Surviving Transition

Charles Kingsley: Thoughts on Shelley and Byron

2013-05-19T14:58:00.001+02:00

The poets, who forty years ago proclaimed their intention of working a revolution in English literature, and who have succeeded in their purpose, recommended especially a more simple and truthful view of nature. The established canons of poetry were to be discarded as artificial; as to the matter, the poet was to represent mere nature as he saw her; as to form, he was to be his own law. Freedom and nature were to be his watchwords.

No theory could be more in harmony with the spirit of the age, and the impulse which had been given to it by the burning words of Jean Jacques Rousseau. The school which arose expressed fairly the unrest and unruliness of the time, its weariness of artificial restraint and unmeaning laws, its craving after a nobler and a more earnest life, its sense of a glory and mystery in the physical universe, hidden from the poets of the two preceding centuries, and now revealed by science. So far all was hopeful. But it soon became apparent, that each poet's practical success in carrying out the theory was, paradoxically enough, in inverse proportion to his belief in it; that those who like Wordsworth, Southey, and Keats, talked most about naturalness and freedom, and most openly reprobated the school of Pope, were, after all, least natural and least free; that the balance of those excellences inclined much more to those who, like Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, and Moore, troubled their heads with no theories, but followed the best old models which they knew; and that the rightful sovereign of the new Parnassus, Lord Byron, protested against the new movement, while he followed it; upheld to the last the models which it was the fashion to decry, confessed to the last, in poetry as in morals, "Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor," and uttered again and again prophecies of the downfall of English poetry and English taste, which seem to be on the eve of realisation.

Now no one will, we presume, be silly enough to say that humanity has gained nothing by all the very beautiful poetry which has been poured out on it during the last thirty years in England. Nevertheless, when we see poetry dying down among us year by year, although the age is becoming year by year more marvellous and inspiring, we have a right to look for some false principle in a school which has had so little enduring vitality, which seems now to be able to perpetuate nothing of itself but its vices.

The answer so easy twenty years ago, that the new poetry was spoiled by an influx of German bad taste, will hardly hold good now, except with a very few very ignorant people. It is now known, of course, that whatsoever quarrel Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe may have had with Pope, it was not on account of his being too severe an artist, but too loose a one; not for being too classical, but not classical enough; that English poets borrowed from them nothing but their most boyish and immature types of thought, and that these were reproduced, and laughed at here, while the men themselves were writing works of a purity, and loftiness, and completeness, unknown to the world--except in the writings of Milton--for nearly two centuries. This feature, however, of the new German poetry, was exactly the one which no English poet deigned to imitate, save Byron alone; on whom, accordingly, Goethe always looked with admiration and affection. But the rest went their way unheeding; and if they have defects, those defects are their own; for when they did copy the German taste, they, for the most part, deliberately chose the evil, and refused the good; and have their reward in a fame which we believe will prove itself a very short-lived one. We cannot deny, however, that, in spite of all faults, these men had a strength. They have exercised an influence. And they have done so by virtue of seeing a fact which more complete, and in some cases more manly poets, did not see. Strangely enough, Shelley, the man who was the greatest sinner of them all against the canons of good taste, was the man who saw that new fact, if not most clearly, still most intensely, and who proclaimed it most boldly. His influence, therefore, is outliving that of his compeers, and growing and spreading, for good and for evil; and will grow and spread for years to come, as long as the present great unrest goes on smouldering in men's hearts, till the hollow settlement of 1815 is burst asunder anew, and men feel that they are no longer in the beginning of the end, but in the end itself, and that this long thirty years' prologue to the reconstruction of rotten Europe is played out at last, and the drama itself begun. ...

From Fraser's Magazine, November, 1853.

Kronos – the Strange New Case of Gombrowicz

2013-05-17T12:53:00.000+02:00

The book of his intimate records arrives as Gombrowicz’s swansong, years after his death in 1969. As with swans, it’s attractive to consider from a distance, but be advised that swans don’t let you pass unnoticed - just ask Leda.

The writer’s final extensive work - the companion piece to his famous Diary, as curt as the Diary is lush and harsh - is published in Polish on the 23rd of May by Wydawnictwo Literackie (WL) in Kraków. The fact that it’s his last book was attested to at the publisher’s press conference in Warsaw on the 8th of May by Rita Gombrowicz, the author’s widow. She had kept the manuscript after Yale University purchased his archive in 1989 for their Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. "This is the integral text", Madame Gombrowicz stated, when asked if other completed material exists, "and I tell you there is absolutely nothing more to come".

The new book lays out Gombrowicz’s meticulous monthly tabulation of concerns – his erotic ventures as lists of partners’ first names, and his health and lack thereof, are the carnal, corporeal priorities. Finances, travel, meetings, invitations, exchanges of gifts and letters are listed. Code words are pointed out in footnotes: "commisariat" when his influential cousin or embassy contacts got him out of Argentine jails, likely for soliciting sex; "Durand" for the Buenos Aires hospital where he received injections to treat syphilis. In finding a form for his unrelenting self analysis, the new book gives the writer something of a last word on his life.

A key work that's been absent for decades – as a full biography of Gombrowicz remains conspicuously absent – publication of Kronos is a fixating coup de théâtre. The book opens with a facsimile of a page on which he listed 1903, the year before he was born, to 1939. Those dates are largely blank, a warning that anyone can envision such a memory project, but few dare undertake it. The original sheets shape-shift over the decades, from graphic notation - with vertical columns classifying sex partners or historical events - to consistent synopses in his concise scrawl. It's an evolution that reflects his efforts to organize material. One concession in this premiere edition is the need to adapt and transcribe those hundred handwritten sheets into conventional paragraphs. Another, which the reader must consent to, is the absence of Gombrowicz’s vital, infectious tone.

Running commentary adorns the bottom of pages, as a system to let the array of facts he compiled breathe and fill, rather than as an academic apparatus. Three main sections cover his life in Poland, in Argentina, where he elected to stay when the Second World War laid waste to Poland, then his European life on returning to the continent in 1963, with a Ford Foundation grant for a year’s stay in Berlin.

Footnotes for the early and late years are by Jerzy Jarzębski, the literary scholar whose Gra w Gombrowicza / Games with Gombrowicz (1982) is a crucial study. The quarter century in Argentina, where the writer transformed from exiled avant-gardist to a figure of international stature, is elucidated by Klementyna Suchanow, whose book Argentyńskie przygody Gombrowicza covers those years. Rita Gombrowicz provides commentary for the final Kronos section, and wrote the book’s introduction. Photos illustrate each phase, and a selection of the manuscript’s pages supplement the transcription and notes, displaying his method and occasional drawings, with plans underway for a full facsimile edition.

There are no announcements to date for translations of Kronos, though expectations are high. The Diary is already available in some two dozen languages. The newest of these, and most ambitious, is the two-volume Norwegian edition of that inventive, argumentative opus, which will include a painstaking index and extensive annotations about the people and topics in that remarkable work. The single-volume Yale University Press publication from 2012 elicited a five-page piece in New Yorker magazine. (Yale publishes a new translation of Trans-Atlantic in 2013, the pithy, provocative novel Gombrowicz completed in 1951.) WL’s new single-volume Polish edition of the Diary accompanies the publisher's edtion of Kronos, and the relation of the two works is illuminating and elusive.

More here.

Stranger in His Own Land

2013-05-14T16:57:00.001+02:00

For a long time, the accepted wisdom on Albert Camus's response to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) has been that he was a coward. This was the view first promulgated by his former friend and rival Jean-Paul Sartre, who accused Camus of having the 'morality of a boy scout' for refusing to praise the terrorist actions of the Algerian nationalists, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1957, Camus famously stated: 'People are now planting bombs on the tramway of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.' Since then this impassioned statement has been held up by generations of anti-colonialists and academic post-colonialist theorists - including the likes of Edward Said - as proof of Camus's weak-mindedness and vacillating nature and, by extension, colonial arrogance towards Algeria, the land where he was born and grew up in the poorest kind of pied-noir family (pied-noir, 'blackfoot', was the term used to describe French settlers in Algeria on the grounds that they wore 'black shoes').

Yet, as Alice Kaplan points out in her scholarly and insightful introduction to this collection of Camus's writings on Algeria, Camus was not at all the 'sentimental egoist' that his enemies wanted him to be. He was in fact convulsed in agony over the war that was tearing Algeria apart. Behind the scenes, he had lobbied to spare Algerian nationalists the death penalty and publicly advocated a federal Algeria where Arabs, Berbers, Jews and colons (settlers) could cohabit. This was perhaps a utopian vision but it was grounded in the reality of the Algeria in which Camus had come to maturity - a collage of pan-Mediterranean languages, races and religions. The fatal flaw in this imagining of Algeria is of course that, for all its friendly overtures to the 'Muslim' or the 'Arab', it is still an overwhelmingly European view of Algeria as a neoclassical pagan Paradise. This is the Algeria described by Camus with loving attention to the scenery and the light and with a powerful nostalgia for a lost (European) antiquity.

The singular importance of Algerian Chronicles is that it brings together for the first time in English all of Camus's writings on Algeria, ranging over his early journalism covering the famine in Kabyle in 1939 to his appeals for reason and justice in Algeria in 1958. Beautifully translated by Arthur Goldhammer, they reveal Camus not so much as a philosopher (or 'ponderous metaphysician' as Said called him) but as something like a French George Orwell. Certainly, in all these essays he demonstrates a most un-Parisian aversion for abstraction and a taste for the concrete detail that reveals the reality of a situation.

In the weeks before the 1955 massacre at Philippeville (now Skikda, a port in northeast Algeria), which was a veritable orgy of slaughter on both sides and a turning point in the war, Camus published two articles in the left-leaning journal L'Express outlining his thoughts on terrorism and repression. He argued that since the elections in recent years had been falsified, the Muslims lived with 'no future and in humiliation'. He did not excuse terror as a weapon of war but he did understand that, as he put it, 'in Algeria, as elsewhere, terrorism can be explained by a lack of hope'. Even at this late stage, Camus wished for a compromise solution in Algeria which would encourage settlers and Muslims to return to the relatively peaceful innocence that Camus had known there in the 1930s. The extreme nature of the violence in Philippeville, however, changed everything. The poet Jean Amrouche, like Camus a child of Algeria, wrote that Camus's idealism and liberalism were finished: 'The evil is too profound ... No agreement is possible between the natives and French of Algeria ... I no longer believe in French Algeria.'

Camus desperately tried to argue against this view. After Philippeville, the French and Algerian communities waited for him to propose a way out of the impasse. But Camus was now exhausted: 'My days are poisoned,' he wrote to a friend, 'but Arabs and Frenchmen must find a way to live together.' However, he was also depressed about the possibility of this happening: 'Algeria is not France,' he wrote again in L'Express, 'it isn't even Algeria, it is that unknown land which a cloud of blood hides.'

More here.

Kerouac: Angel-headed hipster

2013-05-13T12:40:00.002+02:00

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
— Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

The FRANCO-AMERICAN WRITER JACK KEROUAC (1922–1969) is one of the most identifiable and branded of his generation. There are already more than half a dozen extensive biographical treatments, and many of his letters have now been published, including Road Novels, 1957–1960, his Complete Poems in the Library of America series (2007, 2012) and The Portable Jack Kerouac (1995). Why do we need a substantial new look at the author now, that largely ends late in 1951 with the completion of his best-known book, On the Road, which did not actually appear until 1957 when his oeuvre was blossoming but his melancholy decline began?

Why indeed. First, because all but one previous biography are highly unsatisfactory, misleading about meanings and events and not adequately based upon the abundant Kerouac archive, once closed for 30 years, and deposited in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in 2002. Second, because The Voice Is All is written by a literarily astute woman who was his helpmate/lover more than half a century ago and knew many of the dramatis personae who belonged to Jack’s overlapping circles that figured so vitally in his evolution as a person and writer. Third, because Jack’s On the Road has recently been made into a new film. (In 1957 Marlon Brando ignored Jack’s letter requesting him to play the lead as Dean Moriarty. C’est dommage.)

And why am I engaged in writing this? I invited him to read at Harvard and hosted his happy/sad, sometimes wild, and characteristically zany visit to Lowell House, a neo-Georgian Harvard undergraduate residence in March 1964. So I knew him briefly after the acme of his success, which Joyce Johnson may yet choose to write about. I almost hope not, because it was a tough time and in this book she has handily revealed his years of discovery, growth, and troubled complexity in a manner that should satisfy the most zealous fan of the “Beat Generation” — which was Jack’s phrase, appropriated and made widely known by John Clellon Holmes, a writer and devoted pal, one of many, but along with Allen Ginsberg, the best and most constructive. Jack had a genius for friendship with men and women, gay and straight, though his bonds with men tended to be considerably more enduring. Women flitted in and out of his focus like the pretty color scraps falling about at the far end of a kaleidoscope — and he from their beds. His restless life was packed to its perimeters with literature and, eventually, as Johnson makes very clear in her fine concluding section called “Interior Music,” writing what Allen Ginsberg labeled “spontaneous bop prosody.” Talk about le mot juste. That nails it.

Kerouac’s most important influences were Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground was a seminal text for him), Thomas Wolfe, Whitman, Melville, and eventually Céline, Proust, and James Joyce. Is that startling? Perhaps not so much, but mix in Emerson, Thoreau, and Francis Parkman’s Oregon Trail (makes sense, another man from Massachusetts “on the road” a century earlier), Twain and Emily Dickinson (how discrete they seem from one another — yet it is thought that he satirized her as Emmeline Grangerford inHuckleberry Finn), and then Hemingway and Fitzgerald (he called them the “leaver-outers” because of their verbal economy, their predecessors being the “leaver-inners” — quips that actually originated with Wolfe himself). Kerouac once remarked that “my subject as a writer is of course America,” but the roster above would be very incomplete without noting his assimilation of Goethe especially, Shakespeare (think Hamlet), Tolstoy, Rabelais, Stendahl, Rimbaud, Gide, H.G. Wells, Spengler, Thomas Mann, and the New Testament. He inhaled them all.

Wolfe and Dostoevsky ranked uppermost, but Jack ultimately tipped much more toward the latter — despite his desire to be a great American writer — because of the growing darkness during his last decade, even as he remained ebullient at times. He tried Tolstoy’s moral essays but felt far more affinity with Dostoevsky’s “Karamazov Christ of lust and glees.” Savor that. It’s exactly right.

References to angels, saints, Holy Ghosts, archangels, and fallen angels are sprinkled through Jack’s journals, letters, and texts. Despite becoming a nonbeliever early on, vestigial traces of Catholicism lingered even as he sought sanctuary in liquor, drugs, and oblivion. The death of his idealized older brother, Gerard, when Jack was four, left him with a permanent fixation on death, loss, and family. His mission, as he saw it by the time he wrote On the Road, was to “moan for man.” This was no pretense. He did just that.

There is much to lament in the saga of his life, and quite a bit is surprising. In his Book of Dreams Jack echoed what he had written while at sea as a merchantman: “Rough seamen who saw my child’s soul in a grown-up body broke my spirit by spitting and cursing.” Jack was not a gentle soul, but I never saw him spit or curse. Yet he certainly rejected refinement. Felt tacky to him. When Robert Giroux, editor of his first book, The Town and the City (1951), invited Jack to rent a tux and accompany him to the Metropolitan Opera to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, dance became an exotic experience, not to mention dinner afterwards at the Blue Angel in the company of Burgess Meredith, the young Broadway lyricist John Latouche, and Gore Vidal with his socialite mother. Such occasions with Giroux made this Dharma bum exceedingly uncomfortable and he associated them with what he called “white ambitions” and rose bushes, his imagined emblems of upward mobility and artificial symbols of success.

He preferred the company of aspirational unknowns like himself and Neal Cassady inOn the Road, yearning all the while for imaginative literary achievement of a new order. He liked low-lifes better than the high life and spent many more days down-and-out than on a roll. When money came it disappeared swiftly. His affair with the classy Sarah Yokely ended badly and he included only one line about it in On the Road, referring to “a woman who fed me lobsters, mushrooms-on-toast, and Spring asparagus in the middle of the night […] but gave me a bad time otherwise.” She was too rich for his blood.

At the core of Johnson’s compelling book (pace some dismissive recent reviewers) there is a motif more important than alcohol, sex, and drugs, the familiar litany that is all too true and tragic. One prevailing theme is that Jack never became or felt entirely American — not just as a youth in Lowell, Massachusetts, but growing up in its French-Canadian enclave called Centralville, where he became a football star and earned scholarships to Boston College and Columbia, choosing the latter. In his teens, however, Jack frequented the Lowell Public Library, twice a day when possible, and read voraciously. The halfback was also a bookworm, and the latter prevailed as his perplexing Columbia experience proved.

His birth language was French, and initially he spoke the Canuck dialect called joual. Mastering English became an almost lifelong process that never entirely satisfied him. As a youth he spoke English slowly. In 1951 he actually tried composing in joual even though it lacked the thesaurus-full subtleties and richness of English. He liked its roughness, its vernacular qualities. He would then translate from joual to capture that vernacular flavor in English.

More here.

Simple Songs: Virginia Woolf and Music

2013-05-12T12:10:00.002+02:00

As Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries amply record, music was a central part of her social life as it was for many of her contemporaries and she was at her best as a humorist writing about these occasions. She records with glee the various mishaps that befall musicians and audiences – a prima donna throwing down her music in a rage; a button popping off the plump Clive Bell’s waistcoat during the slow movement of a piano sonata; an elderly man crashing loudly but astonishingly unhurt down the stairs at Covent Garden. The social conventions, artifice and pretensions governing these performances intrigue her and allow her to sharpen her wit, but music wasn’t only an occasion for slapstick humour or social satire. It played a central part in the political vision of Woolf’s writing, shaping her understanding and representations of feminism and sexuality, pacifism and cosmopolitanism, social class and anti-Semitism. And it informed, too, the formal experiments of her prose. Woolf learned many of her astonishing literary innovations from music – adopting from Wagner’s operas, for example, the technique of shifting from one narrative perspective to another in order to represent the unspoken thoughts and feelings of her characters.

The short story ‘A Simple Melody’ (c.1925) encapsulates her acute interest in music and its resonant but discreet place in her work. In it, the principal character masks his discomfort at a formal party by studying a landscape painting hanging on the wall:

Mr Carslake, at least, thought it very beautiful because, as he stood in the corner where he could see it, it had the power to compose and tranquillize his mind. It seemed to him to bring the rest of his emotions – and how scattered and jumbled they were at a party like this! – into proportion. It was as if a fiddler were playing a perfectly quiet old English song while people gambled and tumbled and swore, picked pockets, rescued the drowning, and did astonishing – but quite unnecessary – feats of skill. He was unable to perform himself.

The difficulties of communication and the importance of the unspoken are central themes of Woolf’s brief sketch. This is a story about language, about communication. The inhibitions restricting the conversation among the party’s guests, and the difficulty of finding ‘pure new words’ in which to express his feelings, frustrate Mr Carslake. As he looks at the painting of a heath Mr Carslake imagines walking on it with a variety of companions, longing for the intimacy and social equality that he sees as characteristic of al fresco conversation in contrast to polite small talk:

Why, very likely they would talk about their own habits for a whole hour; and all in the freest, easiest way, so that suppose he, or Mabel Waring, or Stuart […] wanted to explain Einstein, or make a statement – something quite private perhaps – (he had known it happen) – it would come quite natural.

His association of the landscape with song suggests that music, like these imagined outdoor exchanges, represents a more direct or ideal form of communication than language, an idea that Woolf’s writing repeatedly explores. She was fascinated by, but wary of, the idea that music was a form of total expression, a model that writing could aspire to or imitate. Here, Mr Carslake’s comparison of the painting to an ‘old English song’ celebrates music’s expressivity and capacity to confer order on its listeners, but also evokes the extensive contemporary nationalist writing about English folk song, landscape and early music by the composers and teachers of the English Musical Renaissance. Mr Carslake remarks that he has recently attended the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, at which English folk songs and military marches were performed: he found it ‘very tiring’ and ‘believed it was not being a success’. These bathetic details undercut nationalist and military music, suggesting that he, like Woolf herself, was repelled by it. Yet Mr Carslake’s belief that music confers ‘proportion’ on the listener echoes the catchphrase used by the unfeeling doctors treating shell-shocked war veterans in her contemporary novel Mrs Dalloway, using music to suggest a more troubling aspect to his fantasies about communication: his ‘desire […] to be sure that all people were the same’ and ‘very simple underneath’ is both crudely reductive, as he partly recognises, and indicative of empathy and a wish for real connection with others.

More here.

Finding Words For What Is Horrible: Aleksandar Hemon's "The Book Of My Lives"

2013-05-11T21:35:00.001+02:00

"I WAS A NIHILIST," writes Aleksander Hemon, "and lived with my parents. I even started thinking up an Anthology of Irrelevant Poetry, sensing that it was my only hope of ever getting anthologized." He adds, "Nothing came of it, although there was a world of irrelevant poetry everywhere around us. There was nothing to do, and we were running out of ways to do it." Hemon's slim new collection of essays, The Book of My Lives, elicits admiration and joy, and we forgive the expat any moments of arrogance or cruelty because, though his youth in Sarajevo might be said to have been peculiarly comfortable, it also obscured a growing avalanche of darkness.

What is so compelling about Hemon, the brooding Eastern European? Perhaps it’s the way he handles particular traumas and contradictions. In an early essay, he tells of being present at a boozy art party, the co-host of which is a woman who would become a rabid nationalist, and of a favorite university professor who would later act as an articulate defender of genocide. Hemon comes away from such encounters seeming both humble and wise. He writes:

The morning after [the party], I woke up with a sense of shame that always goes with getting too drunk, usually remedied by a lot of citric acid and sleep. Yet the sense of shame wouldn't go away for a while. Indeed, it is still around.

The author handles a sense of shame with as much finesse as any other sensory provocation — for instance, here he is on a classic soup:

The vinegary tartness, always refreshing in the summer; the crunchy beet cubes (beets go in last); the luck-of-the-spoon-draw combinations of ingredients, providing different shades of taste with each slurp — eating borscht was always eventful, never boring.

Not everyone could make "the crucial ingredient of the perfect borscht" feel so momentous. One can imagine Hemon just as deftly celebrating a trip to the dry cleaners.

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What we learn when we read Italo Calvino’s letters

2013-05-10T12:27:00.003+02:00

Italo Calvino was discreet about his life and the lives of others, and sceptical about the uses of biography. He understood that much of the world we inhabit is made up of signs, and that signs may speak more eloquently than facts. Was he born in San Remo, Liguria? No, he was born in Santiago de las Vegas, in Cuba, but since “an exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything,” he allowed the phrase “born in San Remo” to appear repeatedly in biographical notes about him. Unlike the truth, he suggested, this falsehood said something about who he was as a writer, about his “creative world”.

This is to say that the best biography may be a considered fiction, and Calvino was also inclined to think that a writer’s work is all the biography anyone really requires. In his letters he returns again and again to the need for attention to the actual literary object rather than the imagined author. “For the critic, the author does not exist,” he writes, “only a certain number of writings exist.”

Such assertions begin to conjure up what came to be known as the death of the author, and in a lecture called “Cybernetics and Ghosts”, Calvino explored the notion with great theoretical panache. This was in 1967, a year before Roland Barthes made the theme notorious in France and the English-speaking world. “And so the author vanishes,” Calvino said, “that spoiled child of ignorance – to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works.” We note that a machine replaces a myth, but a real (thoughtful) person replaces an unthinking illusion, and Calvino adds that we shall get a “poetic result . . . only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society”.

This last sentence makes clear that Calvino is talking about a finished work and its life in the world, and not about some sort of unattainable impersonality: self and society may have become ghosts but they are essential. The death of the grandee author in no way implies the disappearance of the writing person, and any appearance of contradiction vanishes as soon as we understand that for Calvino and many others, writing is life. Books are unavoidably personal for Calvino but not confessional, and not only personal.

But then what are we to make of the letters of such a writer and what are we doing reading them? In part we are, I’m afraid, ignoring his warnings and careful distinctions; peeping into his privacy. What is striking is that the creative writer doesn’t dominate his correspondence as we might expect. There are interesting exceptions but on the whole the letters are not being used as practice for fiction or essays. Calvino does not have any sort of eye on posterity, as so many other modern letter-writers do. He is living in the present, not constructing a future monument.

This may offer something of a surprise to the reader who comes to the letters from the fiction and who may at first miss the expected intricacy and play. It’s not that there is no fun in the letters, but the sense of direct communication, of a man being as clear as he can about a host of matters, complex and simple, is quite different from that created by the artistic density of Calvino’s prose fiction. In his art, the wit and the irony are ways of reflecting the difficulties of the world while hanging on to his sanity – instruments of reason in a world of madness. “I am in favour,” Calvino says in one letter, “of a clown-like mimesis of contemporary reality.” Clowns are often sad and all too sane; but their relation to reality is oblique. Calvino’s writing is part of a great literary project of hinting and suggesting, making memorable shapes and images, rather than giving information or offering explanations. In his letters, Calvino tells rather than shows his correspondents what he means – with great and often moving success.

For this reason, although we invade Calvino’s privacy by the mere fact of looking at these letters, it is a very special privacy that appears: not the writer’s real self – why wouldn’t his writing represent this self, as he thought it did – but his plain self. We eavesdrop not on his secrets but on his devotion to clarity. Calvino’s clarifications cover many diverse topics but they often converge in their effect. We now understand what we half-understood before; we see that what looked like a quirk was a policy; we realise that our puzzlement and Calvino’s are one and the same.

More here.

Maupassant day to day

2013-05-10T11:39:00.000+02:00

In 1883, Guy de Maupassant published the first of his six novels, Une Vie. Asking psychological and formal questions about how to represent a life, the story spans almost thirty years in the existence of Jeanne de Lamare, whose experiences offer a brutal education in the gulf between reality and romantic fiction. Economy is a key characteristic in the presentation of Jeanne’s dreary life. Paragraphs are short, sentences are laconic, patterns of repetition and circularity are evoked by means of symbolic shorthand. The passage of time is evoked through recurrent glimpses of calendars, watches and Jeanne’s beehive-shaped clock, which poignantly summarizes a capacity for productivity that is never realized. If Une Vie offers an example of Maupassant’s skill in concision, there is something ironic in the publication of a sprawling new biography devoted to Maupassant’s own forty-two-year existence, its account of a life anything but economical. Marlo Johnston’s 1,336-page work is a densely packed compendium of detail about one of France’s most popular writers.

Maupassant’s life has long proved attractive to biographers. Johnston’s book is not the only account of his life to appear this year. A somewhat shorter volume was published by Frédéric Martinez in February. They describe a life of extremes: success, failure; creativity, morbidity; joie de vivre and jadedness. Maupassant was a writer who worked hard and played even harder. His career was characterized by a rapid rise to acclaim and fortune, but also by bouts of illness caused by the syphilis he contracted as a young man.

Born in Normandy in 1850, Guy was the elder son of the wealthy but feckless Gustave de Maupassant and the intelligent but febrile Laure Le Poittevin. The disharmony of his parents’ relationship became manifest in 1863, when they formally separated. Contact with literary figures during his adolescence proved memorable. As Johnston recounts, the teenage Maupassant saved the poet Swinburne from drowning while he was on holiday on the coast at Étretat; by way of thanks, he was invited to dine with Swinburne and his lover, George Powell, sampling spit-roast monkey and perusing gay pornography.

The Franco–Prussian war in 1870–71 saw Maupassant conscripted and, in the aftermath of the war, with the family finances overturned, he had to abandon his preparations for a legal career and became instead a minor civil servant, first in the Ministry for the Navy and later in the Ministry of Education. These experiences were formative: the tedium and penury of his time as a government pen-pusher compelled Maupassant to seek an alternative way of making money. Far from being inspired purely by literary ideals, he became a canny and productive writer, acutely aware that literary success could act as an emancipation from bureaucracy.

Maupassant first came to celebrity with the publication of his short story “Boule de Suif”, which appeared in the collection of Naturalist literature spearheaded by Émile Zola, Les Soirées de Médan (1880). The vivid tale of a generous-minded prostitute forced to flee her home during the war, it weaves together the personal humiliation of Boule de Suif, who sacrifices herself to the sexual demands of Prussian officers in order to secure the release of her hypocritical travelling companions, with the national humiliation experienced in the wake of military capitulation. After its success there followed a feverishly productive decade. Maupassant became known as a reporter and columnist; all six of his novels were published within seven years; he travelled widely and produced accounts of his journeys; he bought a yacht, engaged in numerous liaisons, and was celebrated for his parties.

In addition to the novels Maupassant was to publish more than 300 short stories, 200 articles, two plays and three works of travel writing. By the end of the 1880s he was earning around 120,000 francs a year (the equivalent of £275,000–£300,000 today); he had sold almost 350,000 copies of his works by the end of 1891. Such intense creativity was increasingly blighted, though, by the effects of syphilis. The migraines and poor eyesight associated with the disease made it particularly difficult to write, and for his later works, Maupassant did his plotting in his mind, rather than on paper. Productivity and success were accompanied by physical and mental decline, culminating in an attempted suicide on New Year’s Day 1892, when he slit his throat with a paper-knife. He died in a psychiatric clinic in July 1893.

Maupassant’s career stands out not only because of its heady success and dramatic demise. He was also one of the most famous literary apprentices in history: his “master”, Flaubert, was a childhood friend of Guy’s mother. Introduced to Flaubert as a young man, Maupassant was encouraged to write and to show Flaubert copies of his bawdy epic verse. An affectionate friendship developed between the two men, and Maupassant spent his Sunday afternoons at Flaubert’s literary gatherings. As the summary of Une Vie suggests, the style and content of Maupassant’s first novel owe a great deal to the rhythms and patterns of Madame Bovary.

More here.

I still love Kierkegaard

2013-05-08T13:06:00.001+02:00

I fell for Søren Kierkegaard as a teenager, and he has accompanied me on my intellectual travels ever since, not so much side by side as always a few steps ahead or lurking out of sight just behind me. Perhaps that’s because he does not mix well with the other companions I’ve kept. I studied in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy, where the literary flourishes and wilful paradoxes of continental existentialists are viewed with anything from suspicion to outright disdain. In Paris, Roland Barthes might have proclaimed the death of the author, but in London the philosopher had been lifeless for years, as anonymous as possible so that the arguments could speak for themselves.

Discovering that your childhood idols are now virtually ancient is usually a disturbing reminder of your own mortality. But for me, realising that 5th May 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of Søren Kierkegaard's birth was more of a reminder of his immortality. It's a strange word to use for a thinker who lived with a presentiment of his own death and didn't reach his 43rd birthday. Kierkegaard was the master of irony and paradox before both became debased by careless overuse. He was an existentialist a century before Jean-Paul Sarte, more rigorously post-modern than postmodernism, and a theist whose attacks on religion bit far deeper than many of those of today’s new atheists. Kierkegaard is not so much a thinker for our time but a timeless thinker, whose work is pertinent for all ages yet destined to be fully attuned to none.

It’s easy enough to see why I fell in love with Kierkegaard. Before years of academic training does its work of desiccation, young men and women are drawn to philosophy and the humanities by the excitement of ideas and new horizons of understanding. This youthful zeal, however, is often slapped down by mature sobriety. I remember dipping into the tiny philosophy section of my school library, for example, and finding Stephan Körner’s 1955 Pelican introduction to Kant. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Strangely, this did not put me off philosophy, the idea of which remained more alluring than the little bit of reality I had encountered.

Kierkegaard was not so much an oasis in this desert as a dramatic, torrential thunderstorm at the heart of it. Discovering him as a 17-year-old suddenly made philosophy and religion human and exciting, not arid and abstract. In part that’s because he was a complex personality with a tumultuous biography. Even his name emanates romantic darkness. ‘Søren’ is the Danish version of the Latin severus, meaning ‘severe’, ‘serious’ or ‘strict’, while ‘Kierkegaard’ means churchyard, with its traditional associations of the graveyard.

He knew intense love, and was engaged to Regine Olsen, whom he describes in his journals as ‘sovereign queen of my heart’. Yet in 1841, after four years of courtship, he called the engagement off, apparently because he did not believe he could give the marriage the commitment it deserved. He took love, God and philosophy so seriously that he did not see how he could allow himself all three.

He was a romantic iconoclast, who lived fast and died young, but on a rollercoaster of words and ideas rather than sex and booze. During the 1840s, books poured from his pen. In 1843 alone, he published three masterpieces, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and Repetition.

More here.

On Sylvia Plath

2013-05-06T11:51:00.002+02:00

In Sylvia Plath’s work and in her life the elements of pathology are so deeply rooted and so little resisted that one is disinclined to hope for general principles, sure origins, applications, or lessons. Her fate and her themes are hardly separate and both are singularly terrible. Her work is brutal, like the smash of a fist; and sometimes it is also mean in its feeling. Literary comparisons are possible, echoes vibrate occasionally, but to whom can she be compared in spirit, in content, in temperament?

Certain frames for her destructiveness have been suggested by critics. Perhaps being born a woman is part of the exceptional rasp of her nature, a woman whose stack of duties was laid over the ground of genius, ambition, and grave mental instability. Or is it the 1950s, when she was going to college, growing up—is there something of that here? Perhaps; but I feel in her a special lack of national and local roots, feel it particularly in her poetry, and this I would trace to her foreign ancestors on both sides. They were given and she accepted them as a burden not as a gift; but there they were, somehow cutting her off from what they weren’t. Her father died when she was eight years old and this was serious, central. Yet this most interesting part of her history is so scorched by resentment and bitterness that it is only the special high burn of the bitterness that allows us to imagine it as a cutoff love.

For all the drama of her biography, there is a peculiar remoteness about Sylvia Plath. A destiny of such violent self-definition does not always bring the real person nearer; it tends, rather, to invite iconography, to freeze our assumptions and responses. She is spoken of as a “legend” or a “myth”—but what does that mean? Sylvia Plath was a luminous talent, self-destroyed at the age of thirty, likely to remain, it seems, one of the most interesting poets in American literature. As an event she stands with Hart Crane, Scott Fitzgerald, and Poe rather than with Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, or Elizabeth Bishop.

The outlines of her nature are odd, especially in her defiant and extensive capabilities, her sense of mastery, the craft and preparation she almost humbly and certainly industriously acquired as the foundation for an overwhelming ambition. She was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Her mother’s parents were Austrian; her father was a German, born in Poland. He was a professor of biology, a specialist, among other interests, in bee-raising. (The ambiguous danger and sweetness of the beehive—totemic, emblematic for the daughter.) Her father died and the family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, to live with their grandparents. The mother became a teacher and the daughter went to public schools and later to Smith College. Sylvia Plath was a thorough success as a student and apparently was driven to try to master everything life offered—study, cooking, horseback riding, writing, being a mother, housekeeping. There seemed to have been no little patch kept for the slump, the incapacity, the refusal….

More here.

Julian Barnes and the work of grief

2013-05-03T14:17:00.002+02:00

“ How do you turn catastrophe into art?” This bold question, posed by Julian Barnes in a fabulist exegesis of Géricault’s great painting “The Raft of the Medusa”, in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), might be said to be answered by his new book, Levels of Life, a memoir of his wife of thirty years, Pat Kavanagh, who died of a brain tumour in 2008. With few of the playful stratagems and indirections of style typical of his fiction, but with something of the baffled elegiac tone of his Booker Prize-winning short novel The Sense of an Ending (2011), Levels of Life conveys an air of stunned candour: “I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart”. The end came swiftly and terribly: “Thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death”. The resulting memoir, a precisely composed, often deeply moving hybrid of non-fiction, “fabulation”, and straightforward reminiscence and contemplation, is a gifted writer’s response to the incomprehensible in a secular culture in which “we are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern”.

Levels of Life is a not quite adequate title for this highly personal and at times richly detailed book, implying an air of lofty contemplation from which the vividness of actual life has departed. Barnes quotes E. M. Forster: “One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another” – yet Levels of Life suggests that a single death, if examined from a singular perspective, may throw a good deal of light on the universal experiences of loss, grief, mourning, and what Barnes calls “the question of loneliness”. “I already know that only the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak. Nothing modernly evasive or medicalising. Grief is a human, not a medical, condition.” The epiphany – or rather one of the epiphanies, for Levels of Life contains many striking, insightful aphorisms – towards which the memoir moves is the remark of a bereaved friend: “Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain . . . . If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter”. In the more intimate passages here, Barnes would seem to be making the tacit point that the creation of art is inadequate to compensate for such loss.

“You put together two people who have not been put together before . . . . Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.”

Like Barnes’s characteristic works of fiction, Levels of Life is unorthodox in structure and perspective. That it is a widower’s memoir is not evident until page sixty-eight, in a section titled “Loss of Depth”, in which the author speaks for the first time of his grief for his deceased wife, which has scarcely lessened in the several years since her death. Preceding this section are two shorter, self-contained prose pieces evoking the ebullient era of hot-air ballooning that suggest, in retrospect, something of the airy elation, transcendence and terrible risk that falling in love entails.

More here.

One Of Ireland's Greatest Writers Looks Back On Eight Decades

2013-05-01T23:20:00.001+02:00

Back in the early 1950s, as a lonely, pregnant young wife already ruing her rash elopement, Edna O'Brien sobbed through the ending of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and wondered, "Why could life not be lived at that same pitch? Why was it only in books that I could find the utter outlet for my emotions?"

This is one of many, many telling moments in Country Girl, O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life — eight decades filled with famous people, some regrettable choices, inadequately reciprocated love and, always, a passion for words and literature. In fact, parts of her life were lived at such a pitch — especially after the 1960 publication of her iconoclastic first novel, The Country Girls, from which her memoir takes its title — that it's no wonder she sometimes lost her balance.

Country Girl offers a far more detailed and intimate picture of O'Brien's life than her elegiac 1976 memoir, Mother Ireland, yet she remains circumspect on her love affairs. For readers of her fiction, scenes from her straitened, rural, County Clare childhood will be familiar. O'Brien grew up in a decaying, once grand house called Drewsboro, where what she shared with her severely pious mother was mainly a fear of her frequently inebriated father.

With "the prodigal blood of the O'Briens" reigning uppermost in her, O'Brien was propelled outward — first to convent school, then to train as a pharmacist in Dublin and, finally, to a writer's life in England. Like so many of her literary heroes — Yeats, Joyce, O'Casey, Beckett — she left Ireland "because of its narrow-mindedness and robust censorship," but it never left her.

O'Brien's first novel changed her life. Dashed off in just three weeks, this now-classic coming-of-age story about two Irish girls addressed the then-taboo subject of women's needs and desires with unprecedented frankness, and it created a furor. The Country Girls was banned and burned in Ireland, and it widened the rift with her mother, who, O'Brien notes, was always "suspicious of the written word." The novel's success also provided "the death knell" to her miserable and, as it turned out, only marriage.

More here.

The Republic of Dreams

2013-04-29T13:58:00.000+02:00

Schulz says clearly: the unreal is whatever people cannot share with one another. Whatever falls out of that sharing falls beyond the circle of human affairs, beyond the boundaries of the human theater, beyond literature.

The trouble with Bruno Schulz is the following: everybody knows he’s a genius, everybody talks about his tremendous influence, but when push comes to shove it’s all restricted to banalities, as if the measure of a writer’s greatness were to be this community of popular judgments. On the other hand, this comes as no surprise.

Schulz assaults the reader from the very first page and never allows him to rest, never allows him to gather his thoughts. His perfidy lies in the fact that he resists all translation, but encourages us to imitate, to paraphrase and to counterfeit. It’s easier to speak in Schulz’s language than to speak about Schulz. After reading a single paragraph we know at once that it’s Schulz, though we don’t at once know what to say about the paragraph.

The greatness of Schulz is the greatness of his resistance to appropriation, while the result of this resistance is the very small number of memorable books written about him. Certainly, there are a great many discussions, monographs, presentations, dictionaries and exegeses, but few books which would discard the academic paraphernalia and show in black and white that to read Schulz is to wrestle with an angel who means to wrench out your hip.

But then how should we read Schulz? Should we catalogue motifs and themes? This is important, but superficial. Should we illuminate metaphors and track turns of phrase? This reeks of the laboratory from a mile off. Should we compare? But how to compare the incomparable? Even worse, Schulz cannot be utilized for anything: he can’t be hailed as a patron of the left or right and nobody will write a politically engaged essay about him.

Schulz is clearly useless: he refuses to serve any cause, he refuses to rouse and uplift, and even his essays about Józef Piłsudski are a disappointment to old legionnaires. Neither does Schulz have – as would befit a genius of the nation – a decent biography. Ultimately Jerzy Ficowski didn’t write one, preferring to ferret about in the The Vicinity of ’Cinnamon Shops’, rather than to take a look inside them. This is in fact a broader tendency. Indeed, the proliferation of books in the Schulzean bibliography with titles dominated by various margins, postscripts and footnotes clearly demonstrates that the criticism has been overcome by a reverent fear of confrontation. This ferreting about in the margins is by no means a purely native affliction.

More here.

Writers in love with other art forms

2013-04-29T12:38:00.000+02:00

In the last summer of his life Norman Mailer felt he had the face he deserved and the solitude he craved. He was living alone in a house in Provincetown not far from the one he’d rented when he came out of the army in 1946, the little cabin where he began writing The Naked and the Dead (1948). In 2007 I went to Cape Cod and spent two days interviewing him for the Writers at Work series in The Paris Review. When I came to the kitchen table on the second morning, he was drawing faces on oyster shells, the faces of Greek gods. I’ve got one beside me now as I write: the face of Zeus traced out on a bumpy shell.

I asked him which of the other art forms he thought being a novelist was closest to. “Acting,” he said.

Why? “Because it’s the same work. A novelist and an actor have to know how to inhabit characters.”

So, which actor do you admire most? “Warren Beatty,” he said. “And not for the obvious reasons.”

The exchange stuck in my head because of what it says about Mailer’s humour and a novelist’s task overall. I would venture that every novelist has another art form that he thinks explains his own technique or dignifies his own style. We all have our shadow art, the one that isn’t ours, the one we might covet, feeling it knows something about us. Sometimes the novelist becomes a critic of that art and a very good one – as Graham Greene did of film, or Julian Barnes of television – but, most often, he or she will just imbibe it secretly, knowing that the novels could be enriched by the rules of the other art form.

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence, published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other. The book’s title became a kind of sob that writers and critics would deploy when discussing the agony of writing. Poor novelists: they could only sit at their screens wailing inwardly at the realisation they would never be Henry James or, more upsettingly, that they were already Henry James but not as good.

I never believed it. I don’t believe in the meteoric culture of anxiety generally. Obviously, some people have it, some people are crippled by it, but most of the novelists I’ve ever known are in love with influence. They thrive on it. Mailer’s feeling about acting was that the good actor’s typical experience and process gave courage to his own: if you could walk on a stage and be someone else for three hours, plumbing the depths of a soul and a history not your own, then any good novelist would want to examine how that is done. Half the job of a working writer is to seek and maintain his own affinities. You’ve got to know where to lay your empathy and why. And you’ve got to know how to recognise the kind of material that releases your imagination. You don’t always find those things in other novelists: often, indeed, it will be the artist in the next field, the craftsman, the expert, the sportsman, the hero in another line, who will pump fresh air into the recesses of your talent.

More here.

C Day-Lewis and the Fickle Business of Literary Reputation

2013-04-27T12:59:00.001+02:00

The car is coming slowly and cautiously down the steep hill from the Iron Age fort into Musbury on a sunny winter’s morning. The narrow lane is lined with high green hedges which direct the eyes forward to the Axe Valley, spread out before us, and beyond it the blue of the sea. Sean Day-Lewis, retired newspaperman, is at the wheel, pointing out the landmarks of his father’s – and his own - life.

We stop on a bend. Just ahead of us is the house his parents called Brimclose when they bought it in 1938. Soon after his father died, Sean’s mother, Mary, sold up, finally knowing that there was no longer even the remotest chance of her ex-husband coming home to her. The new owners renamed it Woodhayes and have since extended it and painted it sky blue and white, remodelling over the years the garden Mary spent 35 years tending.

The details have changed but the landscape that so inspired Day-Lewis has not. To our right, Sean points out a wooden bench, concreted in position and with a plaque recording Mary Day-Lewis’s life and death, from cancer, in 1975. To our left is the wood that lay between Brimclose and Bullmoor Farm, where his father and Billie Currall would meet in those heady pre-war days.

Of his departure from this spot in 1950, Day-Lewis later wrote: ‘Self-exiled, I left what seems in retrospect a little Paradise. But, as Proust so wonderfully showed, for certain temperaments the only Paradise is Paradise Lost’. He had lived, Day-Lewis wrote in 1965 in ‘St Anthony’s Shirt’ in nine houses. As a poet Day-Lewis had a great capacity to respond to new places and new landscapes – Ireland, Dorset, Tuscany all inspired him. And to human beauty. Some of the women he fell in love with were famed for their good looks. But he never truly settled, physically or emotionally, however much part of him yearned for it. Each paradise was always, as he admitted, lost, often through his own actions. One side of him remained forever the traveller of his poems.

There is not, then, a single landscape where you have the sense of walking in his footsteps. In Musbury that day, with his eldest son at my side, he felt as close as he ever would as Sean mapped out the minutiae of their sparse domestic life in the early 1940s in a cottage that is now comfortably refurbished. I could almost hear the cricket ball being whacked around the weedy tennis court as Day-Lewis and Rex Warner fought it out. But later, when I returned without Sean to the cottage to recapture once again that connection with my subject, Day-Lewis was gone.

The obvious place to look for him is in his poetry. And there, warts and all, he most certainly is. Day-Lewis was the most autobiographical of poets. As I have included stanzas in the preceding chapters to reflect his state of mind at the various crossroads in his life, I have been acutely aware that making such a direct link would be dangerous and even impossible with most writers. With Day-Lewis, it feels the natural and right thing to do. There is, of course, a degree of licence – there were, for example, more than nine houses - but there too, more often, is an almost painful honesty about the important things. Yet even as he opens his heart in poetry, seeks to understand not to be understood as he put it himself, confides as he did nowhere else, he is also simultaneously holding himself apart, observing, suspecting, judging himself and his readers.

More here.

How Muriel Spark rescued Mary Shelley

2013-04-27T12:47:00.000+02:00

In 1950 the thirty-two-year-old tyro poet Muriel Spark drew up a proposal for a “Critical Biography” of Mary Shelley. The project was never going to be easy to sell to publishers. Spark was virtually unknown outside the London poetry scene and, in any case, there was little interest in female novelists of the nineteenth century. Mary Shelley was remembered mostly for having run away with Percy Bysshe Shelley while he was still married to his first wife. Although Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s first novel, had subsequently become familiar through its many theatre and film adaptations, as a piece of literature it was considered a freakish fairy tale written by an eighteen-year-old who scarcely knew what she was doing. As for the novels Mary Shelley went on to write following Percy’s death in 1822, it was probably best to draw a veil.

Nonetheless, Muriel Spark’s determination to rescue Mary Shelley from cultural amnesia and condescension was sufficiently persuasive to win her a commission from a small publisher. The original publication of Child of Light: A reassessment of Mary Shelley was timed to coincide with the centenary of Shelly’s death in 1951, but Spark tinkered with her text over the following decades to take account of emerging scholarship, eventually republishing the biography in 1987 with a new preface. It is this updated edition, together with Spark’s original proposal and her abridgement of Shelley’s little-known dystopian novel The Last Man, which Carcanet has now reissued.

In her proposal of 1951, Spark crisply set out why she believed the time was right for a “reassessment” of Mary Shelley. The author of Frankenstein, she suggested, was the true founder of science fiction and had paved the way for contemporary masters of the genre including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and, above all, H. G. Wells. Moreover, continued Spark, it was quite unfair to say, as so many did, that Mary Shelley had spent her long widowhood as a literary hack writing for money rather than as a creative artist. The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck, Falkner and Lodore may not be entirely successful as novels, but they are clearly the work of a committed novelist testing out the limits of the genre. Finally, Spark promised to make explicit the links between Shelley’s path-finding life as an independent professional woman and the feminist legacy of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.

As Michael Schmidt emphasizes in his excellent introduction, there were other, more numinous, reasons why Muriel Spark felt drawn to Mary Shelley. The women shared initials and both were known professionally by their husbands’ surnames. Both had struggled financially while bringing up sons as single mothers. Mary Shelley died on February 1, which was also the day on which Spark was born. Although not yet received into the Roman Catholic Church, Spark saw in these coincidences a hint that there was a higher power directing her towards Mary Shelley.

More here.

Rainer Maria Rilke: Silent Hour

2013-04-26T12:40:00.002+02:00

Whoever weeps somewhere out in the world
Weeps without cause in the world
Weeps over me.

Whoever laughs somewhere out in the night
Laughs without cause in the night
Laughs at me.

Whoever wanders somewhere in the world
Wanders in vain in the world
Wanders to me.

Whoever dies somewhere in the world
Dies without cause in the world
Looks at me.

D.H. Lawrence as an Enemy of Joyce

2013-04-26T11:33:00.000+02:00

You know that I need to go away, away, away: yes, yes, I can’t go on here anymore. You know there are always the angels and the archangels, thrones, powers, cherubims, seraphims--the whole choir there. But here these baptised beasts always make themselves heard, these and nothing else. I’m going away from here. Walking one arrives: if not to the grave, at least a little bit outside this human, too human world. (Letters IV, 185)

D.H. Lawrence wrote these words on the second of February 1922, when he was preparing to pack up his home in Sicily, turn his back on Europe, and sail around the world. I think they are a good entry into the question of why Lawrence and Joyce must be counted among the great pairs of literary enemies; for what divides them, finally, is their differing attitudes to “this human, too human world” below, and to “the angels and the archangels” above.

A few notes, first, on how much these adversaries knew about each other’s work. Joyce was certainly prejudiced against Lawrence, both as a writer and as an Englishman, but probably knew more of him by hearsay than by close reading. In June 1918 he asked his agent, J.B. Pinker, to get him a copy of the American edition of The Rainbow (Letters I 115). The publisher, Huebsch, was being very careful about distributing copies, and Joyce may never have received the copy he ordered (Delany 166-167). The only other Lawrence book we know Joyce looked at was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and he probably did not look at it for very long (Selected Letters 359). Lawrence does not seem to have taken any interest in Joyce before 1922, and there is no sign that he ever read Dubliners or Portrait. Then, the publicity surrounding the publication of Ulysses caught his attention and in July 1922, while living in Australia, he wrote to S.S. Koteliansky that "I shall be able to read this famous Ulysses when I get to America. I doubt (i.e. I suspect) he's a trickster." Lawrence was writing Kangaroo at the time, and said of it: “but such a novel! Even the Ulysseans will spit at it” (Letters IV, 275). He finally got hold of a borrowed copy of Ulysses in New Mexico in November 1922, and sent it back eight days later with the comment:

"I am sorry, but I am one of the people who can't read Ulysses. Only bits. But I am glad I have seen the book, since in Europe they usually mention us together--James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence--and I feel I ought to know in what company I creep to immortality. I guess Joyce would look as much askance on me as I on him. We make a choice of Paola and Francesca floating down the winds of hell."

The needle of personal rivalry is already evident, reflecting Lawrence’s uneasiness that he and Joyce had become strange bedfellows as the two most notorious banned authors in English. Lawrence’s literary judgement of the novel was guarded: "Ulysses wearied me: so like a schoolmaster with dirt and stuff in his head: sometimes good, though: but too mental" (Letters IV, 345). Lawrence would return regularly to this criticism of Joyce as someone who achieved his effects in too conscious a way. Two months after reading Ulysses he wrote “Surgery for the Novel‹or a Bomb,” and spoke of the “death-rattle” of the “serious” novel:

“Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I?” asks every character of Mr. Joyce or of Miss Richardson or M. Proust. . . . Through thousands and thousands of pages Mr. Joyce and Miss Richardson tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads, till you feel you are sewed inside a wool mattress that is being slowly shaken up, and you are turning to wool along with the rest of the woolliness.
It’s awful. And it’s childish. It really is childish, after a certain age, to be absorbedly self-conscious.
(Lawrence, Criticism 114-115)

When Lawrence came to read part of “Work in Progress,” in the summer of 1928, he felt that Joyce was going much further down the wrong path: "Somebody sent me Transition - American number - that Paris modernissimo periodical, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, etc. What a stupid olla podrida of the Bible and so forth James Joyce is: just stewed-up fragments of quotation in the sauce of a would-be-dirty mind.” Early in 1929 Harry Crosby tried to arrange a meeting between the two men, but Joyce refused. In whatever circle they inhabit on the opposite shore, presumably they are still passing each other without the tribute of recognition.

It would need a book to do justice to the rivalry between these two near-contemporaries whose literary careers and personal histories have so much in common, yet who remain so deeply opposed. In this brief essay I attempt only to identify two major points of contention: realism as a method and sexuality as a subject.

Much in Lawrence’s judgement of Joyce derives from the assumption that Joyce was the inheritor of 19th century realism. Lawrence’s most eloquent statement on this tradition comes in his discussion of Flaubert:

Realism is just one of the arbitrary views man takes of man. It sees us all as little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance. . . . I think the inherent flaw in Madame Bovary is that individuals like Emma and Charles Bovary are too insignificant to carry the full weight of Gustave Flaubert’s profound sense of tragedy . . . Emma and Charles Bovary are two ordinary persons, chosen because they are ordinary. But Flaubert is by no means an ordinary person. Yet he insists on pouring his own deep and bitter tragic consciousness into the little skins of the country doctor and his dissatisfied wife. . . .
the human soul has supreme joy in true, vivid consciousness. And Flaubert’s soul has this joy. But Emma Bovary’s soul does not, poor thing, because she was deliberately chosen because her soul was ordinary. . . .
[Yet] Even Emma Bovary has a certain extraordinary female energy of restlessness and unsatisfied desire. So that both Flaubert and Verga allow their heroes something of the hero, after all. The one thing they deny them is the consciousness of heroic effort.
(Phoenix II 281-282)

Now if you substitute Molly and Leopold for Emma and Charles I think you have essentially the same point, though Lawrence would not be so generous to Joyce as to Flaubert. And how might one respond in Joyce’s defense? First, that Joyce’s “profound sense” is comic rather than tragic, and that Ulysses is not a nihilistic work, as Madame Bovary perhaps is. Second, that ordinary life is quite heroic enough for Joyce, provided one pays sufficiently close and respectful attention to it. Bloom may not be much bigger intrinsically than Charles Bovary, or Bouvard and Pécuchet; but he is imagined with affection rather than scorn, and that makes all the difference. Third, that the special effect of Ulysses depends on Molly and Bloom having “something of the hero” without being conscious of it, as Lawrence would want. Their greatness lies, in other words, precisely in their lack of consciousness--we see the classical parallel, but they mustn’t.

When we turn to the sexual opposition between Joyce and Lawrence, we need to fill in the background of the former’s sly deflations and the latter’s dismissive outbursts. Lawrence was two years dead when Joyce called the ending of Lady Chatterley’s Lover “propaganda in favour of something which, outside of D.H.L.’s country at any rate, makes all the propaganda for itself” (Selected Letters 359). What Joyce did not know was that Connie Chatterley seems to have been conceived deliberately as the antidote to Molly Bloom!

“The last part of [Ulysses],” Lawrence burst out, “is the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written. Yes it is, Frieda. It is filthy. . . . This Ulysses muck is more disgusting than Casanova. I must show that it can be done without muck.”
(Mackenzie 167)

One can make a joke of this, saying that Lawrence liked the idea of Ulysses‹“lusty woman has impotent husband, takes lover”‹but not the way it was written up. But there is a serious point at issue, concerning the treatment of sexuality in nineteenth century realism. Lawrence found that treatment a deliberate narrowing of human potential; whereas Joyce accepts realism’s fundamental project of documenting, without moral preconceptions, people’s everyday behavior.

Joyce regards with equanimity every possible sexual act that is freely chosen; but he does not stop there. His interest in the body is also a moral stance, taken up against the orthodox Christian hostility to “mere” flesh. More heretic than scientist, Joyce becomes a Manichean in reverse, preferring the flesh that affirms to the spirit that denies. Courting Marthe Fleischmann, he reminds her that “Jésus Christ a pris son corps humain: dans le ventre d’une femme juive” (Selected Letters 233). It is by woman’s flesh, and especially her secret inner parts, that a world fallen into negation can be redeemed. At the same time, Joyce is fascinated by woman’s double nature, combining the carnal with the transcendent. His sexual epiphanies are moments when the woman displays both qualities intensely and simultaneously. The whore in Portrait, for example, is a priestess of the body. A real priest would raise the host up to heaven then bring it down into the mouth of the communicant, who kneels below him. But the whore puts something even more potent into Stephen’s mouth: her own tongue, in a direct communion of flesh with flesh.

In the vision of the bird-girl, and in the erotic letters to Nora, Joyce excites himself with a sacred love-object who displays for him her profane functions of excretion; the most intense sexual experience is one that mingles, sacrilegiously, the most exalted with the most vulgar. Yet Joyce’s sexuality remains Catholic, in the sense of universal: it includes every possible means of communion between men and women, whether high or low. His letter to Nora of 2 December 1909 is a classic expression of his need to reconcile sacred and profane love: “side by side and inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for every secret and shameful part of it, for every odour and act of it.”
For Joyce, then, the spiritual idea adds spice to the raw hungers of sensuality; and this is precisely what offends the Lawrentian sexual ethic. The episodes I have discussed would be for Lawrence prime examples of “sex in the head,” the subordination of the physical act to a sophisticated consciousness of it. In Women in Love, Birkin tells Hermione: “You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them” (41). The Lawrentian ideal of immediacy is the opposite of Joyce’s “working up” of sexuality within a cultural and religious symbolic system. Hence Lawrence’s complaint that Ulysses was “too mental” (Letters IV 345). In Finnegans Wake he found a progression of the disease, “too terribly would-be and done-on-purpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life” (CL VI 548).
“Real life,” for Lawrence, means striking through the mask of culture to get as close as possible to “the thing itself.” Joyce, on the other hand, accepts that reality is inescapably textual. Stephen’s maxim that absence is the highest form of presence argues that representations are more potent than whatever they are taken to represent. In sexual relations, Joyce dwells obsessively on indirect or incomplete modes of consummation; he is fascinated by everything that may intervene between desire and performance. A partial list of these intermediate conditions would include idealization (of the woman), fantasies of the inaccessible other, voyeurism, fetishism (of garments, symbols, the written word), fear of exposure, surrogate or vicarious satisfaction, complaisance, jealousy, the incest taboo, impotence. Most of these conditions can be found also in Joyce’s personal sexual history.

Lawrence did not read Joyce closely enough to appreciate the full extent of his rejection of sexual immediacy. But he read enough to support a psychic indictment, that in Joyce the worm of consciousness preys on the living flesh of desire. To this Lawrence adds a moral judgement, directed against the demotic quality of sex in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. When Lawrence was twenty-two, he told a congregational minister that he had “believed for many years that the Holy Ghost descended and took conscious possession of the Œelect’‹the converted one” (CL I 39). Lawrence ceased being a chapel-going orthodox Christian in his late teens; but there persisted in his emotional makeup much of the Calvinist division of mankind into the elect and the preterite (those who are without grace and rejected by God). Not unlike Joyce, Lawrence dares to be a heretic, by making sexual union the center of his heterodox religion. But Joyce makes all sex sacramental in some degree‹even, and especially, such stigmatized practices as prostitution or masturbation; Lawrence makes distinctions and excludes. In Lawrence’s neo-Calvinist morality, sex becomes the predominant means and sign of grace; but, by the same token, the wrong kind of sex is the mark of preterition. From this comes Lawrence’s preoccupation with the signs of sexual grace, such as the proper correspondence between the man’s and the woman’s desire. And just as in the orthodox Calvinist tradition, determining the exact degree of grace in the soul becomes an esoteric art. There is also a Calvinist anxiety about salvation, though now associated with sexual instead of explicitly religious consciousness. ...

G. K. Chesterton: Thomas Carlyle

2013-04-24T10:29:00.000+02:00

There are two main moral necessities for the work of a great man: the first is that he should believe in the truth of his message; the second is that he should believe in the acceptability of his message. It was the whole tragedy of Carlyle that he had the first and not the second.

The ordinary capital, however, which is made out of Carlyle's alleged gloom is a very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, both as a man and as a writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his "liver" is merely pitiful. If indigestion invariably resulted in a "Sartor Resartus," it would be a vastly more tolerable thing than it is. Diseases do not turn into poems; even the decadent really writes with the healthy part of his organism. If Carlyle's private faults and literary virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he is only in the situation of every man; for every one of us it is surely very difficult to say precisely where our honest opinions end and our personal predilections begin. But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savage egotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to grasp Carlyle's gospel. "Ruskin," says a critic, "did, all the same, verily believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself." This is certainly a distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God, because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin, themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St. Francis, Bunyan, Wesley, Mr. Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable variety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average man as their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear and without condescension. It was this simplicity of confidence, not only in God, but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.

But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's religious sentiment must absolutely fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle's sense of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets—humour. A man must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysus, no vague, half-converted Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as "falling asleep in the Lord." "Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through unending ages, insult the face of the sun any more ... and we go on, if not to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher ones."

The supreme value of Carlyle to English literature was that he was the founder of modern irrationalism; a movement fully as important as modern rationalism. A great deal is said in these days about the value or valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.

But though this may be true enough in practice, it scarcely clears up the position of logic in human affairs. Logic is a machine of the mind, and if it is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion. When people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using words in a fair sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything by bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an extraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ, when what is meant is the abuse or decay of that organ. Thus we speak of a man suffering from "nerves," which is about as sensible as talking about a man suffering from ten fingers. We speak of "liver" and "digestion" when we mean the failure of liver and the absence of digestion. And in the same manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the danger of fallacy.

But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partial overthrow of logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and somewhat different. The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they bring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all. Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend to forget that there are two parts of a logical process, the first the choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it, and humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound assumption. It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rational and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as "He did not prove the very thing with which he started," or, "The whole of his case rested upon a pure assumption," two peculiarities which may be found by the curious in the works of Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how constantly one hears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic, apparently without troubling about the deep assumptions involved, having lost their sense, as it were, of the real colour and character of a man's assumption. For instance, two men will argue about whether patriotism is a good thing and never discover until the end, if at all, that the cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies and no prejudices, while the nationalist denies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animal who has preferences, as a bird has feathers.

Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments, but assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where his view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing and beneficent heresy. He denied every one of the postulates upon which the age of reason based itself. He denied the theory of progress which assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth century. Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth century, according to him, depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved to be.

He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but the individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real ground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the last era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there has been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.

Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a mystic, and mysticism was with him, as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of common sense. Mysticism and common sense alike consist in a sense of the dominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formally demonstrated or even formally named. Mysticism and common sense are alike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which have no place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist in breaking through formulæ, old and new, to these old and silent and ironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times over, he maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man and woman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for the exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness, it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe. About hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justice to Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which he sometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which were a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is not that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it in them to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to rebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle's tone invariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled with admiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Christianity. Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle's utterances, his hero worship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired great men primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they were more human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle and his religion of hero worship did not consist in the emotional worship of valour and success; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part of all healthy children. Where Carlyle really did harm was in the fact that he, more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of that modern habit of what is vulgarly called "Going the whole hog." Often in matters of passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog. This remarkable modern craze for making one's philosophy, religion, politics, and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for opportunities to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is a thing which existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were melancholy, and optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obliged to prove that gout and unrequited love make him dance with joy, and the pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a good supper convulse him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly possessed with this mania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take the same view of the wars of the angels and of the paltriest riot at Donnybrook Fair. It was this species of insane logic which led him into his chief errors, never his natural enthusiasms. Let us take an example. Carlyle's defence of slavery is a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak alike in argument and in moral instinct. The truth is, that he only took it up from the passion for applying everywhere his paradoxical defence of aristocracy. He blundered, of course, because he did not see that slavery has nothing in the world to do with aristocracy, that it is, indeed, almost its opposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its thoughtful defenders have made for aristocracy was that a few persons could more rapidly and firmly decide public affairs in the interests of the people. But slavery is not even supposed to be a government for the good of the governed. It is a possession of the governed avowedly for the good of the governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak; slavery uses the weak for the service of the strong. It is no derogation to man as a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed he was, that he should be ruled and guided for his own good like a child—for a child who is always ruled and guided we regard as the very type of spiritual existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute contradiction to that human spirituality in which Carlyle believed that a man should be owned like a tool for someone else's good, as if he had no personal destiny in the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular error of Carlyle's because we think that it is a curious example of the waste and unclean places into which that remarkable animal, "the whole hog," more than once led him. ...

Wisława Szymborska: Moment

2013-04-23T10:52:00.001+02:00

I walk on the slope of a hill gone green.
Grass, little flowers in the grass,
as in a children’s illustration.
The misty sky’s already turning blue.
A view of other hills unfolds in silence.

As if there’d never been any Cambrians, Silurians,
rocks snarling at crags,
upturned abysses,
no nights in flames
and days in clouds of darkness.

As if plains hadn’t pushed their way here
in malignant fevers,
icy shivers.

As if seas had seethed only elsewhere,
shredding the shores of the horizons.

It’s nine-thirty local time.
Everything’s in its place and in polite agreement.
In the valley a little brook cast as a little brook.
A path in the role of a path from always to ever.
Woods disguised as woods alive without end,
and above them birds in flight play birds in flight.

This moment reigns as far as the eye can reach.
One of those earthly moments
invited to linger.

—translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

The Rise of the American Novel

2013-04-22T12:51:00.002+02:00

You might think that a study of early 19th-century American fiction, focusing largely on half-forgotten books, should be the natural purview of a university press. Why, then, would Farrar Straus & Giroux publish a work of seemingly arcane literary history as a trade title? After all, outside of upper-level university classes, who now reads George Lippard’s “The Quaker City” or W.S. Mayo’s “Kaloolah” or Frank J. Webb’s “The Garies and Their Friends” or Elizabeth Stoddard’s “The Morgesons”? The answer may be surprising: Even before you finish “Truth’s Ragged Edge,” you’ll be searching your library, bookstore or the Internet for copies of them all.

Philip F. Gura, professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has produced an enthralling work of literary recovery. There’s nothing at all fuddy-duddy about the books he discusses. Those novels just mentioned and many others are collectively replete with violence, seduction, incest, serial murders, insanity, betrayal and revenge, personality disorders, orgies and much that is simply very, very strange. Yet all these appealingly lurid plot elements underpin complex examinations of class and caste and race and spiritual angst. If you tend, perhaps unconsciously, to dismiss American novels before “Moby-Dick” (1851) as largely earnest, moralizing tales written in fustian English — as essentially James Fenimore Cooper at his worst — or if you think that academics now write only for one another, this book will come as a revelation.

Gura, who knows the literary and intellectual life of 1790-1865 inside out (see, for further proof, his “American Transcendentalism: A History”), points out that the most persistent theme in our nation’s early fiction is “the contest between civic duty and individualism,” between the strictures of social or religious norms and fidelity to one’s own self and impulses. Susanna Rowson’s best-selling “Charlotte Temple” (1791) makes clear, in Gura’s words, that “capitulation to one’s feelings without proper rational reflection could lead not only to personal tragedy but to a breakdown of social mores.”Just consider what happens in Charles Brockden Brown’s “Wieland,” (1798) when the title character hears the voice of God commanding him to murder his wife and children.

In Robert Montgomery Bird’s “Sheppard Lee” (1836) — recently republished by New York Review Books — the protagonist, after accidentally killing himself, becomes a disembodied spirit who is able to enter and reanimate the corpses of the recently dead. He first takes over the body and the life of a rich squire, then a Quaker philanthropist, and eventually an African American slave. Lippard’s novel implicitly asks: Is the self fixed or malleable? Whenever Lee “inhabits other people’s bodies, he begins to act like them.” How, then, do we know that anyone truly is what he or she seems? As Melville writes in “Moby-Dick”: “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?” In Bird’s “Nick of the Woods” (1837), a devout Quaker, professing love and pacifism, is in fact a split personality. At night he becomes the Jibbenainosay, a crazed killer who brutally slaughters Indians and hacks the sign of the cross on their chests.

“Strike through the mask!” famously orders Ahab. In “The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime” (1844), Lippard does just that by imagining an American equivalent of the Hell-Fire Club. “The sinful actions of the large cast of Monk Hall regulars,” writes Gura, “include seduction, rape, incest, cannibalism, murder, counterfeiting, robbery, drunkenness, opium use — all indulged in by Philadelphia’s finest and described in graphic detail. Albert Livingstone, a regular visitor at the hall, finds his social-climbing wife, Dora, asleep naked on a divan with her lover, a man masquerading as an English lord. The Reverend F.A.T. Pyne drugs and tries to rape a young woman named Mabel, whom he has raised as a daughter. The reader learns that she is the illegitimate child of Devil Bug, a feral African American who is the chief pimp at Monk Hall.”

Such gothic excess mirrors the sinful desires lurking in all our souls and thus, somewhat paradoxically, our common humanity. But what is sinful? The Utopian socialist Charles Fourier imagined communal societies founded on the gratification of every desire, and many American followers attempted to create versions of his “phalansteries.” In Mayo’s “Kaloolah” (1849), which combines exotic travel narrative with Lost World romance, the intrepid hero discovers a perfectly harmonious civilization a la Fourier hidden deep in the heart of Africa.

Throughout “Truth’s Ragged Edge,” Gura offers potted biographies of his various authors, followed by interpretative summaries of their most notable books. Because so many of these novels are autobiographical, especially those by women and African Americans, it can sometimes be easy to confuse an actual life with its transformation into a novel’s plot. When Gura mentions Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, an ardent follower of Fourier, one might take him to be fictional, but he’s not. He frequented the salon of Mary Gove Nichols, whose autobiographical novel “Mary Lyndon” (1855) closes with the heroine’s dramatic insistence on her personal agency: “In a marriage with you,” she tells her husband-to-be, “I resign no right of my soul. I enter into no compact to be faithful to you. I only promise to be faithful to the deepest love of my heart. . . . If my love leads me from you,” she warns, “I must go.” She also insists on keeping her name and having a room of her own. Like a proto-Virginia Woolf, Nichols is just one of the many novelists of this period who take up the question: How is a woman to realize herself as a human being and not just as a wife and mother?

More here.

Scenes of Charlotte Bronte's Life in Brussels

2013-04-21T12:38:00.000+02:00

We had "done" Brussels after the approved fashion,—had faithfully visited the churches, palaces, museums, theatres, galleries, monuments, and boulevards, had duly admired the beautiful windows and the exquisite wood-carvings of the grand old cathedral of St. Gudule, the tower and tapestry and frescos and façade of the magnificent Hôtel-de-Ville, the stately halls and the gilded dome of the immense new Courts of Justice, and the consummate beauty of the Bourse, had diligently sought out the naïve boy-fountain, and had made the usual excursion to Waterloo.

This delightful task being conscientiously discharged, we proposed to devote our last day in the beautiful Belgian capital to the accomplishment of one of the cherished projects of our lives,—the searching out of the localities associated with Charlotte Bronté's unhappy school-life here, which she has so graphically portrayed. For our purpose no guide was available, or needful, for the topography and local coloring of "Villette" and "The Professor" are as vivid and unmistakable as in the best work of Dickens himself. Proceeding from St. Gudule, by the little street at the back of the cathedral, to the Rue Royale, and a short distance along that grand thoroughfare, we reached the park and a locality familiar to Miss Bronté's readers. Seated in this lovely pleasure-ground, the gift of the empress Maria Theresa, with its cool shade all about us, we noted the long avenues and the paths winding amid stalwart trees and verdant shrubbery, the dark foliage ineffectually veiling the gleaming statuary and the sheen of bright fountains, "the stone basin with its clear depth, the thick-planted trees which framed this tremulous and rippled mirror," the groups of happy people filling the seats in secluded nooks or loitering in the cool mazes and listening to the music,—we noted all this, and felt that Miss Bronté had revealed it to us long ago. It was across this park that Lucy Snowe was piloted from the bureau of the diligence by the chivalrous stranger, Dr. John, on the night when she, despoiled, helpless, and solitary, arrived in Brussels. She found the park deserted and dark, the paths miry, the water "dripping from its trees." "In the double gloom of tree and fog she could not see her guide, and could only follow his tread" in the darkness. We recalled another scene under these same tail trees, on a night when the iron gateway was "spanned by a naming arch of massed stars." The park was a "forest with sparks of purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage," and Lucy, driven from her couch by mental torture, wandered unrecognized amid the gay throng at the midnight concert of the Festival of the Martyrs and looked upon her lover, her friends the Brettons, and the secret junta of her enemies, Madame Beck, Madame Walravens, and Père Silas.

The sense of familiarity with the vicinage grew as we observed our surroundings. Facing us, at the extremity of the park, was the unpretentious palace of the king, in the small square across the Rue Royale at our right was the statue of General Béliard, and we knew that just behind it we should find the Rue Fossette and Charlotte Bronté's pensionnat, for Crimsworth, "The Professor," standing by the statue, had "looked down a great staircase" to the door-way of the school, and poor Lucy, on that forlorn first night in "Villette," to avoid the insolence of a pair of ruffians, had hastened down a flight of steps from the Rue Royale, and had come, not to the inn she sought, but to the pensionnat of Madame Beck.

From the statue we descended, by a quadruple series of wide stone stairs, into a narrow street, old-fashioned and clean, quiet and secluded in the very heart of the great city,—the Rue d'Isabelle,—and just opposite the foot of the steps we came to the wide door of a spacious, quadrangular, stuccoed old mansion, with a bit of foliage showing over a high wall at one side. A bright plate embellishes the door and bears the inscription,

PENSIONNAT DE DEMOISELLES

Héger-parent.

A Latin inscription in the wall of the house shows it to have been given to the Guild of Royal Archers by the Infanta Isabelle early in the seventeenth century. Long before that the garden had been the orchard and herbary of a convent and the Hospital for the Poor.

We were detained at the door long enough to remember Lucy standing there, trembling and anxious, awaiting admission, and then we too were "let in by a bonne in a smart cap,"—apparently a fit successor to the Rosine of forty years ago,—and entered the corridor. This is paved with blocks of black and white marble and has painted walls. It extends through the entire depth of the house, and at its farther extremity an open door afforded us a glimpse of the garden.

We were ushered into the little salon at the left of the passage,—the one often mentioned in "Villette,"—and here we made known our wish to see the garden and class-rooms, and met with a prompt refusal from the neat portresse. We tried diplomacy (also lucre) with her, without avail: it was the grandes vacances, the ladies were out, M. Héger was engaged, we could not be gratified,—unless, indeed, we were patrons of the school. At this juncture a portly, ruddy-faced lady of middle age and most courteous of speech and manner appeared, and, addressing us in faultless English, introduced herself as Mademoiselle Héger, co-directress of the pensionnat, and "wholly at our service." In response to our apologies for the intrusion and explanations of the desire which had prompted it, we received complaisant assurances of welcome; yet the manner of our kind entertainer indicated that she did not appreciate, much less share in, our admiration and enthusiasm for Charlotte Bronté and her books. In the subsequent conversation it appeared that Mademoiselle and her family hold decided opinions upon the subject,—something more than mere lack of admiration. She was familiar with the novels, and thought that, while they exhibit a talent certainly not above mediocrity, they reflect the injustice, the untruthfulness, and the ingratitude of their creator. We were obliged to confess to ourselves that the family have apparent reason for this view, when we reflected that in the books Miss Bronté has assailed their religion and disparaged the school and the character of the teachers and pupils, has depicted Madame Héger in the odious duad of Madame Beck and Mademoiselle Reuter, has represented M. Héger as the scheming and deceitful M. Pelet and the preposterous M. Paul, Lucy Snowe's lover, that this lover was the husband of Madame Héger, and father of the family of children to whom Lucy was at first bonne d'enfants, and that possibly the daughter she has described as the thieving, vicious Désirée—"that tadpole, Désirée Beck"—was this very lady now so politely entertaining us. To all this add the significant fact that "Villette" is an autobiographical novel, which "records the most vivid passages in Miss Bronté's own sad heart's history," not a few of the incidents being "literal transcripts" from the darkest chapter of her own life, and the light which the consideration of this fact throws upon her relations with members of the family will help us to apprehend the stand-point from which the Hégers judge Miss Bronté and her work, and to excuse, if not to justify, a natural resentment against one who has presented them in a decidedly bad light.

How bad we began to realize when, during the ensuing chat, we called to mind just what she had written of them. As Madame Beck, Madame Héger had been represented as lying, deceitful, and shameless, as heartless and unscrupulous, as "watching and spying everywhere, peeping through every keyhole, listening behind every door," as duplicating Lucy's keys and secretly searching her bureau, as meanly abstracting her letters and reading them to others, as immodestly laying herself out to entrap the man to whom she had given her love unsought. In letters to her friend Ellen, Miss Bronté complains that "Madame Héger never came near her" in her loneliness and illness.

It was, obviously, some accession to the existing animosity between herself and Madame Héger which precipitated Miss Bronté's final departure from the pensionnat. Mrs. Gaskell ascribes their mutual dislike to Charlotte's free expression of her aversion to the Catholic Church, of which Madame Héger was a devotee, and hence "wounded in her most cherished opinions;" but a later writer, in the "Westminster Review," plainly intimates that Miss Bronté hated the woman who sat for Madame Beck because marriage had given to her the man whom Miss Bronté loved, and that "Madame Beck had need to be a detective in her own house." The recent death of Madame Héger has rendered the family, who hold her now only as a sacred memory, more keenly sensitive than ever to anything which would seem by implication to disparage her.

For himself it would appear that M. Héger has less cause for resentment, for, although in "Villette" he (or his double) is pictured as "a waspish little despot," as fiery and unreasonable, as "detestably ugly" in his anger, closely resembling "a black and sallow tiger," as having an "overmastering love of authority and public display," as basely playing the spy and reading purloined letters, and in the Bronté epistles Charlotte declares he is choleric and irritable, compels her to make her French translations without a dictionary or grammar, and then has "his eyes almost plucked out of his head" by the occasional English word she is obliged to introduce, etc., yet all this is partially atoned for by the warm praise she subsequently accords him for his goodness to her and his "disinterested friendship," by the poignant regret she expresses at parting with him,—perhaps wholly expiated by the high compliment she pays him of making her heroine, Lucy, fall in love with him, or the higher compliment it is suspected she paid him of falling in love with him herself. One who reads the strange history of passion in "Villette," in conjunction with her letters, "will know more of the truth of her stay in Brussels than if a dozen biographers had undertaken to tell the whole tale." ...

Lord Byron: Euthanasia

2013-04-17T17:48:00.001+02:00

When Time, or soon or late, shall bring
The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead,
Oblivion! may thy languid wing
Wave gently o'er my dying bed!

No band of friends or heirs be there,
To weep, or wish, the coming blow:
No maiden, with dishevelled hair,
To feel, or feign, decorous woe.

But silent let me sink to earth,
With no officious mourners near:
I would not mar one hour of mirth,
Nor startle friendship with a tear.

Yet Love, if Love in such an hour
Could nobly check its useless sighs,
Might then exert its latest power
In her who lives, and him who dies.

'Twere sweet, my Psyche! to the last
Thy features still serene to see:
Forgetful of its struggles past,
E'en Pain itself should smile on thee.

But vain the wish?for Beauty still
Will shrink, as shrinks the ebbing breath;
And women's tears, produced at will,
Deceive in life, unman in death.

Then lonely be my latest hour,
Without regret, without a groan;
For thousands Death hath ceas'd to lower,
And pain been transient or unknown.

`Ay, but to die, and go,' alas!
Where all have gone, and all must go!
To be the nothing that I was
Ere born to life and living woe!

Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be.

Poet of Loss

2013-04-16T12:12:00.002+02:00

Oh, for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy.

So wrote the author of “Sleep and Poetry,” composed in late 1816. Alas, John Keats was allowed only half that time, dying at the age of 25 in 1821.

Is there any more affecting story than his in the annals of English literature? Orphaned at a young age, barely five feet tall (and sensitive about it), and raggedly educated, Keats was nonetheless naturally gregarious and fond of “women, wine, and snuff.” A Londoner through and through, he loved the theater, enjoyed watching boxing matches, and once spent an evening cutting cards for half guineas. This sometimes overidealized poet—so sensitive! so ethereal!—even seems to have been treated for a venereal disease, possibly syphilis. He fell in love at least twice before he met Fanny Brawne, to whom he became engaged. When they were apart or quarrelling, he suffered horribly from jealousy.

For a couple of years, the young Keats was also absorbed with medical studies and nearly became what we might call a physician’s assistant. Admirably dedicated to his siblings, he wrote regularly to his sister Fanny and his brother George (who emigrated to the United States and was cheated out of his savings by John James Audubon, no less). When his other brother, Tom, fell mortally ill of consumption, i.e., tuberculosis, the poet devotedly nursed him—to the detriment of his own health. When, shortly after Tom’s death, Keats himself spat up a bit of deep red, he recognized it as arterial blood, and knew that he, too, was doomed. He traveled to Italy, hoping for a reprieve, but ultimately died, after great suffering, in Rome. On his tombstone, he requested that these words be inscribed: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

The dying Keats was, however, quite wrong about being forgotten. Percy Bysshe Shelley almost immediately composed one of his greatest works, “Adonaïs,” as a memorial to him. Charles Armitage Brown brought out a brief biography, in which he accused the literary critics who had scathingly attacked Keats and “the Cockney School of Poetry” of having hastened his beloved friend’s death. Substantial lives and studies gradually appeared, including a two-volume biography by Amy Lowell early in the 20th century and, in the 1960s, substantial volumes by Walter Jackson Bate, Aileen Kelly, and Robert Gittings. Nearly all of these books are first-rate in their differing ways, for Keats seems to bring out the best in his admirers. In 2008, for instance, Stanley Plumly’s “personal biography,” Posthumous Keats, garnered tremendous reviews and well-deserved praise. To scholar and fellow poet David Baker, it was nothing less than “the greatest book ever written about the greatest lyric poet of our language.”

Even with such competition, John Keats: A New Life has much to recommend it. Nicholas Roe, professor of English at the University of St Andrews, comes to his mighty task with superb credentials: two previous scholarly studies of the poet, a biography of the fiery controversialist Leigh Hunt (whom the young Keats revered), and the chairmanship of the Keats Foundation. Roe writes, moreover, with reportorial crispness (though he does overuse phrases like “as we shall see”) and, at times, tracks his subject’s brief life almost by the hour.

“Like Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and The Prelude,” underscores Roe, “as a poet Keats depended on memories laid down in very early childhood.” Roe stresses, in particular, the emotional turmoil resulting from the death, while riding, of Keats’s 31-year-old father, Thomas, when John was just 8 years old. This was followed by the sudden remarriage of Keats’s mother, Frances, two months later to a man “aged twenty, with no income of his own.” Roe even raises the possibility that Frances, known to be lively and “passionately fond of amusement,” may have been carrying on a clandestine affair before her first husband’s death. When she died at just 35 from tuberculosis, her children—John, George, Tom, and Fanny—found themselves thrust upon various relatives, or sent away to school. Financial wrangling within the extended family dragged on for years.

Roe sees aspects of these family tragedies, and possible suspicions about his mother, reemerging throughout Keats’s poetry—as well as being a possible cause of his self-confessed “morbidity” and Hamlet-like melancholy. Death haunted the poet’s early life, and part of his childhood was spent literally next door to Bethlem Royal Hospital, aka Bedlam, the asylum for the insane.

Something of a scrapper and hardly a model student, young Keats nonetheless fell in love with that key to all mythology, Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary. Using it as a source book, the teenage boy began work on a (now lost) prose translation of the Aeneid, possibly as a distraction from grief at his mother’s death. About the same time, he discovered Spenser’s Faerie Queene and went through it, in his own words, “as a young horse would through a spring meadow—ramping!” A similar passion for Shakespeare and Milton soon followed.

More here.

Resistance, Rebellion, and Writing

2013-04-13T12:24:00.002+02:00

“People expect too much of writers,” Albert Camus lamented in the late 1950s. At the time Camus was writing, the Algerian rebellion had grown into a full-scale guerrilla war for independence, and while his initial sympathy for the uprising led the French Right and the French Algerian settlers to denounce him as a traitor, he also came in for frequent polemical attacks from the French Left for not energetically and unequivocally supporting the insurgents. Criticism also came from the Algerian militants themselves. Frantz Fanon, the best-known Algerian writer, derided him as a “sweet sister.” Sartre, formerly his close friend, mocked Camus’s “beautiful soul.”

Camus’s complaint does him credit. He agonized over his political pronouncements in a way that the more brilliant, mercurial, doctrinaire Sartre never had to. In 1957, as the war ground on and positions hardened on both sides, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despairing of the Algerian situation but determined to answer his critics and, with the prestige of the Nobel behind him, make one final effort for peace and reconciliation, Camus assembled a short collection of his writings about Algeria, which was published in 1958. It appears now in English for the first time, ably translated by Arthur Goldhammer.

Algerian Chronicles spans two decades. In 1939, when Camus was a young journalist in Algeria—where he was born in 1913, to impoverished and barely literate working-class parents—a severe drought struck the region of Kabylia. Camus traveled there to report on it, and was horrified. He wrote a series of vivid and powerful dispatches, with which Algerian Chronicles begins.

Kabylia was a populous province that, like many other underdeveloped areas, derived a large proportion of its income from the remittances of émigré workers. During the Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment soared in France, many Algerian immigrants were sent home and new emigration was discouraged. Kabylia was already economically depressed when the drought hit, and the results were devastating. Hunger and unemployment were general, wages were below subsistence level, and there were few schools for poor children to attend. Some public subsidies and private charity arrived from France but made hardly a dent.

More here.