don't know if "avuncular" is quite the right word, but there's certainly a hint of gentleman's club about this discussion. Whether that's the kind of forum in which love is likely to be usefully discussed is certainly a question. 

[Aristophanes:]  "... There is my speech about Love, Eryximachus, and you will see that it is of quite a different type from yours.. Remember my request, and don't make fun of it, but let us hear what each of the others has to say. I should have said "each of the other two", for only Agathon and Socrates are left."

"Well, I will do as you ask," said Eryximachus; "I won't deny that your speech gave me very considerable pleasure. Indeed, if I didn't know that Socrates and Agathon were authorities on the subject of love, I should be afraid that they might find the subject exhausted by the various speeches already made. But as it is I have complete confidence in them."

"It is all very well for you, Eryximachus," said Socrates. "You have just given a fine performance yourself. But if you were in my present position, or rather in the position which I shall be in shortly, when Agathon too has distinguished himself, you would be in a panic and at your wit's end, as I am now."

"You're trying to put a spell on me with your flattery, Socrates," Agathon said. "You want to upset me by making me think that the audience has formed great expectations of my eloquence."

"I should be forgetful indeed, my dear Agathon, if, after seeing your courage and high spirit when you appeared upon the platform with the actors just before the production of your play, and faced a crowded audience without the least sign of embarrassment, I now supposed that you were likely to be upset by a handful of people like us."

"But you surely don't suppose, Socrates, that I am so stage-struck as not to know that to a man of sense a handful of wise men is more formidable than a crowd of fools?"

"I should be very wrong if I entertained any opinion derogatory to your intelligence, Agathon. Of course, I know that you pay more attention to those whom you consider wise than to ordinary people; only I am afraid that we do not belong to the former class. We were in the theatre, you know, and part of the audience of ordinary people. But if you were to meet really wise men, you would probably feel shame before them if you were conscious of doing something discreditable, wouldn't you?"

"Of course I should."

"But you wouldn't feel shame before ordinary people in the same circumstances?"

Here Phaedrus interposed and said:

"Don't answer Socrates, my dear Agathon. Provided that he has somebody to talk to, particularly if that somebody is good-looking, he won't care in the least what happens to our project. I'm very fond myself of hearing Socrates talk, but my present duty is to watch over the interest of Love, and receive a contribution of praise from each one of you."

"Quite right, Phaedrus," said Agathon, "and there's nothing to prevent me from making my speech. There will be plenty of other opportunities of conversing with Socrates ..."

(from The Symposium 193-194)

What's going on here? Socrates begins with claims about his own panic that are certainly insincere, but Agathon's bland acceptance of it as "flattery", a mind-game in the context of their speech competition, doesn't seem adequate. Mockery underlies it too; he seems to be digging at Agathon. When Phaedrus interrupts, Socrates has just manoeuvred Agathon into a tight corner. But Agathon shows no sign of being offended by Socrates. His consciousness of his own good looks and brilliance secures him; and perhaps Socrates, who is sharing a couch with him, is to be understood as coming after Agathon in a flirtatious rather than vindictive spirit. That's consistent with Phaedrus' implication that Socrates is always next to the best-looking guy in the room. Alcibiades's mock-surprise hints at that reputation too, and Alcibiades finds further cause for complaint in Socrates only playing the role of a voracious pursuer: Socrates doesn't intend physical satisfaction, and this can make his good-looking friends feel paradoxically ill-used. 

It makes you wonder. A drinking-party, after all, is not only a place for discussing love, it's also a place for transacting love. (An aspect well captured by the atmosphere of Feuerbach's painting, with its mix of distinguished older men and attractive youths.) By the end of the night, according to a drowsy Aristodemus, the only people who are still awake are Socrates, Aristophanes and Agathon. A striking trio, given Aristophanes' ridicule of Socrates (in Clouds, 423 BCE) and Agathon (in Thesmophoriazousae, c. 411 BCE); the former perhaps contributing to Socrates' condemnation in 399 BCE, as the Apology asserts. (The dinner described in The Symposium takes place in 416 BCE.)

Socrates was compelling them to admit that the man who knew how to write a comedy could also write a tragedy, and that a skilful tragic writer was capable of being also a comic writer. They were giving way to his arguments, which they didn't follow very well, and nodding. Aristophanes fell asleep first, and when it was fully light Agathon followed him.

(from The Symposium, 223)

Assigning terms to the tone and genre of The Symposium isn't easy, but it isn't tragedy, even though we're darkly aware of Alcibiades being on the brink of a turmoiled future, and that Socrates' eventual fate is connected with just the kind of social tittle-tattle that is portrayed in its pages. There is nothing statuesque or classicist about this banquet. The hubbub and chaos increase towards the end, but quotidian intrusion is there from the beginning; for instance in Aristodemus turning up uninvited, Socrates half-way through dinner, Aristophanes' hiccups, etc. Should we call this comedy, or naturalism maybe? I keep thinking of Proust; the parties, the upper class, the semi-autobiographical material, the philosophy of love, the personal transactions that Marcel witnesses but doesn't understand until later. 

*

Martha Nussbaum, "The Ascent of Love: Plato, Spinoza, Proust", New Literary History Vol. 25, No. 4, 25th Anniversary Issue (Part 2) (Autumn, 1994), pp. 925-949.  

In Proust, the "ascent of love" is towards, not contemplation of ideal forms, but "narrative art". 

Nussbaum makes the point (perhaps from a basically Aristotelian perspective) that these three philosophical transcenders of love are themselves driven by an infantile longing for totality. "There is an odd irony in this situation. For the teachers of the contemplative ascent all claim as the chief benefit of contemplation that it delivers a condition free from dependency. They depict contemplative creativity as a free act, chosen in pure positive joy, without the pressure of need. But why do they choose such a radical goal? Why do they give up the daily world and its people? We have to say, because of need. Because their anguish about the condition of infantile dependency was so acute, so unendurable, they could brook no compromises with life. Because human life was so excruciating they had to become godlike" (p. 946). 

*

Luc Brisson, "Agathon, Pausanias and Diotima in Plato's Symposium: Paiderastia and Philosophia" (Chapter 10 of Lesher, James, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield, eds. 2007. Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception. Hellenic Studies Series 22. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.)

(Includes a brief but comprehensive description of what we know about the practice of paiderastia; significant differences between the Greeks' and our assumptions about sex; significant differences, too, between paiderastia and the modern connotations of "pederasty". Even so, I find it hard to think dispassionately about the notion of supplying (supposedly voluntary) sexual favours to an older man in exchange for education and influence. My sense of the scope for coercive abuse in such an arrangement overwhelms other thoughts.  At the same time, Pausanias and Agathon seem to have been an example of a successful lifetime partnership arising out of paiderastia. But then, this was not the way it was usually meant to go, and they were apparently criticized for it.)

*

“Look at her next Sunday at church—she sits with her father on the left of the reading-desk. You needn’t look quite so much at Hetty Sorrel then. When I’ve made up my mind that I can’t afford to buy a tempting dog, I take no notice of him, because if he took a strong fancy to me and looked lovingly at me, the struggle between arithmetic and inclination might become unpleasantly severe. I pique myself on my wisdom there, Arthur, and as an old fellow to whom wisdom has become cheap, I bestow it upon you.”

“Thank you. It may stand me in good stead some day, though I don’t know that I have any present use for it. Bless me! How the brook has overflowed. Suppose we have a canter, now we’re at the bottom of the hill.”

That is the great advantage of dialogue on horseback; it can be merged any minute into a trot or a canter, and one might have escaped from Socrates himself in the saddle. The two friends were free from the necessity of further conversation till they pulled up in the lane behind Adam’s cottage.

(George Eliot, Adam Bede, end of Ch 9)

*

The rest is a purely technical matter. They give you a careful going-over in the Sexual Bureau labs and determine the exact content of the sexual hormones in your blood and work out your correct Table of Sex Days. Then you fill out a declaration that on your days you'd like to make use of Number (or Numbers) so-and-so and they hand you the corresponding book of tickets (pink). And that's it.

So it's clear -- there's no longer the slightest cause for envy. The denominator of the happiness fraction has been reduced to zero and the fraction becomes magnificent infinity. And the very same thing that the ancients found to be a source of endless tragedy became for us a harmonious, pleasant, and useful function of the organism, just like sleep, physical work, eating, defecating, and so on. From this you can see how the mighty power of logic cleanses whatever it touches!

(Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, Record 5, translation by Clarence Brown)

George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857)

Caterina and Gilfil

[Image source: http://www.sidneyolcott.com/Henderson_Bland1.htm . A still from the British silent movie "Mr Gilfil's Love Story" (1920), starring Robert Henderson Bland as Maynard Gilfil and Mary Odette as Caterina.]

Shepperton Church was a very different-looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in everything else what changes! Now there is a wide span of slated roof flanking the old steeple; the windows are tall and symmetrical; the outer doors are resplendent with oak-graining, the inner doors reverentially noiseless with a garment of red baize; and the walls, you are convinced, no lichen will ever again effect a settlement on—they are smooth and innutrient as the summit of the Rev. Amos Barton's head, after ten years of baldness and supererogatory soap.

These are the opening words, and they make me immediately want to go back, for the third time, to Bruce Pirie's wonderful reading.

https://librivox.org/scenes-of-clerical-life-by-george-eliot/


*

At university I raced through English Literature; I read two or three, perhaps four, George Eliot novels, but she was an author I never much took to; I was far too young and untouched by life.  I knew about her reputation, then Scrutinistically high; I, however, was an ardent  Dickens fan and I made all the comparisons in his favour.

But Dickens himself instantly recognized the remarkable qualities of Scenes of Clerical Life. 

I have been so strongly affected by the two first tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me, through Messrs. Blackwood, that I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration of their extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy both of the humour and the pathos of these stories, I have never seen the like of; and they have impressed me in a manner that I should find it very difficult to describe to you if I had the impertinence to try. In addressing these few words of thankfulness to the creator of the Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, and the sad love-story of Mr. Gilfil, I am (I presume) bound to adopt the name that it pleases that excellent writer to assume. I can suggest no better one: but I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seemed to me such womanly touches in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began.

[I'm not sure what I think about Dickens' gender-hunting... at least, I'm quite sure I wouldn't indulge in that sort of speculation in a letter to a stranger... but his moral certainty that the author was a woman is interesting. He had an unparallelled sensitivity to the different forms of thinking and language used by different parts of society.  Four years previously he had triumphantly carried off the narrative of Esther Summerson in Bleak House, but evidently he had learnt the limits of impersonation.]


Anyway, these days I'm more grown-up, apparently. At any rate my youthful indifference to Eliot's books is belatedly transforming into admiration and attachment. She, along with Tolstoy, is someone I now anticipate spending a lot more time with.

Virginia Woolf's parenthetical remark was this: "...Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." (TLS, November 1919.)

What did Woolf mean by "grown-up"? Maybe there's a trace of Woolf-family snobbery about pronouncing so confidently on what is or isn't grown-up. I think there is. And the parenthesis takes place within a larger argument about how George Eliot's necessary social isolation, once she was living with G.H. Lewes, enforced the cultivation of hallucinatory memories of her Midland youth - with unforgettable results of course - but prevented her from realizing and still less from portraying realistically fit futures for her constrained and aspirational heroines. Ruling-class futures, you might say. Implying that the emancipated yet socially presentable Bloomsbury set had ascended to a higher evolutionary level; they could and should write better novels as a result.

Or she might have meant intellect; the intellect that Mary Ann Evans possessed in an exceptional degree, and which has sometimes cooled praise of her work, as if intelligence was somehow a bad thing for a novelist to have too much of. (Especially, maybe, a woman novelist?)

Or she might have meant the novels' commitment to the hard truths that grown-ups really believe: that fairy-tales are fantasies, that life isn't full of happy endings, that happiness flits across us and keeps on going, that people become ill or aged or silly or die, that goodness doesn't confer immunity, that most people do their best and it isn't enough, that sometimes love turns to hate and that people usually don't change for the better.

Or she might have meant a committed engagement with grown-up and serious subjects: faith, tolerance, the right way to live, psychology and society.

Or maybe she meant something like hard-won wisdom, something like the deep experience of suffering that in the end brings together Mr Tryan and Janet Dempster in "Janet's Repentance".

When Janet left the grave, she did not return to Holly Mount; she went to her home in Orchard Street, where her mother was waiting to receive her. She said quite calmly, 'Let us walk round the garden, mother.' And they walked round in silence, with their hands clasped together, looking at the golden crocuses bright in the spring sunshine. Janet felt a deep stillness within. She thirsted for no pleasure; she craved no worldly good. She saw the years to come stretch before her like an autumn afternoon, filled with resigned memory. Life to her could never more have any eagerness; it was a solemn service of gratitude and patient effort. She walked in the presence of unseen witnesses—of the Divine love that had rescued her, of the human love that waited for its eternal repose until it had seen her endure to the end.

Not, perhaps, that Mary Ann Evans then knew what Janet Dempster knew. But she knew of it, and could write it.

*

Dickens (in the passage given above) rightly admired the humour of Eliot's stories. The opening pages of "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" are full of this quiet and delectable humour. The ponderous title, too, suggests (against its plain meaning) that the reader can look forward to a jocular performance, which makes the story that follows all the more poignant.


*

In "Mr Gilfil's Love Story", neither the author nor any of the characters seem especially bothered about how Miss Assher might take her fiancé's death.

While Mr. Gilfil was telling Warren how it would be best to break the news to Lady Cheverel and Miss Assher, anxious himself to return to Caterina.....

In the story, the only people whose reactions matter are Caterina and Sir Chrristopher. I don't pretend, of course, that Miss Assher makes a pleasant impression on us.

*

An internet search turned up this, some helpful thoughts by Rohan Maitzen on "Janet's Repentance":

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/novelreadings/janets-repentance-revisiting-a-scene-of-clerical-life/

Maitzen notes that, in this story, the consolations of Christianity are not replaced by mere human relations. That's true. A pious reader could read it without strain as a pious tale. Yet Eliot makes it clear that in the end the consoling power of Mr Tryan depends on purely human factors, e.g his own experience of terrible guilt and his effort to atone for it.

It is strange that the brutal lawyer and the lovable priest should both, in their different ways, have been guilty of crimes towards women.

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)