Another man speaks satirically of those people who out of restlessness or curiosity embark on long journeys, who keep no diaries and write no descriptions, who carry no notebooks; who go to see things, and who either don’t see them or forget what they have seen; who are only anxious to look at unfamiliar towers or steeples, and cross rivers that are not called Seine or Loire; who leave their native land merely in order to return to it, who like being away from home, and hope some day to be travelled men; and his satire is justified, it deserves listening to.
– La Bruyère,
‘Of Fashion’, p. 252.
Our ancestors wrote prose in long, beautiful sentences, convoluted like curls; although we still learn to do it that way in school, we write in short sentences that cut more quickly to the heart of the matter; and no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes and in writing, it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people.
Robert Musil, ‘The Paintspreader’,
in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, p. 67
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.
The process of not writing has been a kind of sleep – fitful dormancy. I cannot tell if I am awake again – awake to the habit of writing, of typing, of setting my thoughts someplace other than the impermanent stream of the passing breath – cannot tell if this is not just another middle-of-the-night stumble for a glass of water and the euphemism. Time will tell.
It is a shame to write with such abundant style and yet offer so little evidence of thought.
Then how vncertaine our estates would be, how vncomfortable our selues, how dangerous and pernicious it would be for the state of euery common-wealth, all men may easily iudge, yet God to preuent these inconueniences, for the further benefit of mankind, as hee hath giuen vs a voice to expresse the minde vnto the eare, so hee hath giuen vs hands to frame letters or markes for the voice to expresse the minde vnto the eyes. So that the eyes and eares are as it were the receiuers of message sent vnto the heart, the hands and voice as deliuerers of message sent from the heart: And though the voice be a more liuely kind of speech, yet in respect it is but onely a sleight accident made of so light a substance as the ayre, it is no sooner vttered but it is dissolued, euery simple sound doth expell and extinguish the sound going before it, so that the eare can haue but one touch of the ayre beating vpon it to declare the speech vnto the mind: but the hand though it giue a dumbe and a more dull kind of speech, yet it giues a more durable. A letter is a grosser substance, and therefore is of more continuance than a sound: what is once written still continueth when the hand ceaseth. If the eyes haue not satisfied the mind at one view, they may looke on it againe, yea till they haue satisfied it’s desire: And by this meanes of noting and charactring of the voice, all things worthy of memory are defended form iniury of forgetfulnesse…*
* A learned and wise person would refer to Plato and the evolution of views on literacy & orality & memory, but at present I am too feeble – the spirit, as they say, is willing, but the flesh is weak. Also, the cisterns in the following passage please me:
…perchance I may be charged with presumption both in respect of my selfe, and in respect of my yeers, in that I professe to be a teacher of a science to others, hauing as it were but newly learned my letters my selfe: Whereunto I answer, that I learned not this my arte out of the books and workes of learned men, neither would my small meanes afford me to be acquainted with their great volumes, only out of a volume of Gods owne guift and making did I take this small Manuscript, euen to all men hath he giuen the same impression, whereby the truth hereof may be examined: yet certainly the vnripenesse of my yeeres, and want of other learning, had wholly withheld me from publishing thereof, so that it might haue died with my selfe and haue benefited no man, had I not considered that euery one of what estate, degree, or condition soeuer, is bound in duety to reueale whatsoeuer may be beneficiall to his country; assuring my selfe that God doth not giue either knowledge or riches to any priuate person meerly for his own particular vse, but imploieth those on whom he bestoweth such guifts, as Cisternes and conduits to conuey and impart them likewise to others. Yet he therein so prouideth that themselues also be neuer empty. This consideration therefore caused me to thinke it were far better, though with boldnesse to set foorth that portion of knowledge which God had giuen me, then with a dastard-like feare for the causes afore remembred to conceale the benefit; Hauing therefore laboured to finde out the true ground of speech, that the manifold errors therein might be made manifest, and so auoided (f.A6v–A7).
1. – I could sit forever with a man, provided that what he said did not grate on my ears, that he had charm, and that he did not talk very much. […] The mark of an excellent man is that he writes easily in an acceptable hand, sings agreeably and in tune, and, though appearing reluctant to accept when wine is pressed on him, is not a teetotaler.
– from the Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
(trans. D. Keene)
I was quite pleased with myself: I managed to trim a ten-paragraph letter down to nine words, excluding salutation. Sadly, neither the grammar nor spelling were all that they should be, and I am pleased no more.
I shall say but little at present of their Learning, which for many Ages hath flourished in all its Branches among them: But their Manner of Writing is very peculiar; being neither from the Left to the Right, like the Europeans; nor from the Right to the Left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese; nor from down to up, like the Cascagians; but aslant from one Corner of the Paper to the other, like Ladies in England.
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—
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ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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