We always associate the word ‘book’ with printing, and think of it in terms of format and typographical convenience, but such mechanical criteria do not apply to notebooks, whose beginning and end are determined only by the unity of the poetic impulse which gives birth to a given series of poems. In other words, a notebook is the same as a ‘book’ in the sense in which it was understood by Charents, Pasternak and M. himself. The only difference was that M. did not have to stick to some particular length or structure – often artificial – which is required for a published book. But the word ‘notebook’ itself, as I have said, arose in our usage quite accidentally, owing to the fact that we were forced to write in school exercise books. It has the drawback of being too concrete in its meaning, as well as reminding one of Schumann’s ‘Notebooks’. The only thing in its favor is that it faithfully reflects the way in which we had been thrown back into a pre-Gutenberg era.
– Nadezdha Mandelstam
(Hope Against Hope, p. 193)
Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand (55).1
Reading Pound’s Guide to Kulcher, I was perplexed; partially because it is an odd book, aimed at those who don’t mind attending the university of the brain of Ezra Pound (which is a strange place, of many prejudices). Mostly, though, I just wasn’t (and ain’t) sure what to make of it, how to reconcile those parts I can (reservedly) agree with and those which strike me as outcroppings of the fashion of the times or mere idiosyncrasies.2 It jumps here and there, following a logic which I don’t quite see (and am too lazy to look for),3 and digresses on subjects with a force not quite necessary to the task of guide – as though Virgil cracked wise at every opportunity, and made opportunities to do so where none were before.
When I can agree with him, though, I find that generally agree pretty whole-heartedly. Some notes:
I suspect that the error in educational systems has been the cutting off of learning from appetite […] Real knowledge goes into natural man in titbits. A scrap here, a scrap there; always pertinent, linked to safety, nutrition or pleasure (98f).
Then there is education as apart from learning. By learning I assume in some measure that he means learning how to think about things, rather than being educated into a brittle edifice of apparent understanding. It’s impossible to force-feed knowledge; one gets prescient indigestion.
About thirty years ago, seated on one of the very hard, very slippery, thoroughly uncomfortable chairs of the British Museum main reading room, with a pile of large books at my right hand and a pile of somewhat smaller ones at my left hand, I lifted my eyes to the tiers of volumes and false doors covered with imitation bookbacks which surround that focus of learning. Calculating the eye-strain and the number of pages per day that a man could read, with deduction for say at least 5% of one man’s time for reflection, I decided against it. There must be some other way for a human being to make use of that vast cultural heritage (53f.).
Also how ideas of things become mixed up with the things themselves. There is the vast cultural heritage as an idea and then there is the representation of it, locked behind imitation bookbacks. There is the thing that is and the thing that seems and, though it seems that one can grasp it by a diligence of buttocks, that is the idea of an ass.
If the affable reader (or a delegate to an international economic conference from the U.S. of A.) cannot distinguish between his armchair and a bailiff’s order, permitting the bailiff to sequester that armchair, life will offer him two alternatives: to be exploited or to be the more or less pampered pimp of exploiters until it becomes his turn to be bled. ¶ The bailiff’s order may be openly such, or it may be a bailiff’s order heavily camouflaged, but homo not completely sap-head will smell, divine or see clearly the difference between his roof and a mortgage (244).
***
The supreme evil committable by a critic is to turn men away from the bright and the living. The ignominious failure of ANY critic (however low) is to fail to find something to arouse the appetite of his audience, to read, to see, to experience (161).
So I was reading Paul Fussell’s book about travel, Abroad. Of course it’s not just about travel, though he does spend some thirty-odd (or more or less, I’ve returned it to the library and cannot refer to it now) pages lamenting the impossibility of true travel1 in this degraded age of tourism, it’s about literary responses to travel and literary traveling between the two World Wars.2 This much one might have gathered from the subtitle. To Fussell this means observing that D.H. Lawrence glimpsed the infinite no matter where he was, Evelyn Waugh probably best traveled solo, and that Robert Byron was very clever and died too young. All this I dare not dispute, nor wish to. It also means mentioning Rebecca West only three times (in passing)3 and rather snottily saying, some two-thirds of the way through, that he would not be discussing Freya Stark because she was insufficiently literary.4
However, I do not want to discuss the false nostalgia for a lost age of the British (imperialist) ‘traveler’, which has all the authenticity and moral clarity of a bus-tour ’round the famed sites of a defunct civilization; well, I do, but I cannot think of a way to do it in which I do not circumnavigate (and circumvent) my own arguments by thinking that after all it is Fussell’s book and that is how he wrote and it’s not his fault if I wanted to read a different one. What I want to get at, though, is that I am glad that The Road to Oxiana is readily available because of it.5
I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveller: £10,000 for the first man to cover Marco Polo’s outward route reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.
What I mean is, that if I had some detective stories instead of Thucydides and some bottles of claret instead of tepid whisky, I should probably settle here for good.
– Robert Byron,
The Road to Oxiana, p. 238f.
I am satisfied with the butterfly in the field; I have no need to see it dead and pinned in a box.
I ordered the book from the library after reading a quotation from it somewhere on the internet. I don’t remember my source, which is probably just as well; I had also heard the author mentioned favorably, and thought I might as well take a look.
The book arrived and, as usual, I judged it by its cover. The front was unpreposessing and a trifle overdesigned, but that is not unusual for modern literary novels. The real difficulty, for me, began with a blurb:
Self-consciousness is one of the noblest literary virtues, especially as so exquisitely practiced by _____________ in ____________.
Shut up. I realize the purpose of literary reviews (and/or blurbs) is either: 1) personal/professional sniping/toadying, 2) to sell books; but who on earth wants to snuffle around any of the ‘literary virtues’ noble or not, on a Saturday?
The book looks at me and says, after rustling its pages: so, are you going to read me or what? There are people waiting for me…. I open the book. I read. A terribly self-conscious novel, about a terribly self-conscious female brooding about a terribly unself-conscious male. Emphasis: terribly. After twenty pages I cannot stop my eyes rolling heavenwards. A bitter cup of tea is meant to emphasize the emptiness and/or loneliness of the narrator’s life, a drop of finality in her emotional bucket, and nod to Proust, who, on the other side of the ether cuts the acknowledgment. It is the poor man’s Joan Didion, if such a thing were possible. Even so, Mr. Blurb-ist may be correct, and self-consciousness might be ‘one of the noblest literary virtues’, if literary virtues, like human ones, are very often dull and pain-in-the-arse-ish. I look at the cover of the book. I look at some of the books I actually positively want to read (someday). Life is short – this book, not short enough.
* * *
I ask myself why the book exists, and am brought back, after much mental circumambulation, to the question that always makes me uncomfortable: why does any book exist? I don’t know – and I don’t like any of the answers I’ve seen. I like to think this is because I have not seen enough. Let’s hope so, shall we?
I was working one day for a poetry competition and had written one line – ‘Beauty makes crime noble’ – when I was interrupted by a criticism flung at me from behind by T.S. Eliot. ‘What does that mean? How can crime be noble?’ He had, I noticed, grown a mustache.
– Graham Greene
A World of My Own, p. 10
At this point Schopenhauer interrupts the thread of his discourse to speak at length upon an example of false fame. Those who are at all acquainted with the philosopher’s views will not be surprised to find that the writer thus held up to scorn is Hegel; and readers of the other volumes in this series will, with the translator, have had by now quite enough of the subject. The passage is therefore omitted.
– T. Bailey Saunders,
note to Schopenhauer’s
essay On Reputation.
Virginia and Adrian Stephen playing cricket in Cornwall, ca. 1886;
plate 37i from the Stephen Family Photo Album.
I finished by the way The Electra of Sophocles, which has been dragging on down here, though it’s not so fearfully difficult after all. The thing that always impresses me fresh is the superb nature of the story. It seems hardly possible not to make a good play of it. This perhaps is the result of having traditional plots which have been made & improved & freed from superfluities by the polish of innumerable actors & authors & critics, till it becomes like a lump of glass worn smooth in the sea. Also, if everyone in the audience knows beforehand what is going to happen, much finer & subtler touches will tell, & words can be spared. At anyrate my feeling always is that one can’t read too carefully, or attach enough weight to every line & hint; & that the apparent bareness is only on the surface. There does, however, remain the question of reading the wrong emotions into the text. I am generally humiliated to find how much Jebb is able to see; my only doubt is whether he doesn’t see too much – as I think one might do with a bad modern English play if one set to work. Finally, the particular charm of Greek remains as strong & as difficult to account for as ever. One feels the immeasurable difference between the text & the translation with the first words. (…) It’s strange to notice how, although the conventions are perfectly false & ridiculous, they never appear petty or undignified, as our English conventions are constantly made to do. Electra lived a far more hedged in life than the women of the mid Victorian age, but this has no effect upon her, except in making her harsh & splendid. She could not go out for a walk alone; with us it would be a case of a maid & a hansom cab.
– Virginia Woolf, Diaries
I.184, 19.viii.1918
|
Henry James. The Sacred Fount. New Directions, 1995 (1901) |
In conversation with Ford Obert, R.A., the nameless novelist narrator of The Sacred Fount notes the following:
It might have been my mere fancy – but it was my fancy – that he looked at me a trifle harder. ‘How on earth can I tell what you’re talking about?’ (145).
Readers might feel inclined to ask the same question; that’s the great joy of the novel – trying to figure out if one can tell what on earth James (or the narrator or, indeed, any of the other characters) is talking about.
…once we have recognised that knowledge in itself is good for man, we shall need to invent no pretexts for studying this subject or that; we shall import no extraneous considerations of use or ornament to justify us in learning one thing rather than another. If a certain department of knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study it because it attracts him; and let him not fabricate excuses for that which requires no excuse, but rest assured that the reason why it most attracts him is that it is best for him. The majority of mankind, as is only natural, will be most attracted by those sciences which most nearly concern human life; those sciences which, in Bacon’s phrase, are drenched in flesh and blood, or, in the more elegant language of the Daily Telegraph, palpitate with actuality. The men who are attracted to the drier and the less palpitating sciences, say logic or pure mathematics or textual criticism, are likely to be fewer in number; but they are not to suppose that the comparative unpopularity of such learning renders it any the less worthy of pursuit. Nay, they may if they like console themselves with Bacon’s observation that ‘this same lumen siccum doth parch and offend most men’s watery and soft natures’ and infer, if it pleases them, that their natures are less soft and watery than other men’s. But be that as it may…
Also, ibidem:
I do not believe that the proportion of the human race whose inner nature the study of the classics will specially transform and beautify is large; and I am quite sure that the proportion of the human race on whom the classics will confer that benefit can attain the desired end without that minute and accurate study of the classical tongues which affords Latin professors their only excuse for existing.
…the judgement that someone is unliterary is like the judgement ‘This man is not in love’, whereas the judgement that my taste is bad is more like ‘This man is in love, but with a frightful woman’. And just as the mere fact that a man of sense and breeding loves a woman we dislike properly and inevitably makes us consider her again and look for, and sometimes find, something in her we had not noticed before, so, in my system, the very fact that people, or even any one person, can well and truly read, and love for a lifetime, a book we had thought bad, will raise the suspicion that it cannot really be as bad as we thought. Sometimes, to be sure, our friend’s mistress remains in our eyes so plain, stupid and disagreeable that we can attribute his love only to the irrational and mysterious behaviour of hormones; similarly, the book he likes may continue to seem so bad that we have to attribute his liking to some early association or other psychological accident. But we must, and should, remain uncertain. Always, there may be something in it that we can’t see.
Of juvenilia I am not a fan, but, in a desire to improve my mind by reading what I do not like, I picked up yet another volume of opuscula published by Hesperus. It should not be surprising that Jane Austen possessed, at the age of fourteen, all the sharpness of observation which would later make her famous. She punctures the conventions of eighteenth century ‘chick-lit’ (see, e.g., the works of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, or Mary Hays). She mocks the romantic sensibility and its affectations both physical (’it was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself – We fainted alternately on a sofa…’) and emotional:
She staid but half an hour and neither, in the Course of her Visit, confided to me any of her secret thoughts, nor requested me to confide in her any of Mine. You will easily imagine, therefore, my Dear Marianne, that I could not feel any ardent affection or very sincere Attachment for Lady Dorothea.
This would be of little interest, were it not for the transparency with which Austen punctures the narrator’s pretensions and reveals her self-absorption:
Nay, faultless as my Conduct had certainly been during the whole course of my late Misfortunes and Adventures, she pretended to find fault with my Behaviour in many of the situations in which I had been placed. As I was sensible myself that I had always behaved in a manner which reflected Honour on my Feelings and Refinement, I paid little attention to what she said…
As might be expected, Austen’s sense of the ridiculous allows her to avoid such silliness as the ‘African Olympic Games‘ but, as with most juvenilia, it is of interest primarily in the light of what comes after. The presence of names such as Dashwood, Willoughby, and Musgrove in this collection rather emphasize than dispel that unfortunate association.
Who knew that stealing grapes could have such terrible repurcussions? The young Mary Raymond (beautiful according to the custom of such novels) misappropriates the fruit to gratify the hunger of her childhood companion (and later, of course, beloved) William; she is, however, caught by the owner of the grapes, Sir Peter Osborne, who takes a fancy to her (tho’ she was only twelve at the time…). One would need to be blind not to see where this story is going. So poor Mary (poor, put-upon, thieving Mary) is, at a later date, obligingly raped by the wicked Sir Peter, who had gone through much trouble and expense to get her guardians out of the country (her father having conveniently died without leaving her much money). Poor Mary (poor, sweet Mary) then makes mighty efforts (friendless in a wicked world) not to become a prostitute as all ravaged women invariably do. She, being virtuous and intelligent as well as beautiful (being beautiful is such a nuisance, isn’t it?), of course succeeds and lives in modest contentment after her guardians return from two years of ‘exile’, but:
The vigorous promise of my youth has failed. The victim of a barbarous prejudice, society has cast me out from its bosom. The sensibilities of my heart have been turned to bitterness, the powers of my mind wasted, my projects rendered abortive, my virtues and my sufferings alike unrewarded, I have lived in vain! unless the story of my sorrows should kindle in the heart of man, in behalf of my oppressed sex, the sacred claims of humanity and justice (174).
I shouldn’t be so flippant about such a serious topic, but poor Hays uses so many of the same phrases and quotations from her earlier book – The Memoirs of Emma Courtney, about a woman who becomes infatuated with a man who cannot reciprocate, not least because he is (secretly) married – that it seems as though she writes by recipe. Still, for those who enjoy eighteenth century women’s novels, there’s much scope for interpretation, criticism, and feminist delight in the book, replete as it is with a heartless male villain, an oppressive society, &c.
For no good reason1 I’ve been reading The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (ed. W. Martin, CUP: 2002). It is somewhat refreshing to find books which do not concern Cicero. And it is interesting to step outside the charmed circle of academics and then to peer back in, as though through windows. For one can see then, very clearly, the absurd. As, for instance, a professor of 19th C. American literature vexed that Miss Dickinson ‘completely ignored the largest mass execution in the legal history of the United States, in 1863, when thirty-eight Santee Sioux Indians were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, for their roles in an uprising sparked by chronic shortages in food, clothing, and fuel’ (194).
Two facts leap from that sentence: 1863 and Mankato, Minnesota. Students of American history will doubtless be familiar with the Civil War (1861-1865) which lamentably preoccupied much of the eastern seaboard. Lamentably, of course, because they should have been outraged by massacres of Native Americans. One should note that, at the time, Miss Dickinson was probably in a little town in Massachusetts, a town whose only claim to fame, then as now, was the college. Not to argue on the laws of geographical improbability, but it seems rather unlikely, given the state of the media in that day (which delighted in the lurid rather than the likely) and age, that the news would have reached across those thirteen hundred miles in any form other than: ‘Uprising supressed! Law strikes against Terror! The savage and violent…’ I do not think it laudable, I merely suggest it as a possibility.
But I lose my way. I would like to address the issue raised by P. B. Bennett’s chapter entitled ‘Emily Dickinson and her American women poet peers’ (pp.215-35). Bennett laments the lack of interest displayed by ‘Dickinson scholars’ for the poetry of Dickinson’s contemporaries (which is, apparently, only now ‘beginning to attract the serious attention it deserves’
[215f.]). These contemporaries were the ‘daughters of the first sizable generation of feminist activists’ and ‘were all consummate professionals’ such as: Frances Butler Kemble, Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Larcom, the Cary sisters, Rose Terry Cooke, Helen Hunt Jackson (nota bene), Harriet Prescott Spofford, Celia Thaxter, Louise Chandler Moulton, Sarah Piatt, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Ella
Wheeler Wilcox, Edith M. Thomas, Lizette Woodworth Reese (216), to say nothing of the Grimkés.
These were women with a message, whose writing was their livelihood, who were (as in the case of Sarah Piatt2 capable of publishing some of ‘the most powerful American political poems the century produced’ (217). That is the crux, then, isn’t it? In an age when art is supposed to have a message, a meaning, a moral (or at the very least, an agenda), it is dastardly, retrograde of a poet not to follow along, it shows that one is, ‘politically speaking […] no progressive’ (218). Dickinson, so Bennett argues, had ‘literary agency’ in spades, though she ‘lacked a sense of social and political agency altogether’ (218). She was a ‘bodiless’ poet, who wrote for God (232), who, then, must be read in the context of these other women’s work if she is to be ‘interesting’ (234).3
I’ve lost my way again. For I merely I wanted to say was simply that Dickinson is a great poet because she is not political, because she explores the personal and the private. And greater still, she combines this exploration with linguistic experimentation and an icy diction, a crispness and clarity of thought and word, which is as refreshing as it is ambiguous. She does not deny meanings; her work is the variaorum. Whereas the other women Bennett discussed seem to have written from desire, Dickinson, at least as I read her, wrote from necessity—a necessity not less powerful for being interior.4
Undue Significance a starving man attaches
To Food—
Far off—He sighs—and therefore—Hopeless—
And therefore—Good—Partaken—it relieves—indeed
But proves us
That Spices fly
In the Receipt—It was the Distance—
Was Savory—
[↩]
Up, coffee, bath, Love in a Cold Climate (it troubles
me somewhat, being clever and charming and not especially brilliant, the characters remain, as intended I suppose, card-board cut-outs — Cedric, for instance, is an insult to one’s intelligence — though it is entertaining to ponder the actual schedule of the narrator), library (Greek Religion, etc.), brunch, e-mail, room, coffee, Fathers and Sons (I have at last actually set my mind to it and finished the thing, and find it is much more intriguing than I remember from my last attempt four years ago), dabble, Athenian Religion, Bach Mass in B minor, room, bed.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.