Joseph Epstein teaches Henry James - I did at least grasp that Henry James was serious stuff

Joseph Epstein wrote an account of teaching a class on Henry James in 1990.*  Epstein was at Northwestern University, so his students were ace.  His reading list, in order:

1.  “The Art of Fiction”
2. “The Figure in the Carpet”
3. “The Aspern Papers”
4. Washington Square
5. “Daisy Miller”
6. “The Pupil”
7. The Europeans
8. “The Turn of the Screw”
9. The Princess Casamassima
10. The Ambassadors (to be read for the final exam)

I would like to pause for a moment to savor that parenthetical description.  The Ambassadors is in James’s thick late style, and is over 500 pages long in the Penguin Classics edition.  Now that, I say, that is a university education – “for the final exam!”

This would be as good a way to get to know James as any, except that most of us would want to take more than ten weeks to get through the list, and I also, for health reasons, will have to reschedule the final.  I claim, accurately, to not know James well, but I have read 40% of that list.  I was at 30% twenty years ago.

Epstein titled his essay “Selling Henry James,” and he meant it: “I wanted converts.”  Converts not to any particular view of James, but to the idea that reading James was still worth the time of a 20 year-old.  He thinks he succeeded by the way; the article is an account of a class that went well.

Epstein’s introduction to James was in a class at the University of Chicago, where he was assigned a “novel about furniture,” as the protagonist of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty calls it, The Spoils of Poynton:

How much of the novel I could be said to have comprehended I cannot say.  Yet I came away with respect for it, which was in part owing to the respect I had for the respect in which my teacher [Morton Dauwen Zabel] held it.  I did at least grasp that Henry James was serious stuff…

I read “Daisy Miller” in American Lit II – I think that was my first James – but did not learn the same lesson, not too strongly.  “Daisy Miller” is stiff but light and elegant.  I hate to press the word “serious” against it too forcefully.  I learned to respect James later by reading good readers of James, readers like Edmund Wilson and Joseph Epstein.

A few other lessons.  Be alert for James’s comedy.  Easy enough for me, since I think Dostoevsky and Wuthering Heights are hilarious, but valuable advice for others.  No, for me, too, since much of the comedy is created by minute shades of phrasing: “for Henry James not entirely but in good part life was a matter of phrasing.”  Actively look for the meaning in James.  He will not do the work for the reader: “He had a positive horror of generalization.”  Read James not in one particular way but in many ways.

I think I knew all of that.   Still, how pleasant to eavesdrop on Epstein’s class without having to take the final.

* Epstein’s article originally appeared in The New Criterion, 1990 (here 'tis).  I found it in the Epstein’s essay collection Pertinent Players (1993).

The first published Henry James story - not what I was expecting

The concerns I expressed yesterday about reading Henry James neurotically were the direct result of reading James neurotically.  By discussing my neurosis, I hope to expel it, as with a Freudian talking cure.

My neurotic action was to read the first four stories James published, one from 1864, one from 1865, and two from 1866.  Simultaneously he began his career as a book reviewer for magazines.  At least I was not neurotic enough to read the book reviews.  I went to the library and looked them up in the two Library of America volumes of James’s criticism, but I did not actually read them.  So there is that.

I should read good James first, surely?  And there was no reason to think that these early works were particularly good.  They are not, but I was curious.  The problem builds, though, if I next read his fifth story, and then the sixth, and so on, ignoring Washington Square and “The Pupil” because of a meaningless chronology fetish.*

“A Tragedy of Error,” 1864, 25 pages in the old Complete Tales of Henry James Volume 1: 1864-1868, edited by Leon Edel, that is the first Henry James story.  James was 21 or 22 when it was published.

We are in “a French seaport town.”  A pretty woman receives a letter and faints.  The point of view hovers over the woman and a man who is clearly her lover, and in a clever touch shifts, when they return home, not to either of them but to one of the servants:

The cook looked up from her potato-peeling with a significant wink.

“What can it be,” said she, “but that monsieur returns?”

Part II, another shift, to the docks and to a sinister boatman.  He steals milk from a little boy!  His own nephew.  What a bad man.  The story spends the next fifteen pages in a conversation between the woman and the boatman as they negotiate the terms of a contract to kill her husband.  Then a twist!  The end.

To be clear:  60% of the first Henry James story is about an adulterous woman hiring a contract killer to knock off her hapless husband.  His first story is a noir, except without all of the shadow imagery.  I described the story to ma femme – “It’s Thérèse Raquin,” she exclaimed, and it is, except Zola’s novel was published three years later.  Were boat-related murders a common subject in French magazine fiction at the time?  Or American?  I say French because the story is clearly a French imitation, with Balzac and Mérimée the strongest flavors.

I do not want to claim too strongly that “A Tragedy of Error” is worth reading.  I am sure happy to know about it.

Here we have, thanks to Cornell University, the entire issue of Continental Monthly in which it appeared.  Let me know if you find anything good.

* Emma of Book Around the Corner, pitying me, has kindly suggested we read Washington Square together, which we will do.  Writing may commence in four or five weeks.  If anyone else wanted to read along, we have no legal means to stop them.  Washington Square is a short one.  Thanks, Emma!

Rambling towards Henry James

Henry James has moved into the top spot of my Humiliation list, I think, the writer who, from the point of view of his status, I should know better than I do.  I have read some of his Greatest Hits – “Daisy Miller” (1878), The Europeans (1878), “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), and a few other much-anthologized stories – and I have read so much about James, just through the ordinary process of reading magazines, that I do not feel so ignorant, although I likely am.

By status I mean – well, I mean the 16 volumes of Henry James published by the Library of America.  Six thick collections of novels, five of “tales” as James called his short fiction, two of criticism, and two volumes of travel writing.  For comparison, Mark Twain and Philip Roth are currently at seven books a piece.  No American writer of similar achievement can compete with the bulk of Henry James.  No writer of similar bulk can compete with his achievement. In retrospect, books by James and his opposite number Twain fill a lot of the imaginary shelf labeled “Late 19th Century American Books We Still Read.”  The 1870s and 1880s would look especially thin without them.  I leave proof of this statement as an exercise for the reader.

How does the neurotic reader deal with this vast mass of stuff, much of it likely mediocre?  By overcoming his neurosis, I hope, by not reading all five books of the short fiction, by not reading Watch and Ward or Confidence or the five volumes of Leon Edel’s biography of James, but instead restricting myself to the one-volume abridgement, and to only the best dozen or so of his novels, and only the most famous thousand or two pages of the tales.  A good plan until the twelfth-best novel turns out to be interesting enough to make me curious about the thirteenth.

Other writers have been leading me to James.  Eliot and Balzac and Hawthorne, for example.  As I  got to know these writers better, a natural question was “What came next?”  The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians are good answers to that question.  The un-Jamesian Robert Louis Stevenson led me to James by a different path, as the two writers debated the art of fiction.

I am not sure why I have not pursued James seriously.  One of the writers I admire most, Vladimir Nabokov, loathed James (“Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting on the wrong one?”); another, Joseph Epstein, calls James “the most artistically intelligent, the most subtle, finally the greatest American writer.”* Both are likely correct, meaning that the artistic qualities most valued by Nabokov are not to be found in James, while the subtleties admired by Epstein are there if I can learn to see them.  This sounds like something that could be profitably written about in blogpost-sized fragments, if I were to read more James.

*  “Selling Henry James,” Pertinent Players, 1993, p. 181.

I am not interested in art. I am interested in the obstacles to art. - Richard Howard's Robert Browning

A swerve:  Richard Howard’s poem “November 1889,” found in Findings (1971).  The Howard poem is an imagined monologue by an elderly Browning, speaking to his son in Venice about – oh, everything.  Browning died on December 12, 1889.  That should frame the poem.  Hey, look, Browning was born on May 7, 1812, so this is his bicentenary year, too, just like Dickens.

Browning, knowing death is near, is delivering to his son Pen the box of his and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s letters, “five-hundred letters, by my count” for posthumous publication:

      Some twenty years since I looked
          at what is in the box.
          Cowardice, call it that;
    I do not know the name.  Sufficient
for me, knowing they are there.

Browning has been thinking about his and Elizabeth’s reputation:  “I dread but one thing: biography.”  His typically optimistic solution is openness:

                                       It should be two volumes…
          Nothing but ourselves then,
          though that be too much now
      for me.  Put the box away,
      high and dry.  I am still here.

Those ellipses belong to Howard; the complete correspondence of the Brownings with each other and everyone else has now been published in eighteen volumes.  Browning was so rarely himself in his poems that I take Howard’s line as a curious inversion of death, a surrender not of but into Browning’s own self.

That is the plot, so to speak.  The rest of the poem is commentary:  Browning on Venice through the years (“the marble blacker / the patience of ruin deeper”), comments on Wilkie Collins, who had died in September (“Well, we are all stewing-pans, and can cook only what we can hold”).  Browning is having trouble writing because of “the torment of starch / in my new shirts,” and also because he fears he is wasting his time at idiotic parties, including one at which a woman “with queenly airs / and a snake, I vow, tattooed on her ankle” tries to seduce him.

I am not sure how much later Browning I really plan to read.  His critical reputation after The Ring and the Book is not so hot, but I can admire the man that Howard depicts.  What relationship this character has to the real Browning I cannot say, but I see what Howard, or Browning, or “Browning," means in this passage, a potential motto for Wuthering Expectations:

                      They seem
to care so deeply
for what they call art:
          I suppose it is like one
          of those indelicate subjects
                  which always sounds better
                   in a foreign language.
    I am not interested in art.
I am interested in the obstacles
    to art.

***

Richard Howard is a master of Browning-like dramatic monologues.  The book before Findings, the 1969 Untitled Subjects is full of nothing but – poems spoken by or about Richard Strauss , Walter Scott, John Ruskin, Thackeray (“probably Thackeray,” Howard notes).  Howard is probably best known as a translator from the French: Baudelaire and Stendhal and a shelf of Roland Barthes.  But anyone with sympathy for Browning and his century should try Howard’s poems.

Don’t it want trimming, turning, furbishing up and polishing over? - Robert Browning the Medium

I have been reading Robert Browning’s poems not in some Selected Poems of but in replicas of the original published volumes.  Ugly and unsatisfying replicas, such as The Complete Works of Robert Browning Volume VI, Ohio University Press, 1996, where I read Dramatis Personae and part II of Men and Women, simply ignoring the fifth or third of the page describing the manuscript variants.

I wish I could read Browning’s four great collections – Dramatic Lyrics (1841), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men and Women (1855), and Dramatis Personae (1864) – as four separate objects, as books.  I guess I could edit an electronic text, pick a cover, and send it to a print-on-demand joint.  If I ever need another hobby, I’ll do that.

Selected Poem volumes and anthologies pull almost all of their Robert Browning from these four books.  My Norton Anthology of English Literature gives Browning about 90 pages, a huge amount of space.  Three poems in two pages are from his later work.  The Penguin Classics Selected Poems is more generous to Late Browning, giving only 240 of 290 pages to his four major books.  In both cases, the enormous 1868-9 The Ring and the Book is omitted.  I have not read it, but I will, I hope.

Dramatis Personae was published after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although many of the poems were written earlier.  It is, and this is one good reason to read the collection as a book, suffused with EBB, even though only one poem, “Prospice,” a challenge to Death, is actually about her:

And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
                Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
                Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul!  I shall clasp thee again,
                 And with God be the rest!  (23-28)

If I am mistaking the speaker, as is likely, then the poem is not about EBB, at least not directly.

About a third of Dramatis Personae is given to a single long monologue, “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’.”  The medium’s name tells me what I need to know about Browning’s attitude towards spiritualism.  Elizabeth was a believer, Robert was not, although he apparently kept his frustration at what he saw as his wife’s gullibility to himself.  Or he directed it into this poem, which I doubt he would have published while Elizabeth lived.  Mr. Sludge is simply a fraud, a con man,  and the poem is his long, drunken confession.

At least that is how it begins.  The confession, including details about the magician’s tricks of floating tables and ghostly presences, somehow turns into a justification (“As for religion – why, I served it, sir! \ I’ll stick to that!”, 664-5), and the justification becomes a metaphysics (“I live by signs and omens,” 971), imposture as a system of belief:

Well, when you hear, you’ll answer them [genuine spiritual signs], start up
And stride into the presence, top of toe,
And there find Sludge beforehand, Sludge that sprang
At noise o’ the knuckle on the partition-wall!
I think myself the more religious man.  (1001-5)

Like all great con men, Sludge is able to bring himself to believe whatever nonsense he spouts, at least for the moment, so there is no stable position for the reader.  The audience, the “you,” is not merely a Browning-like skeptic, but a blackmailer, so that he is not much help either.  Sludge’s system inevitably (with the help of the booze) collapses into self-interest:

What need I care?  I cheat in self-defence,
And there’s my answer to a world of cheats!
Cheat?  To be sure, sir!  What’s the world worth else?
Who takes it as he finds, and thanks his stars?
Don’t it want trimming, turning, furbishing up
And polishing over?  (1346-51)

A line has been crossed here.  Is Sludge a spiritualist, or an artist, a poet?  Browning and the fraud converge.  Both are magicians.  One is rather more skilled than the other.

Such good books.

I joy because the quails come - obscure Browning, difficult Browning

Robert Browning was, for a time, best known – well, first he was best known as the husband of a famous and beloved poet, so I mean aside from the sheen of Elizabeth Barrett Browning – he was best known as the author of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”:

     Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
     And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
    And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles…

This first-rate children’s poem has been replaced by “My Last Duchess,” now the representative* Browning anthology piece.  “My Last Duchess” is a perfect textbook on how to read the dramatic monologue.  The narrator is a character, certainly not Robert Browning, who was not an Italian duke.  He tells us a story but skips crucial juicy bits (“This grew; I gave commands; \ Then all smiles stopped together”) but I can sleuth out the gaps without much trouble.  Maybe I have to read the short poem twice.

My point is that these two famous Robert Browning poems are clear.  Reading Browning in bulk, though, I cannot escape the fact that much of his work is defiantly obscure.  His earliest works, the long Shelleyan closet dramas Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) are close to incomprehensible; Sordello (1840) was more than close, and defeated me after a few pages.   As if I remember a thing about the first two, which I read!

Young Browning was allusive and learned, but he also left out too much.  His leaps in argument are too great.  Perhaps we see a reason I like Browning so much; the same charges could be brought against Wuthering Expectations.

In Browning’s mature poems, obscurity transforms into difficulty.  “Caliban Upon Setebos; Or Natural Theology in the Island,” one of the masterpieces from Dramatis Personae (1864) will show what I mean.  Caliban leads me to The Tempest, but what is Setebos, a person, a place?  The name is from the play, invoked twice by Caliban, “my dam’s god Setebos,” so a god, or God.

Caliban is the speaker or thinker in the poem, but he refers to himself in both the third and the first person, sometimes hiding the “I” behind an apostrophe:

‘Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,  (1-2)

Only in the pit can Caliban safely speculate on the purpose and nature of Setebos (“Because to talk about Him, vexes”).  God cannot see into the cave, it seems.

All of this is clear enough upon re-reading, but is baffling at first.  Early references to Miranda and Prospero at least assure me that I have picked the right Caliban, but the where and how and why require work, and of course Caliban does not develop his ideas in a coherent order.  Of course there are huge gaps in his natural theology.  For whom is that not true?

It is only looking back, for example, that I see that Caliban is worried about first causes, “the something over Setebos \ That made Him” (129-30).  The monster speculates that Setebos may have driven off an earlier god, who still exists somewhere, perhaps in the stars, the part of the universe Setebos did not create (27).  Setebos himself lives in the moon.  Caliban has a really fine imagination.

But now the leap, after the invocation of the absent god:

I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring  quails here when I have a mind (135-6)

The mysterious actions of the absent or arbitrary or incomprehensible god is a source of joy to Setebos, just as the quails are to Caliban, and the joy comes from Caliban’s (and thus God’s) lack of control over them.  Caliban always makes Setebos in his image, but then models his own behavior after his God:

‘Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
‘Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.

A storm approaches as the poem ends, sent by Setebos, who after all can see into the cave, to chastise Caliban.  “Fool to gibe at Him!”  The Tempest is about to begin.

*  Or maybe “’Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’”?  No, surely “My Last Duchess.”

Visiting the Paris Morgue with Robert Browning

The subject at hand is not Robert Browning, but Browning’s 1864 book Dramatis Personae, a great book, his fourth great book in a row.  I looked at one of its less known poems yesterday, seldom collected elsewhere.  Today I will enjoy a better known poem, although not one of the book’s big anthology hits like “Rabbi ben Ezra” or “Caliban Upon Setebos”.  This one, “Apparent Failure,” is about suicide, and includes a fairly direct statement of Browning’s religious belief, assuming that the speaker of the poem is Robert Browning, and the real one at that.  Who knows.

The poem has an epigraph, from a “Paris newspaper”: “We shall soon lose a celebrated building.”  That building is the morgue on the Ile de la Cité, which I last visited with Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White (1860 - why did I not write about this?), and will soon see again (I am respecting chronology) in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867).  The building was not demolished, at least not then, as it appears again in an 1883 story by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

This particular morgue (“The dead-house where you show your drowned”) was famous because it was open to the public, with the bodies, many pulled from the Seine and in horrible states of decay, on display in hopes of identification.  Zola is direct about the entertainment value of corpse-watching.  Why does Browning go in, as he did in 1856?

One pays  one’s debt in such a case;
        I plucked up heart and entered, - stalked,
Keeping a tolerable face
       Compared with some whose cheeks were chalked:
Let them!  No Briton’s to be baulked!

I see.  A demonstration of national fortitude.

Here are the corpses.  Browning has no interest in Zola’s evocation of disgust, but rather with the dignity of the undignified dead.

Poor men, God made, and all for that!
         The reverence struck me; o’er each head
Religiously was hung its hat,
          Each coat dripped by the owner’s bed,
Sacred from touch: each had his berth,
          His bounds, his proper place of rest,
Who last night tenanted on earth
        Some arch, where twelve such slept abreast, -
Unless the plain asphalte seemed best.

Browning puzzles over the causes of suicide: thwarted idealism, the world’s cruelty, plus the usual stuff, money and women.  He hopes for the best, for the suicides, for all of us.

It’s wiser being good than bad;
        It’s safer being meek than fierce:
It’s fitter being sane than mad.
        My own hope is a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
        That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
        That which began best, can’t end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.

Youth and truth With loves and doves - reading and misreading Robert Browning

When I started this Robert Browning poem, as usual a monologue, I got everything wrong.

Dîs Aliter Visum; Or, Le Byron de Nos Jours

Wait, I had better unpack the title first.  The Latin is from the Aeneid, and means “the gods see things differently”; the French is “the Byron of our time.”  What gods?  Why in French?  Etc.  Typical Robert Browning.  The poem begins:

I

Stop, let me have the truth of that!
        Is that all true?  I say, the day
Ten years ago when both of us
        Met on a morning, friends – as thus
We meet this evening, friends or what? –

II

Did you – because I took your arm
        And sillily smiled, “A mass of brass
That sea looks, blazing underneath!”
        While up the cliff-road edged with heath,
We took the turns nor came to harm –

A pause again: that “mass of brass” is hard to ignore.  Moving back to the first stanza, and leafing ahead, I see that line 2 always features this close internal rhyme.  “Walked and talked,” “youth and mouth,” verse and worse.”  I do not know the name of the form: ABCCA, but with B hiccupping.

The narrator is a well-to-do English woman, the “you” a famous French poet.  He is the Byron of our time, and also perhaps the god who sees things differently.  Ten years ago, the woman wanted to marry him.  The poet was tempted  but for egotistical reasons never pressed the point.  They both subsequently married others, and married worse.  The woman spends the poem recreating the meeting when, with some sort of nudge, both of their lives could have been different.  And should have been, she argues, whether to herself or to the poet’s face I can only guess.

All of this has been pieced together from the rest of the poem.  On my first pass I became confused about who was speaking and even more confused about the identity of the French poet’s “you,” in effect inventing a third character.  My imaginary poem was not bad, but awfully confusing, and in the last stanza it crumbled in my hands.  Oh, oops.  Start again.  Robert Browning poems.

The odd rhyme scheme now looks integral to the poem.  Taking “mass of brass” as genuine speech, we hear the young narrator trying to impress the famous poet (in his words, or, really, her imagined version of his words “she tries to sing… Reads verse and thinks she understands”).  The repetition of the repetition in each stanza becomes a parody of the poet, climaxing in his description of her (her imagined etc.) in stanza XIII, when the internal rhymes explode:

“And this young beauty, round and sound
           As a mountain-apple. Youth and truth
With loves and doves, at all events
            With money in the Three per Cents;
Whose choice of me would seem profound: –

The narrator, over the last ten years seems to have learned something about poetry, or has at least revised her valuation of the French Byron’s verse, if not his person.  They should have married – “you had saved two souls: nay, four.”  Kind of a sad poem, whatever the struggle to pull out the sadness.

The poem is from the 1864 Dramatis Personae.  I wonder if I have the fortitude for a week of Browning.  I will find out.

The verb rigidly defined the action - Machado de Assis in the courtroom and dressing room

The pair of Machado de Assis stories Clifford E. Landers translated for Words without Borders a couple of years ago are excellent; perhaps I should say more about them.  Curious reader can test my impressions against them and can come back here and really rake me over the coals.  One is “A Visit from Alcibiades”; t’other is “Justice Unbalanced.”  The former is the only English translation of the story; the latter exists in another version more accurately but somehow irritatingly titled “Wallow, Swine!” (“Suje-se Gordo”).

“A Visit from Alcibiades” is deliberately minor, but still tasty.  The narrator, reading Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades,  somehow summons the Athenian general and dandy.  After some fuss, the story turns out to be a satire on clothes – thus the need for Alcibiades in particular.  The narrator is going to dress the Athenian for a ball:

"Black tubes!" he exclaimed.

These were the black trousers that I had just put on.  He exclaimed and laughed, a cynical laugh in which surprise mingled with mockery, greatly offending my sensitivity as a modern man.  Because, Your Excellency will note, although to us our times may seem deserving of criticism, even of execration, we dislike it when an ancient ridicules them to our face.

That last line is prime Machadian (Assisisian?) humor, as is an earlier aphorism, “death is the ultimate sarcasm.”  Next in the narrative comes, each more absurd than the last, the cravat,  then the frock coat, then, as a climax, the hat, and I suppose I should stop there.  I said it was minor!  But the sense of Machado in the story is strong.

“Justice Unbalanced” is more clearly one of those Masterpieces of World Literature.  The narrator tells us about two terms on a criminal jury.  In the first trial, he and his fellow jurors convict a man of a minor forgery.  The narrator is shocked by a “corpulent and redheaded” fellow juror who seems to judge the guilt of the defendant by the pettiness of his crime.  I am going to switch to the quite different, more vivid version of the story found in The Devil’s Church and Other Stories and the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story:

“And all for twenty dollars, a pittance.  Let the swine wallow in his filth!  Wallow, swine, wallow!”

“Wallow, swine!”  I confess I was astonished.  Not that I understood him nor felt that he was being fair, and that’s why I was astonished.

The big twisteroo occurs when the narrator again serves on a jury, and the defendant turns out to be the red-headed juror, now thin, charged with embezzling a huge amount of money.  No matter what the other evidence might be, the narrator is sure of the man’s guilt.  I will switch back to Landers for contrast:

The verb rigidly defined the action.  "Steal something big!"  It means a man shouldn't commit an act of that kind except for a considerable sum.  No one should defile himself for a few coins.  If you're going to steal, steal something big!

The story ends on an ambivalent note with the narrator drawing a quite different lesson from the story than I did, one that focuses my attention on his motives and psychology.

A couple of days ago I claimed that the stories of Machado de Assis were unlike his novels, but my last claim is exactly of a piece with the novels.

I hope someone is currently translating another collection of Machado de Assis stories for me.

It doesn’t mean anything, but it’ll become popular right away - pop Machado de Assis

The Machado de Assis short story “The Celebrity” (“Um Homem Célebre”) caught my attention with its subject.  It is an 1888 story about a pop musician, a songwriter.  I do not know any earlier fiction on the subject, although I wish I did, because I would like to read it.  This one begins:

“Oh, so you’re Pestana?” asked Miss Mota, with a sweeping gesture of admiration.  And immediately correcting her familiar address: “Pardon my manners, but… are you really he?”

Annoyed and dispirited, Pestana answered yes, it was he.

The celebrity Pestana is at a party where he has just played, as a special favor to his hostess, his newest hit song “Don’t Kid Me Honey.”

The very latest – published just three weeks earlier, there was no longer a nook or cranny of the city, however remote, where it wasn’t known.  The tune was on everybody’s lips.

“Don’t Kid Me Honey” is a polka.  Pestana writes hit polkas.  Walking home after the party, he finds that last line to be literally true, to his frustration.  Pestana  surrounds his piano with portraits of “Cimarosa, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Bach, Schumann, and three others,” and wants to compose “just one immortal page,” but inspiration never comes.  Or actually it does, frequently:

He began to play something that was his very own, with genuine inspiration: a polka, a frolicsome polka, in the language of the billboards.  No resistance on the part of the composer.

It is the ur-plot for the popular artist, isn’t it?  The bestselling author who wants critical acclaim, the hack painter who wants not just success but respect.  This part of Machado’s story is not so original.  Or perhaps it is, and I am only remembering the mass of later stories on the same theme.

The polka writer marries a consumptive woman hoping that she will be his muse, and an ironic twist or two follow, ones.  She does inspire him, and he composes, in secret, a nocturne for her:

One Sunday, however, he could no longer hold back, and he called his wife to hear him play a passage of the nocturne.  He didn’t tell her what it was or who had composed it.  He stopped suddenly and looked at her questioningly.

“Don’t stop,” said Maria, “it’s Chopin, isn’t it?”

Pestana became pale, stared out into space, repeated one or two passages, and got up.  Maria sat down at the piano and after making an effort to recall it to her memory, executed the piece by Chopin.

That is pretty good, but honestly my favorite parts of this story are the passages about the business of pop songwriting.  Pestana’s publisher is always ready with a title.  The one written in the passage up above, for example, is “Please Keep Your Basket to Yourself, Ma’am.”  It is another smash hit.  Sometimes the titles are political, “The Law of September 28” Or “Bravo for the Timely Election!”  Early on Pestana asks his publisher what the title means and is told “’It doesn’t mean anything, but it’ll become popular right away.’”

Like a good novelty song, a song about something songs are not often about, “The Celebrity” is a fine novelty story.

I found “The Celebrity” in The Devil’s Church and Other Stories.

Cataloguing 40 of at least 60 masterpieces of world literature by Machado de Assis

More of a catalogue than real writing, that is what I will do today.

I mocked (gently, gently) the editor of the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story for his amusingly precise insistence, borrowed from another critic, that “at least sixty [of Machado’s stories] are masterpieces  of world literature” (38).  What amuses me, aside from the vague pedantry, is wondering what the rest of the list would look like.  Chekhov wrote at least 100 masterpieces of world literature; Hemingway wrote at least 40 MoWL; Flannery O’Connor did not write many stories, but at least 20 are MoWL.  I am just guessing at the numbers.  An odd exercise.  Suddenly the world is overflowing with masterpieces.

Not that the general point is wrong.  I have now tracked down all of the short Machado that I can find in English, forty stories if I am counting correctly, almost all from the post-1880 Phase II of Machado’s career, written alongside his five great novels.  It seems like a shame and a mistake that, just to pick a prominent example, the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction does not have a Machado story.  Note to Norton: “Father versus Mother” is the one you want.

Machado’s stories have been translated and collected in three books:

The Psychiatrist and Other Stories, tr. William Grossman and others, University of California Press, 1963.

The Devil’s Church and Other Stories, tr. Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu, University of Texas Press, 1977.

A Chapter of Hats and Other Stories, tr. John Gledson, Bloomsbury, 2008.

The Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story has three that do not appear in the above, and Words without Borders has two fine Clifford Landers translations online, one of which is the only English version.  I think.  Let me know if I am wrong about any of this.

The three collections are all strong.  The degree of overlap is high and irritating, yet all three books have a number of excellent stories found nowhere else.  The Devil’s Church is an unusually ugly book, with an odd font and pointless clip-art illustrations, but the stories are first-rate.  The title story of The Psychiatrist, more of a mini-novel than a short story, is enough to recommend that collection, but A Chapter of Hats has the most stories, also a recommendation.

I would not be surprised if all sixty MoWL would fit in a single 400 page book, but such a book does not exist.  During Machado’s lifetime these stories were published in five short collections.  A set of translations of those five books is a pleasant thing to imagine, and would be even more pleasant to own.

Machado’s short fiction is surprising in how much it is unlike the novels.  The author’s puzzle-solving and digressive how-fiction-works tomfoolery are reserved for the novels.  The short stories are focused and more directly purposeful.  While the novels are always about the Rio de Janeiro upper class, the stories explore every corner of the city.

I think I will spend the next couple of days looking at a few of them, not to worry about their status as MoWL, but just to enjoy what I found in them.

The attentive reader has four stomachs in his brain - instructions for reading Machado de Assis

For, the attentive, truly ruminative reader has four stomachs in his brain, and through these he passes and repasses the actions and events, until he declares the truth which was, or seemed to be, hidden. (142)

Machado de Assis, and the narrator of Esau and Jacob, seem to have called his attentive readers cows.  Never mind that.  My question is, what truths are at issue here?  What is hidden, and what merely seems to be hidden?

The context of the quotation is that the father of the novel’s heroine has changed political parties for reasons of ambition – his wife’s ambition, specifically.  The mystery, for the narrator, is why the man abandoned his principles so easily; the hidden truth is the role of the wife.  Machado’s novels, with their fractured chronologies and digressions, can superficially resemble puzzle novels – Dom Casmurro­ more than superficially – but the greatest puzzles are those of motive:  why do people do the strange things that they do?  Within the novel, it is Counselor Ayres who is continually working to solve the mysteries, ruminating along with the reader.  In this case, the narrator (also Counselor Ayres) simply tells the reader the “truth”:

Note that I have spared him [me, the reader] Ayres’ work; this time I did not oblige him to find out everything for himself as he has been obliged to do on other occasions. (142)

Then he calls me a cow; I have inverted the quotation.  My point is that the mysteries of Esau and Jacob are not so different than those of Henry James or Marcel Proust, however differently they are presented.

The central mystery of Esau and Jacob is the heroine Flora’s love for the twin brothers of the title.  Does she love Pedro or Paulo or both?  Is there a way to choose between them?

The girls that saw them go by on horseback, along the shore, or up the street, fell in love with that perfect order of form and motion.  Their very horses were exactly alike, almost twins, and beat their hooves in the same rhythm, with the same vigor, with the same grace.  Don’t go imagining that the tossing of their tails and of their manes was simultaneous: it is not true, and might make one doubt the rest.  But the rest is certain. (73)

Neither James nor Proust are likely to scold the reader for extending an image too far.  I usually emphasize, when I am writing about tricky narrators, the bumps and sharp turns in the way they tell the story.  But Machado is clear in Esau and Jacob that the central issue is how we read it.

Esau and Jacob by Machado de Assis - have faith in the narrator of these adventures

Esau and Jacob, 1904, seventh novel  by Machado de Assis, fourth of his amazing late run.  This one, Esau and Jacob is another ingenious masterpiece, although not a particularly welcoming one.  I suspect it requires a bit of commitment to the Machado project.

The obstacle, for me, was a theme that fussed with late nineteenth century Brazilian politics.  Helen Caldwell, the novel’s translator and premier Machado scholar, makes a convincing case that the novel works as an allegory – over here is the soul of Brazil, over there a cluster of symbols of Brazilian monarchism, and on like that.  Oh no no no.  Knowing about this interpretation helps explain some of the flatter parts of the novel, but it is not needed for the hilly and even mountainous passages, so let us never mention it again.

If you want to write the book, here is the pen, here is paper, here is your humble admirer; but, if you only want to read, keep quiet, and go from line to line, I will grant you permission to yawn through a couple of chapters, but wait for the rest, have faith in the narrator of these adventures. (72)

Yes, have faith!  For Esau and Jacob is another of Machado’s brilliantly digressive narrated novels.  As another anonymous narrator explains in a preface that the text in front of me is the seventh manuscript volume of the notebooks of the recently deceased Counselor Ayres.  I know something the contemporary reader would not have known, that Machado’s next and final novel is titled Memorial de Aires (1908).  Most curious.

Counselor Ayres is then the writer and narrator of Esau and Jacob.  He is an omniscient narrator, wandering into any character’s thoughts, prayers, or private moments as he likes.  One character whose thoughts receive particular attention is Counselor Ayres, who functions, as per his diplomatic title, as an adviser to the protagonists of the novel.  Nowhere outside of the preface is there a hint that this same Counselor Ayres is telling the story.  The reader only knows the truth from the preface.

Very clever, having the narrator as a character while never letting on, except that someone else spoils (or enhances) the joke.  Some readers may not be all that interested in cleverness.  Fair enough.  I recommend the earlier Dom Casmurro to their attention, a devilishly clever book, but less merely clever.

Ayres narration is primarily about a pair of young twin brothers who fall for the same woman, the mysterious Flora.  “Mysterious” is Ayres’s word, Ayres the character, not the narrator; the character Ayres is puzzling away at the motives and behavior of Pedro and Paulo and Flora just as the narrator is, perhaps our one clue within the text that they are one and the same.  Flora becomes something of a real character while the twins are part of the book’s flatness, really brought into service only to help create Flora.  At the point where Flora is introduced (the passage I quoted above is about the narrator’s irritation that the reader has likely predicted her existence before he could properly introduce her), I realized that the novel’s title is a red herring – Esau and Jacob did not fight over a woman, no one is going to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage , etc.  And if I have been misdirected by the title, who knows what else has tricked me.

I begin to write about the actual story and characters and find myself back to the cleverness of how the story is told.  That is the kind of novel Esau and Jacob is; those are the novels Machado de Assis wrote.

Recycled Dickens - never perfect, never finished

The commercialized dust heaps of Our Mutual Friend (1865) make the novel a classic of the Literature of Recycling, if there is such a thing.  Dickens was himself a master recycler.  A good part of the fun of reading so much Dickens is watching the author return to characters, images, and problems – problems of how to write fiction, I mean.

See how the grave robber of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the one whose alibi each night is that he is “fishing,” returns in Our Mutual Friend as Jesse Hexam, who fishes corpses out of the Thames.  Both men make their living by recycling the dead, as does Mr. Venus in his bone shop.

A new strain appears in Our Mutual Friend, in the subplot of the dual obsessions of Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone for Lizzie Hexam.  Wrayburn’s nihilism is paralyzing; the unassuming Headstone turns out to be something of a sociopath (“as I was saying – undergoing grinding torments,” from III.10, where one might wonder if both men are maniacs).  This is Dostoevskian Dickens; The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) takes up the theme again and builds the novel around it, reflecting Dickens’s deepening ideas about the nature of evil.  But different shades  of the characters, of Wrayburn at least, had been appearing in Dickens novels for a decade, in the Sydney Carton of Two Cities and Arthur Clennam of Little Dorrit (1857), and now I wonder about Pip, and have something new to look for when I reread Great Expectations (1861).

Dickens was always working on the problems of past novels, and had little interest in perfecting the novel at hand.  One might blame serialization, where the published chapters constrain the unwritten ones – too late to scrap a character or plot and start over – but the issue is one of artistic temperament.  Dickens was a master of serialization because of the way he wrote, not the other way round.  He was an exploratory writer, one who had to write to know what he was going to write, wholly unlike a like Gustave Flaubert or other conceptual perfectionists.  Flaubert would stop everything else to fix a word in the wrong place; Dickens, recognizing the artistic error, would try to do better next time.

The cleanest example of Dickens recycling is A Christmas Carol (1843), his first Christmas book.  It was written and published in the middle of the ongoing Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44).  Ebenezer Scrooge is a reworking of Jonas Chuzzlewit, one of Martin Chuzzlewit’s villains.  They are similar in appearance, behavior, and attitude, but one is redeemed by the Spirit of Christmas while the other inevitably destroys himself.  I do not know of another example quite like this, where an author retells a story that he is currently publishing.  Today one would have to look genres where serialization has survived, to television and comic books.

Roberto Bolaño had the Dickens “write first” temperament.  He came close to the Christmas Carol experiment twice.  After Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), Bolaño published Distant Star (1996), a reworking and expansion of the last episode of the earlier book.  The next book after The Savage Detectives (1998) was Amulet (1999), a Savage Detectives episode blown up into its own novel.

I wish I had a conclusion, a grand summing up, although that is not in the Dickensian spirit.  There is no summing up, there is no conclusion, until the inevitable one, death ending the exploration halfway through the new novel which has already suggested the next one that we will never know about.

Crazy Imaginative Dickens

An entire novel built on the symbolic base of giant mounds of dust spilling onto London, at least everywhere but the corpse-filled Thames, does not sound like the production of the sentimental social reformer many readers seem to identify as Charles Dickens.  Dickens was a pathos-wringing wrong-righter, yes, that is part of who he was.  But he, Dickens-the-author, the only Dickens of any continuing interest, was also crazy, and wrote crazy books.  By “crazy”  I mean that he was prodigiously inventive, that he had a freakishly capacious and active imagination, and that he was willing to follow his fancies wherever they led him.

Thus:  In Dombey and Son (1847), a child dies in a suitably pathetic scene.  It really is quite sad.  But: the child, by dying, becomes a sea spirit – in fact he dies because the sea has been calling him to itself.  The sea spirit is later reincarnated as his own nephew.  This is in the novel Dickens wrote.

The villain in Dombey and Son  is a kind of human cat.  The villain in The Old Curiosity Shop is a fire spirit, some kind of imp.  I wrote something many years about the little monster Quilp which still seems to say what I wanted it so say, and more importantly includes the relevant illustrations.  A writer always has to demonstrate the villainy of his villains, so Dickens includes a scene in which Quilp torments a chained dog, which we can all admit is terribly cruel.  He torments the animal by “taunting the dog with hideous faces.”  The monster!

This is the same novel that ends with the apotheosis of sickly sentimentalism, Little Nell’s ascension to heaven in the arms of three little girl angels (in an illustration, granted).  Dickens is many things at once, or in succession.

The Old Curiosity Shop is almost too strong for my argument.  A formless and almost entirely improvised novel, it allowed Dickens perhaps too much freedom to aimlessly indulge his imagination.  In the tightly controlled Bleak House, the craziest moment starts small and builds:

"Why, there's not much air to be got here; and what there is, is not very freshening," Weevle answers, glancing up and down the court.

"Very true, sir. Don't you observe," says Mr. Snagsby, pausing to sniff and taste the air a little, "don't you observe, Mr. Weevle, that you're - not to put too fine a point upon it - that you're rather greasy here, sir?"

"Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place to-night," Mr. Weevle rejoins.  "I suppose it's chops at the Sol's Arms." (Ch. 32)

Ha ha ha ha ick!  Some pages go by, discussion and plot.  Oh look, there’s the famous candle flame with “a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.”  Great description but not crazy like:

As he is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve. It takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast.

"Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night?  Is there a chimney on fire?"

"Chimney on fire!"

"Ah!" returns Mr. Guppy. "See how the soot's falling.  See here, on my arm!  See again, on the table here!  Confound the stuff, it won't blow off - smears like black fat!"

If anyone is wondering, Dickens is a master of the flip from present to past tense, with present used here for typical tension-building reasons.  Everyone knows the source of the soot, yes?  Or has a good guess.  It ain’t the chops.

I am just emphasizing the more extreme side of the superior imagination of Dickens, the part that makes him a forefather of Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie and other writers of the pack it in and see what happens variety.  The part gives characters silly names and that gleefully Goes Too Far at times; the part that is a little crazy.

I'd give the dustman five shillings, to carry you off in the dust cart.

While visiting the skulls, warious and mummified birds of Mr. Venus, I neglected to say anything about Mr. Venus himself.  His hair is dusty, that is the important thing to know, dust-colored and dusty.  Our Mutual Friend is built on giant mounds of dust:

By which means, or by others, he grew rich as a Dust Contractor, and lived in a hollow in a hilly country entirely composed of Dust.  On his own small estate the growling old vagabond threw up his own mountain range, like an old volcano, and its geological formation was Dust.  Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust, crockery dust, rough dust and sifted dust,-- all manner of Dust. (I.2)

Humphry House, in The Dickens World, tell me that “[t]heir chief value was in the ashes, which were used for brick-making, while the soot section of the heap was good for manure” (167), and the mounds are a source of great wealth, worth all kinds of fuss with wills and blackmail and disguises.  The dust heaps were in the northern suburbs of London, “a tract of suburban Sahara,” and they coat the entire city in their grit.

I'd give the dustman five shillings, to carry you off in the dust cart. (II.5)

Now that is Jenny Wren, if it matters, threatening her alcoholic father.  Fortunately for him she does not have five shillings to spare.  The surreal dust mounds are so metaphorically promising that I was almost disappointed with how little use Dickens makes of them, although the fact is that the dust is mentioned constantly, as metaphor and reality.  The “dust cart” threat is good by itself, but made better since we know where that dust cart will take the old man.

The collection and storage of waste is the economic center of Our Mutual Friend, whether in dust heaps or bone shops, but less dusty economic activity is also possible.  The novel begins with Lizzie Hexam and her father fishing a corpse out of the Thames.  That is how he makes his living, looting the pockets of dead men and collecting rewards.

The gentlemen of the novel avoid the dust, too.  They traffic in Shares: “As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world” (I.10).  In other words, in the terms of Our Mutual Friend, they make money from nothing at all, not dust but air, which once in a while goes poof.  Or not poof, as it should, but smash:

'And what is to happen next?' asked Mrs Lammle of the skeleton.

'Smash is to happen next,' said Mr Lammle to the same authority. (III.12)

Look, there is another skeleton, more bones, a metaphor here (it is in the closet), but an unusually intrusive one.  To recap:  money in Our Mutual Friend can be made from nothing, or from garbage.  Garbage is more difficult but more stable.  There will always be garbage.

Note to Richard:  This is not the post I promised to write, something about Crazy Dickens, but it is preparatory.

That's the general panoramic view.

I suppose in the end it makes sense to have some idea of a book as a whole, good or bad, worth reading or not, morally edifying or blighting, but in fact I do not read books as wholes, but rather passages, and sentences, and sometimes even individual words.  As I have improved as a reader I have retreated further from the whole;  as I continue to improve, I will move past the passage, and then the sentence, and perhaps even the word, reading nothing but a series of letters, each deeply meaningful, until I am adept enough to read nothing but the nirvana of the blank space between and among the letters.  Every day, then, after an hour or so of clear thought, careful writing, and judicious editing, I will produce the perfect blog post about what I read, one that is completely blank.

I have not yet achieved that level of sophistication.  What I am trying to say is that I have read 14 ½ Charles Dickens novels because of, as an example, this:

From these, in a narrow and a dirty street devoted to such callings, Mr Wegg selects one dark shop-window with a tallow candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct, save the candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two preserved frogs fighting a small-sword duel.  (I.7)

Allow me to savor the image: “two preserved frogs fighting a small-sword duel.”  Readers familiar with Our Mutual Friend will know that I have just accompanied the one-legged Simon Wegg into the anatomy shop of Mr. Venus.  The latter is presumably the creator of the frog tableau; he is a taxidermist and assembler of skeletons by trade:  “’You may go and buy a skeleton at the West End if you like, and pay the West End price, but it’ll be my putting together.’”  Again, I will pause – “and pay the West End price.”  I have been led to believe that there are people in the world who criticize Dickens for wordiness, who wonder why he does not just get on with it.  But he is!  This, the dueling frogs and proud craftsman, are it, or much of it.

Mr. Venus gives a tour of the shop:

‘My working bench.  My young man's bench.  A Wice.  Tools.  Bones, warious.  Skulls, warious.  Preserved Indian baby.  African ditto.  Bottled preparations, warious.  Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation.  The mouldy ones a-top.  What's in those hampers over them again, I don't quite remember.  Say, human warious.  Cats.  Articulated English baby.  Dogs.  Ducks.  Glass eyes, warious.  Mummied bird.  Dried cuticle, warious.  Oh, dear me!  That's the general panoramic view.’

I have to suppress the kerfuffle over teeth (“There was two in the coffee-pot at breakfast time.  Molars.”)  in order to marvel at the delights of this passage alone, “Say, human warious,” for example, or “Ducks.”  The penultimate exclamation is the result of something, the bird mummy or cuticles, reminding Mr. Venus of his romantic troubles, which will work out fine; do not lose any sleep over the love life of Mr. Venus the skeleton articulator.

The frogs, by the way – this is a tip for aspiring fiction writers – could be found on Dickens’s own writing desk, not as taxidermy but in the form of a French bronze sculpture (and they were toads, not frogs).  So the tip is to surround yourself with useless knickknacks which you will someday insert into your story as a telling detail.

All of this is just one little slice of one little chapter of Our Mutual Friend.  Dickens is so generous.

I have read all fourteen and a half Dickens novels.

Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) was the last Dickens novel I had not read, which means that I have now read them all.  Rather than write a post about this milestone, I will quietly celebrate on my own.

That took a lot less time than I had expected.  It was a little too quiet, if you know what I mean.  Guess I’ll write something.

I am never sure what people – by people I of course mean book bloggers – are really planning when they declare, after reading two novels, or maybe a novel-and-a-half, that they have fallen in love and will soon read “all” of an author’s work.  They should investigate the “all” a bit before making their empty declarations.  “All” can be pretty dire, even for a major writer.

Many years ago, I was the proud reader of all of Thomas Pynchon, not just the five published books but every published scrap of text uncovered by his lunatic bibliographers.  The highlight, from the completist’s point of view, was a short article published in a 1960 issue of Aerospace Safety magazine which had exactly one Pynchonian line, a joke about a flagman signaling “The plane ran over the general’s foot.”  Or so I remember.  Then Pynchon wrote the liner notes to a CD by a minor indie rock band called Lotion, and I thought forget it, I am not buying a goldang Lotion album in order to maintain my neurotic all-of-Pynchon status.  Now I have not even read all of his novels.  This is progress.

The “all” of Dickens is so enormous that it is unreasonable.  Fourteen and a half novels, check; five “Christmas Books,” check; the confusingly labeled “Christmas Stories,” at least half are still unread; and then there are travel books, and Sketches by Boz, and A Child’s History of England, just to stay with books that might be readable.  What to make of his plays, or his poems?  (Answer: nothing, ‘cause I’m not going to read them).  And all of that magazine and newspaper writing, masses of it.

The exciting thing about having read every Dickens novel is that I have completed a necessary step to re-reading not all but most of them.  Finally, some real reading!  It has been almost twenty years since I read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, so that one is tugging at me a bit, particularly since it is closely related to a plotline of Our Mutual Friend.  Been a while since Great Expectations, too, which prefigures OMF in interesting ways.  Bleak House I have read twice, but having read the rest in the series – with Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, it forms a thematic and artistic trilogy – I want to go back to it.  Dickens is often revising the previous novel in the current one.  It is nice to be able to line them all up in my head.

Himadri, the Argumentative Old Git, provided the encouragement to check off Charles Dickens Novel #14 now rather than later.  If I write something  - I was going to say “more” but I have deftly avoided the novel this time – about Our Mutual Friend, I will bounce some ideas off of his pieces.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: Our attention to the world is the observance they claim, or Writing insists on solitudes and deserts

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is a poet of the sea, but which sea?  She is a dedicated Hellenist, and a characteristic poetic effect is a blurring of the difference between Portugal’s ocean and Greece’s Mediterranean.  When Sophia, a dedicated Catholic, discovers the gods in the landscape, which gods does she mean?

She shares her interest in Greece and its gods with an earlier Portuguese poet, an imaginary one, the sad Epicurean Ricardo Reis.  Reis insisted that he was a true pagan, and that his encounter with the shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro showed him how to turn his beliefs into poetry.  Reis perhaps taught Sophia something similar:

Homage to Ricardo Reis III

The gods are absent yet they preside.
    We inhabit this
    Ambiguous transparency.

Their thought emerges when everything
    Suddenly becomes
    Solemnly exact.

Their gaze guides ours:
    Our attention to the world
    Is the observance they claim.

I cannot tell if Sophia is speaking to Reis or as Reis.  The poem is meaningful either way; the poets share their purpose, even if the absent gods are less metaphorical for Reis than for Sophia.

Our world is transparent yet ambiguous - an obscure enough adjective.  The transparent becomes visible, the ambiguous fixed, when we direct attention to the things of the world, to their exactness.  Or the confused invisibility then becomes “exact” as the result of our attention.  “Lord, free us from the dangerous game of transparency” she writes in “On Transparency.”  Sophia is positing a corollary to Heisenberg’s much-abused Uncertainty Principle: we can observe either the position or momentum of a particle with precision, but not both; but without “attention to the world” we know nothing at all.  The poet is the operator of the electron microscope.  Like Coral the cat, the poet asks each thing its name.

Lest Sophia de Mello Breyner seem too mystical,  the editor of the Marine Rose collection sets beside the pair (only two, unfortunately) of Homage to Ricardo Reis poems an alternative description of the poet’s vocation.  What can Sophia share with Lord Byron, a writer of satire and long narrative poems about pirates and lady-killers?  The title is the first clue:

Writing

In Palazzo Mocenigo where he had lived alone
Lord Byron used every grand room
To watch solitude mirror by mirror
And the beauty of doors no one passed through

He heard the marine murmurs of silence
The lost echoes of steps in far corridors
He loved the smooth shine on polished floors
Shadows unrolling under high ceilings
And though he sat in just one chair
Was glad to see the other chairs were empty

The empty chairs imply full ones, and in fact Byron’s life in Venice at this time was manically social:

By the end of the year 1818, in which he had begun his greatest poem, Don Juan, he was to be discovered morosely climbing the balcony of an 18-year-old Italian heiress at midnight.  He afterwards told Medwin that he was indifferent to the outcome of the affair, and did not care whether the police officer had come to have him shot or married. (Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, 420)

Sophia is interested in the first part of that passage, the writing, amidst chaos, of the great poem, as her poem concludes:

Of course no one needs so much space to live
But writing insists on solitudes and deserts
Things to look at as if seeing something else

We can imagine him seated at his table
Imagine the full long throat
The open white shirt
The white paper the spidery writing
And the light of a candle – as in certain paintings –
Focussing all attention

Byron, too, if guided by the gaze of the gods and giving them the observance they claim.  He is a poet.

Translations are again from Ruth Fairlight's Marine Rose.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: Fantastic sea gods stroll at the edge of the world, or She asked each thing its name

Three collections of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen exist in English, I think, all miniscule.  Their titles help place the poet:  Log Book; Shores, Horizons, Voyages; and Marine Rose.  I have read that last one (tr. Ruth Fairlight, Black Swan Books, 1988).  Portuguese literature from its roots is a literature of the sea; Sophia* is a poet of the sea.

Beach

The pines moan when the wind passes
The sun beats on the earth and the stones burn.

Fantastic sea gods stroll at the edge of the world
Crusted with salt and brilliant as fishes.

Sudden wild birds hurled
Against the light into the sky like stones
Mount and die vertically
Their bodies taken by space.

The waves butt as if to smash the light
Their brows ornate with columns.

And an ancient nostalgia of being a mast
Sways in the pines.

Just taken as a bundle of imagery I find a lot to like here.  The first two lines may be ordinary scene-setting, but the salt-crusted sea gods are excellent.  Are they purely imaginary, or is Sophia transforming Speedo-clad bathers into deities?  The lines about the birds are all about motion, about moving faster than the eye.  The waves I do not quite see – are the columns the rays of the sun (the light that is being smashed)?  The pines return with added weight, the brilliantly paradoxical addition of the fate they might have had back in the time of the sea gods, who are as likely to be Portuguese explorers as Neptune and his court.

Marine Rose ends with an essay by Kenneth Krabbenhoft that makes as much use of Heidegger as I can take.  Such philosophical firepower is hardly necessary, but the connection is not fanciful.  Besides a common interest in ancient Greece, Sophia is, like Andrade, a poet of the moment, of something like Heidegger’s Being (Dasein).  How that helps me more than this, I do not understand:

In the Poem

To bring the picture the wall the wind
The flower the glass the shine on wood
And the cold chaste severe world of water
To the clean severe world of the poem

To save from death decay and ruin
The actual moment of vision and surprise
And keep in the real world
The real gesture of a hand touching the table.

In a short talk included in Marine Rose, Sophia says “For me, poetry has always been the pursuit of what is real.”  The creation of the poem, an act of imagination, is what “keeps” the gesture of the hand “real.”  Or so the poet argues.  Prove her wrong!

One last tiny sea poem:

Coral

He went and came
And asked each thing
Its name.

No, that’s a trick.  It’s not a sea poem at all – Coral, a note tells me, is a cat.

The Poetry International site has a number of Richard Zenith’s translations of Sophia, plus a sweet personal essay about her which inventories the art in her apartment.  And do not miss St. Orberose, where one can enjoy Sophia alongside three other tantalizing contemporary female poets.  Marvel at the way Adília Lopes can write a good poem which includes the line "I need a hug."  I would not have thought it possible.  The poem is called "I don't like books."

*  How nice to discover that the poet with the multi-part name is typically just called Sophia.