Kipling's Rewards and Fairies - music, history, dying children and another heroic seal - the broad gentle flood of the main tune

Some easier Kipling, Rewards and Fairies (1910).  It’s a book for children, so I hope it’s easier.

What children, though.  In each story a pair of perfect children, from the Kipling point of view, I mean – “Dan had gone in for building model boats” – encounters a figure from history who tells about his encounter with a more important figure from history.  A local shipbuilder tells about Francis Drake, before he was a Sir.  A young smuggler meets President Washington in one story and General Bonaparte in the next.  The children are already sufficiently educated to follow the stories.  So am I, now, somewhat older.

Although a sequel to Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and similar on general principles, the fairy aspect is muted.  Just a little touch of “then they woke up” to wave away pointless questions of actuality.

“The Conversion of St Wilfrid” is about a super-intelligent pet seal.  What kind of seal, I don’t know.  His heroism converts the saint.  This is Kipling’s second story about a heroic seal, the other being “The White Seal” from The Jungle Book.  The other that I know of, I mean.  Maybe there are more.  How many writers have written even one.  The frame of this story is extraordinary, with the medieval saint, the Shakespeare fairy and the Kipling children listening to an old church organ played by a professional organist.

The music had turned soft – full of little sounds that chased each other on wings across the broad gentle flood of the main tune.  

As in the story, the combination of beauty and belief is hard to untangle.

“Marklake Witches” also ends with music.  It is almost too sad to read, with a story-teller who is a vivacious teenager who does not know that she is mortally ill, and an auditor, little Una, who does not know that she is a stand-in for Kipling’s daughter who died of pneumonia.  Everyone else in the story knows that the narrator is doomed; only she and Una never figure it out.  She sings a song about a dying flower and thinks that everyone is so deeply affected by the beauty of her performance.

‘And what did Dr Break do?’

‘He got up and pretended to look out of the window, but I saw his little fat shoulders jerk as if he had the hiccoughs.  That was a triumph.  I never suspected him of sensibility.’

‘Oh, I wish I’d seen!  I wish I’d been you,’ said Una, clasping her hands.

And this is where Puck ends the story, presumably on the verge of tears himself.  Irony is so sad.

The poems Kipling attaches to his so-called adult stories are often oblique, even cryptic, in their connection to the proses text.  The poems in Rewards and Fairies are clear, direct, and often beautiful –  the old lost road in “The Way through the Woods,” or Father Eddi’s Christmas sermon to an ox and an ass in “Eddi’s Service:”

And when the Saxons mocked him,
    Said Eddi of Manhood End,
‘I dare not shut His chapel
    On such as care to attend.’

Kipling is unafraid of sublime effects, but the generosity of Rewards and Fairies tempers the fear.  It’s a children’s book, sort of.

Oh! / The differential gear! - that huge mass of Kipling poems

Maybe one more day of incomprehension, to finish off the week.  A different kind of bafflement, though.  I completed, in the page-turning sense, the Verses: Definitive Edition (1940) of Rudyard Kipling, the books that was until very recently served as the 800 page collected poems of Kipling.  It is a strange book, and I am not sure how to use it, other than read it.

The only Table of Contents is alphabetical by title.  The poems themselves are organized, I believe by Kipling, in an order that must have meant something to him but confused me.  Departmental Ditties (1885) starts things off, good, first book, lead spot, but the next book, Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) does not appear for over 300 pages.  In between are chronologically wide-ranging selections with some thematic organization – lots of poems about ships, lots of poems about the Boer War.  But not all of them in one place.  New subjects appear, then it is back to South Africa.  I cannot believe how many poems Kipling wrote about the Boer War.

Kipling was among the world’s best-loved poets.  Did his best readers find this organization useful?  They knew the titles, the subjects – they knew where to look for a poem?

I cannot believe, still, the thirty-page chunk titled The Muse among the Motors, a series of poetic parodies in which the poems, in the style of Horace, Chaucer, etc. are all about automobiles and driving.  Wordsworth:

The Idiot Boy

He wandered down the mountain grade
    Beyond the speed assigned –
A youth whom Justice often stayed
    And generally fined.

He went alone, that none might know
    If he could drive or steer.
Now he is in the ditch, and Oh!
    The differential gear!

I picked one of the more thumping ones, just to make things obvious, but some of them, like the Stevenson / Child’s Garden parody, are sad and lovely, they are all ingenious, and some are perhaps funny, including the fifteen-page Shakespeare parody, “The Marrèd Drives of Windsor” (sample stage direction: Enter FALSTAFF, habited as a motorist).

What amazed me the most, I guess, is that Kipling had time for all of this throwaway verse amidst a production of prose fiction and non-fiction that is itself so vast I do not grasp it.  His sheer facility with verse must have been as great as anyone alive at the time.  And this is what he did with it!  Motoring parodies.

No, he did everything with it.  His short stories are invariably accompanied by poems, often only cryptically related to the story, because the composition of verse was part of how he thought.

I thought the best group of poems were the Barrack-Room Ballads, in which Kipling blends the voices of ordinary servicemen in India with music-hall verse.  They were an unusual invention:

I’ve a head like a concertina, I’ve a tongue like a buttonstick,
I’ve a mouth like an old potato, and I’m more than a little sick,
But I’ve had my fun o’ the Corp’ral’s Guard; I’ve made the cinder’s fly,
And I’m here in the Clink for a thundering drink and blacking the Corporal’s eye.  (from “Cells”)

Kipling’s politics, consistent over his life, are always firmly on the side of the soldier, sailor, and engineer, whatever they might be doing, and deeply skeptical of any decisions made much higher up the chain.  The value he puts on the lives of soldiers – and not just British soldiers – is humane and often moving, although politically a source of its own problems.  Kipling does not look like much of an imperialist to me at this point.  But he always supports the troops.

Not that several hundred pages of ironic, obscure poems are that much help with this question.  Some help.

Dark things are drawn to brighter - Eugenio Montale polishes some Cuttlefish Bones

One more of these, with Eugenio Montale’s first book, Cuttlefish Bones (1925), translated by William Arrowsmith in an edition with far more notes than poetry.

Aren’t cuttlefish invertebrates?  Yes, but they have an “internal shell” that young Eugenio would find in large quantities on the beaches of Liguria.  As Whitman showed, the shore poem contains all poems:

from Seacoasts

Days of tumbling and tossing
like cuttlefish bones in the breakers,
vanishing bit by bit;
becoming
gnarled tree or sea-polished
pebble; melting away
in sunset colors, to dissolve as flesh
and flow back, a spring drunk on sunlight,
devoured by sunlight…
                                            O seacoasts,
this was his prayer, that boy I used to be,
standing by a rusty balustrade,
who died slowly, smiling.  (ellipses in original)

This 1920 poem ends the collection, and Arrowsmith says critics have often argued it is too jolly, like a forced positive ending on an otherwise grim book, an expression of deep pessimism.  About “Maybe one morning,” one of a group of lyrics labeled “Cuttlefish Bones,” Arrowsmith writes that it “was memorized by two generations of school children” and “continue[s] even now to haunt the Italian mind” (213).

Maybe one morning, walking in air
of dry glass, I’ll turn and see the miracle occur –
nothingness at my shoulders, the void
behind me – with a drunkard’s terror.
Then, as on a screen, the usual illusion:
hills houses trees will suddenly reassemble,
but too late, and I’ll quietly go my way,
with my secret, among men who don’t look back.

Strong stuff!  All is an illusion, all is nothingness.  If you are lucky you will get a glimpse behind the veil.  The Italian is, as far as I can tell, musical and beautiful.  I know as a matter of literary history that Montale, like many other poets of his generation, were deliberately trying to “walk in air of dry glass,” by which I mean they were avoiding the baroque excesses and politically suspect decadence of the dominant figure of Gabrielle d’Annunzio.  But the starkness Montale finds is in his imagery and philosophy or temperamental position more than form or language.

Bring me the sunflower, I’ll plant it here
in my patch of ground scorched by salt spume,
where all day long it will lift the craving
of its golden face to the mirroring blue.

Dark things are drawn to brighter…

That’s part of another “Cuttlefish Bone,” another famous one.

Just rummaging through the book, I keep coming across repeated images and motifs.  What complexity.  A sequence about figures on an ancient sarcophagus – “World asleep or world that boasts / life unchanging, who can say?” – embeds a number of them, like the sunflower.  The “Agave on the Cliff” poems are from the point of view of a plant, buffeted by a series of winds:

incapable of breaking into bloom, today I feel
this rootedness of mine
is torture.

This is what I meant by “grim.”

Hopeless to do anything with this book or poet on a first pass.  This is a note to remind myself to try again some time.

César Vallejo dips his nose in the absurd

César Vallejo, what a mystery to me.  The theme of the week is “in over my head.”  I have read the H. R. Hays translations in Selected Poems (1981, but with translations going back to 1943) a couple of times, mostly with bafflement.  I find him difficult.

Vallejo was a classic smart kid from a small town, in the Peruvian Andes.  Tungsten mining; rough.  Vallejo got away, went to college, then Europe, and became a poet, but he did it the hard way, with time in prison for political activities and a down-and-out Bohemian life in Paris.

    César Vallejo is dead, everybody beat him
Without his ever having done anything to them;
They beat him hard with a cudgel and hard
    Likewise with a piece of rope…  (from “Black Stone Upon a White Stone”)

“I prose / These verses” he writes, even though this poem, like many, is a sonnet of some regularity and beauty.  The Trilce poems (1922), many written in prison (“Oh, the four walls of the cell!,” XVIII) make some radical and, soon enough, influential, moves away from regularity.

This torrent frightens me,
Pleasant memory, strong sir, implacable
Cruel sweetness.  It frightens me.
This house makes me feel fine, fine
Place for this not knowing where you are.  (from XXVII)

The poem ends with the appearance of a “sad blond skeleton,” which whistles.  “Rubio y triste esqueleto, silba, silba.”

With some help from Whitman, Baudelaire, and some Spanish-language poets Vallejo concocted a kind of personal surrealism, a mix of imagery and anti-poetic language that however strange it sounds to me is expressive for Vallejo.  He is saying what he is trying to say.

    And if we should dip our noses this way
In the absurd
We shall cover ourselves with the gold of having nothing,
And we would pollinate
The unborn wing of the night, sister
Of that orphan wing of day
Which trying to be a wing still isn’t.  (from XLV)

I know, that moves towards gibberish in translation.  In Spanish, “que a fuerza de ser una ya no es ala.”  It’s cryptic.  Vallejo, in translation – and I include other translators, like James Wright and Thomas Merton – often sounds like a Beat poet, like his poems are meant to be performed, howled a little.

As Vallejo turns, in the 1930s, to poems about the Spanish Civil War, he becomes clearer without losing his surprising imagery.  Having some history helps (helps me, I mean; clearer to me).

A book lay beside his dead belt,
A book was spouting from his dead body.
They raised the hero
And, corporeal and sad, his mouth entered our breath.
We were all sweating, dog tired,
As we traveled the moons were following us;
And the dead man, too, was sweating with sadness.  (from “Little Responsory for a Republican Hero”)

Maybe I just accept more easily the surreal sublimity of Vallejo’s imagery when his subject is so frightening, so big.  Maybe I need to accept that for Vallejo that intensity was everywhere, constant, not just a product of war.

There is no confusion – only difficulties - Spring and All, where WCW cuts loose

I’ve been reading William Carlos Williams much like I have been reading Conrad Aiken – why not shovel it all in, up to a point.  I wrote an uncomprehending post about his second book, The Tempers (1913), in which I made two points, first, this stuff hardly sounded like Williams and second, this poet sure likes leaves.

Since then I read Al Que Quiere! (1917) and Sour Grapes (1921) – those are good titles – but did not write about them.  More Williams flavor, and lots more leaves.  I guess a poet as Whitman-like as Williams has no choice.

Now I have hit the pure stuff, the crazy hybrid Spring and All (1923):

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
 One by one objects are defined –
It quickens : clarity, outline of leaf

That’s an almost baldly programmatic bit of Poem I, “By the road to the contagious hospital.”  I had to do a head-to-head comparison to Sour Grapes to see the difference.  Many of the earlier poems are fine as they are:

Complete Destruction

It was an icy day.
We buried the cat,
then took her box
and set match to it.

in the back yard.
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.

But others must have still seemed too poetical to Williams.  Sour Grapes opens with “The Late Singer”:

Here it is spring again
and I still a young man!
I am late at my singing.

Then there is a sparrow, grass, the moon, and guess what leaves (“brown and yellow moth-flowers”).  To most of is this sounds pretty plain, but Williams thinks it’s missing something.

The 2011 New Directions reissue of Spring and All has a terrific introduction by C. D. Wright.  Here’s how she describes the change:

The year before, 1922, was high tide in poetry: The Duino Elegies, Trilce, and The Waste Land.  The latter was a head blow to William Carlos Williams…  Then came The Waste Land, all tricked out with Sanscrit and Latin ornaments.  The impact was as useful as it was painful.  Whap.  Now he knew what he was opposing…  (p. viii)

Spring and All is full of nonsense, upside-down chapter titles, misspellings, and general goofiness.  The poems are embedded in a prose manifesto that is written “con brio,” to borrow the title of one of his earliest poems.  It is energetic:

    If I could say what was in my mind in Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so. But I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life’s inanity ; the formality of its boredom ; the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill ! kill ! let there be fresh meat…  (Chapter 19, p. 5, ellipses in original)

But the manifesto is at heart not negative or prescriptive but personal, a portrait of the creative self.

  Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystallization of the imagination – the perfection of new forms as additions to nature – Prose may follow to enlighten but poetry –  (p. 78)

The, or a, joke being that Spring and All is mostly prose.  “There is no confusion – only difficulties.”  Maybe.

He who has kissed
a leaf

need look no further –
I ascend

through
a canopy of leaves

and at the same time
I descend

for I do nothing
unusual –   (from XXIV)

No, even for 1923, that’s not true.

In a whistling void I stand before my mirror, / Unconcerned, and tie my tie. - Conrad Aiken writes a good one

Conrad Aiken wrote too much poetry, was too imitative, hammered one bad idea too long, and gave his books terrible titles.  Yet, helped by the magic of online scans, I have been read his first five books, from Earth Triumphant (1914) through The Charnel Rose (1918).  Five books in five years!  That is what I mean by too much.  The Jig of Forslin: A Symphony (1916) – that is what I mean by bad titles, and the bad idea, of attributing musical structures to poems, is also visible.  In Nocturne of Remembered Spring: And Other Poems (1917), for example, besides the title poem there is a “Sonata in Pathos,” a “Nocturne in a Minor Key,” and so on.  “I do not wish to press the musical analogies too closely,” Aiken writes in Poetry in June 1919, in a review of one of his own books.  Fair enough.

He was invited to write that review.  “Even so, the variation of tine has not been carried far enough: a little more statement and a little less implication would have been a good thing, for it verges on the invertebrate.”  Accurate.

As for imitative, Aiken was all too adept at picking up whatever was in the air.  Imagism, Spoon River Anthology, T. S. Eliot – to my ear, mostly Eliot.  Aiken’s poems often include a Prufrock or Sweeney-like figure – Forslin, he of the “jig” above, is one of them – introverted, interiorized, old before his time.

You see me: I am plain: and growing baldish.
The clothes I wear are old, but carefully kept.  (“Jig,” I.iiii.)

But starring in a much longer, more repetitive (“symphonic”) poem.  Bloated Eliot, gaseous Eliot.

Useful, though.  Aiken has helped me see what is going on around him.  That is one reason I have been reading his early poems.  The other reason is of course that the poems are often quite good.  “Senlin: A Biography,” a 1918 poem, has a great one.  I have to break the symphony into its component poems.

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.

The stanzas repeat and develop this mismatch between the ordinary, pointless ritual activity and the narrator’s sense of his place in the cosmos, and similarly his astonishment by mundane natural details that he experiences himself (“Vine leaves tap my window”) and those that he can only imagine (“a sun far off in a shell of silence”), some of which may be contiguous with “god,” who is “immense and lonely as a cloud.”  “Silence” is one of the repeated motifs.

The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion,
The stars pale silently in a coral sky.
In a whistling void I stand before my mirror,
Unconcerned, and tie my tie.

I don’t know what happens next with Aiken.  His Collected Poems is a thousand pages long; his Collected Stories is only half as long.  Maybe I will switch to a Selected Poems sometime.  Not yet.

Yes, it was the same flesh - some War and Peace death

War and Peace is full of Tolstoy’s unoriginal ideas about history in essay form, and his original ideas about death in novel form.  Tolstoy is among the greatest writers about death – sudden or prolonged, in combat or illness, actual or threatened.

If you are bothered by learning about the deaths of characters in a book you have not read and with whom you have no associations whatsoever, skip this post, I guess.

A combat death, Petya Rostov.  His death in XIV.2. is preceded by his great musical dream, where a whetstone, horses, and snoring are somehow combined into a “harmonious orchestra playing some unknown, sweetly solemn hymn.”  Seven hundred pages earlier, Tolstoy suggested that Petya’s sister is synesthetic; perhaps Petya is, too.  I mention the dream because it shows how intensely subjective the point of view has become.  Everything is interior.  To make the text work, I am identifying with Petya, whether he is observing other soldiers, sleeping, or riding into combat.

His charge alongside the Cossacks is chaotic, a breathless blur:

“Wait?...  Hurrah-ah-ah!” shouted Petya, and without pausing a moment galloped to the place whence came the sounds of firing and where the smoke was thickest.

A volley was heard, and some bullets whistled past, while others plashed against something. (ellipses in original).

Tolstoy plays a terrible trick here.  The “something” is or includes Petya, but for two more headlong sentences I do not know that the perspective has shifted to the other cavalrymen.  Something has gone wrong.  “Petya fell heavily to the ground.  The Cossacks saw…”  Now I know the truth.  What a masterful use of a perspective shift.

A number of the best death scenes are attached to Prince Andrew, over and over – he is thinking about death, he is wounded in combat, etc.  Here he is part of the hot, dusty retreat towards Moscow, before the battle of Borodino:

The dust always hung motionless above the buzz of talk that came from the resting troops.

That by itself is an interesting sentence, isn’t it?

As he crossed the dam Prince Andrew smelled the ooze and freshness of the pond.  He longed to get into that water, however dirty it might be, and he glanced round at the pool from whence came the sounds of shrieks and laughter.  The small, muddy, green pond had risen visibly more than a foot, flooding the dam, because it was full of the naked white bodies of soldiers with brick-red hands, necks, and faces, who were splashing about in it.  (X.5.)

Tolstoy emphasizes the “health” and pleasure of the soldiers (“joyfully wriggling his muscular figure and snorted with satisfaction”), but bathing himself Andrew can only imagine them as the corpses that many of them will soon be:

“Flesh, bodies, cannon fodder!” he thought, and he looked at his own naked body and shuddered, not from cold but from a sense of disgust and horror he did not himself understand, aroused by the sight of that immense number of bodies splashing about in the dirty pond.

Later, wounded, the bodies in the hospital remind Andrew of the bodies in the pond – “Yes, it was the same flesh” (X.37.).  All of 120 pages later, almost adjacent for this book.

Maybe it is a paradox of War and Peace, of much of Tolstoy, is how exhilarating so much of this material about death can be.  Or not a paradox – the reason is art.

like a hare surrounded by hounds... he tried to continue reading - hunting wolves and hares in War and Peace

The prose in War and Peace is generally plain, often repetitive – more so in Russian than in the Maude translation – and rough.  Anna Karenina is more finely worked at the sentence level and its beauties depend more on the motifs that Tolstoy runs through the novel.  There are exceptions, though, like Book VII of War and Peace, the wolf hunt and the Christmas party, a couple of days in which two characters move into a state of sublimity.

In the entry there was a smell of fresh apples, and wolf and fox skins hung about.  (VII.7.)

It is a thickly described part of the book.  More smells.

Nicholas and Natasha Rostov are siblings, but Nicholas is quickly off in the cavalry, so they rarely meet.  Book VII, with everyone at the country estate, is where they finally get some scenes together.  Amusingly, they barely speak to each other.  They’re siblings; they communicate plenty.

They go hunting for about twenty pages – those poor wolves – and celebrate Christmas for about thirty.

The bare twigs in the garden were hung with transparent drops which fell on the freshly fallen leaves.  The earth in the kitchen garden looked wet and black and glistened like poppyseed and at a short distance merged into the dull, moist veil of mist…  There was a smell of decaying leaves and of dog.  Milka, a black-spotted, broad-haunched bitch with prominent black eyes. got up on seeing her master, stretched her hind legs, lay down like a hare, and then suddenly jumped up and licked him right on his nose and mustache.  (VII.3.)

Those fine similes are one evidence of the difference in this section.  In War and Peace, similes frequently describe the character or behavior of people, but rarely things.  “Though Daniel was not a big man, to see him in a room was like seeing a horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and surroundings of human life.”  The hunt needs horses, dogs, landscapes, wolves, clothes; the later party food, music, costumes, folk customs, and it all has to be precise, and precision demands metaphor.

The wolf paused, turned its heavy forehead toward the dogs awkwardly, like a man suffering from the quinsy, and, still slightly swaying from side to side, gave a couple of leaps and with a swish of its tail disappeared into the skirt of the wood.  (VII.4.)

For the first time, I even get some precision about how the Rostovs are spending themselves into bankruptcy: “there were about a hundred and thirty dogs and twenty horsemen.”

Soon enough the dog Milka is in a race with some of the others after a lively hare.  The scene with the hare is a little hunt within the larger wolf hunt, a battle within the battle.  In a sense, much of the point of the hunt is to include a “battle” in the middle of the book, between the big early Austerlitz scenes and the later Borodino section.

Oddly, on the eve of Borodino, Pierre Bezukhov sees a “brown hare with white feet” on what will be the battlefield (X.23.).  A third hare, the hare that saved Russia, leads the Russian army to discover, and ambush, a French army (XIII.1.).  Much, much earlier, Nicholas Rostov, injured and losing his horse in his first combat, runs “with the feeling of a hare fleeing from the hounds” (II.14).  Pierre Bezukhov at one point “like a hare surrounded by hounds who lays back her ears and continues to crouch motionless before her enemies, he tried to continue reading” (IV.6.) – hilariously, here the battlefield is his study, and the enemy combatant his wife.  Yet this scene is also directly related to Pierre’s first experience of combat, a duel.

I wanted to look at the wolf hunt scene in part because it is extraordinarily good, but also because those hares make me wonder what else is in the novel that its size conceals from me.

This is how it happened - Les Misérables makes Tolstoy's thoughts swarm

From the “Chronology” of The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (2002):

1863, February 23: reads Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – “Powerful”; “I went through my papers – a swarm of thought and a return, or an attempt to return to lyricism.  Lyricism is good.” (p. 10)

Leo Tolstoy was planning – actively writing – a historical epic about, eventually, the Napoleonic Wars that is meant to demonstrate an argument about the functioning of history.  Along comes a model by the “best nineteenth-century writer” (p. 31, quotation is a paraphrase of Tolstoy by the editor) that shows you can just plop your essays into the middle of the story.  The digressions account for maybe a third of the novel?  That’s fine.

I saw a strong “influence” of Les Misérables on War and Peace, but what do I mean by that?  (certainly not “lyricism”).  After all, “1863, June 2: ‘I’m reading Goethe, and thoughts swarm.’”  When you’re a genius like Tolstoy, that’s what your thoughts do.  Maybe I should be arguing for the influence of Elective Affinities on Tolstoy, too.  Now that I mention it – no, one at a time.  Much later, Tolstoy says that the influence of Hugo’s novel was “Enormous,” but that could mean anything.

I mean two things.  Not anything to do with battles.  Tolstoy had been a great war writer for a decade already.  The first influence is on the use and structure of the essayistic material.  I don’t think Tolstoy is nearly as good with this stuff as Hugo.  The French giant writes as a sage, so everything he writes is an expression of pure Hugoness.  Every aspect of the novel is suffused with hugolité.  Tolstoy write as if he is trying to invent social history or sociology or some other social science.  He struggles in the didactic sections.  Hugo does not.

If I remembered the arguments better – I have already forgotten Tolstoy’s, much less Hugo's – I might be able to see how or if Tolstoy adapts Hugo’s ideas about Napoleon and the chaos of the battlefield and the role of individuals in mass action and so on, but I don’t.  Instead, what felt like Hugo was Tolstoy’s use of epic similes as argument, such as the comparison of burned, looted, empty Moscow to a beehive (XI.11.) with a dead queen, a comparison that is clear immediately but goes on for a couple of pages, developing its own characters.

What really caught my attention, though, were moments in the narrative, not the essays, that sounded so much like Hugo, places where Tolstoy adapted Hugo’s signature devices, like the chapter-ending revelations of identity: “This man was registered under the number 9430, and his name was Jean Valjean” (Hugo, III.3.).  Even the long, essayistic Waterloo section ends with one of these.  In Tolstoy:

That night another wounded man was driven down to Povarskaya…  Mavra Kuzminichna concluded that he was a very important man…  He was conveyed… [Etc.]

This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkonski.  (XI.8.)

Another example: simple transitional sentences, like Tolstoy is telling the story: “This is how it happened” (XI.9.).

Another is the use of a series of blunt, single-sentence paragraphs.

Yet another is the transformation of Pierre Bezukhov into Jean Valjean, including his superhuman strength, in the section where Pierre is out in Moscow rescuing little girls from fires.  “Pierre was in such a transport of rage that he remembered nothing and his strength increased tenfold” (XI.16.) – then he goes to prison!

Why are all of these quotations from Book XI?  Not just because that is where I started to write them down.  No, I think much of the Hugo flavor is concentrated in this book, which contains the evacuation, occupation, and destruction of Moscow.  No battles as such, no parties, no ordinary daily life, but rather nothing but extraordinary events, one after another.  It is the most melodramatic part of War and Peace, the most ordinarily novelistic, where Pierre’s thread becomes something of an adventure story.  Thus it is here that Tolstoy turns to a great master of this kind of novel, to the example that has been on his mind for a number of reasons.

That is my guess.  The problem points to the solution.  It is interesting to witness.

Tomorrow, 100% Tolstoy.

busy whispering something gladsome and mysterious - Tolstoy moves the point of view

I wonder how many thinking parts there are in War and Peace.  The major characters all have scenes shown from their point of view, and long passages describing their private thoughts, but Tolstoy is, in this novel, also a master of the sudden shift and quick dip into the mind of anyone else.  The Cossacks (1863) is a good place to see him use the technique.  That character has a single, obvious protagonist, but when he goes to the Caucasus the point of view flits away from him, landing in a number of interesting places.

The cinematic analogy is strong, even if the camera can’t do much with a train of thought.  But it accompanies a character, flies up in the air, wanders around, finally returning to the doe-eyed fellow with whom it started.  It is curious how naturally we attach and detach the point of view from characters, even knowing perfectly well that we are watching an edited series of filmed sequences.

Tolstoy’s technique is similarly natural.  Much of the first of the fifteen volumes is spent at parties, with a couple dozen characters almost flung at me, the perspective freely wandering among them and back to Tolstoy.  At the Rostov’s the characters have paired off to go to dinner.  They are all new, or were when I first read the book.  Mostly the camera just looks at them, records them.  “Pierre spoke little but examined the new faces, and ate a great deal.”  Sometimes there is more interpretation.  “Sonya wore a company smile but was evidently tormented by jealousy.”  And sometimes, the point of view moves inward:

The German tutor was trying to remember all the dishes, wines, and kinds of dessert, in order to send a full description of the dinner to his people in Germany; and he felt greatly offended when the butler with a bottle wrapped in a napkin passed him by. He frowned, trying to appear as if he did not want any of that wine, but was mortified because no one would understand that it was not to quench his thirst or from greediness that he wanted it, but simply from a conscientious desire for knowledge.  (I.9.)

Good comedy from a character who is never mentioned again (occasionally a crowd of “tutors” is mentioned).  But I am only on page 65 of 1,351!  How do I know that this is the poor tutor’s only scene?  The Maudes cheat a bit early on, with footnotes like “Natasha Rostova, the most important female character in War and Peace” (I.5.).  So pay attention!  But for the novelist, everyone is available.  Everyone:

The Emperor’s horse started at the sudden cry. This horse that had carried the sovereign at reviews in Russia bore him also here on the field of Austerlitz, enduring the heedless blows of his left foot and pricking its ears at the sound of shots just as it had done on the Empress’ Field, not understanding the significance of the firing, nor of the nearness of the Emperor Francis’ black cob, nor of all that was being said, thought, and felt that day by its rider.  (III.13.)

Actually, maybe not everyone.  It is possible that Emperor Alexander is only observed, except in the sense that his interiority is the negative space of his horse’s, or vice versa.

The extreme example, near the novel’s end, closing a scene featuring ordinary soldiers around a campfire:

They all grew silent.  The stars, as if knowing that no one was looking at them, began to disport themselves in the dark sky: now flaring up, now vanishing, now trembling, they were busy whispering something gladsome and mysterious to each other.  (XV.3.)

War and Peace is for the most part written in a plain style.  Not always.

I am to blame, not he - Tolstoy's "complicated task" in War and Peace

I previously read War and Peace (1869) for a Tolstoy class, mixed undergraduate and graduate, mixed language – I was in the easy division, under- and English – twenty-six years ago, using the Norton Critical Edition of the Maude translation, the same book I just finished.

The professor, a Nabokov scholar, wanted the entire text available for class discussions, so we had double reading for the first third of the class – reading and discussing the novellas in The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy while simultaneously reading War and Peace, then reading Anna Karenina while discussing War and Peace, and finally re-reading for our papers while discussing Anna Karenina.  The bare minimum reading load for a respectable literature class, yes?  That was a good class.

War and Peace is hardly the piece of worked-up art that Anna Karenina is, and how could it be?  It is so big.  That Leo Tolstoy could handle the mass of material as he did was his first achievement.  Many subsequent writers of historical fiction have written books – or series – of comparable, or greater, size and complexity, paralleling and criss-crossing the lives of a small (or large) number of characters across a big historical landscape, having them wander into “real” scenes populated by Napoleon Bonaparte and the equivalent.

Tolstoy only had the one example in front of him.  This was my single great “discovery” about War and Peace, the influence of Victor Hugo.  Save that for later.  The bigness of the book is a real achievement, and a real difficulty for me, since it is hard to remember so many details across so many pages.

Vladimir Nabokov called War and Peace “a rollicking historical novel written… specifically for the young” (1969 interview in Strong Opinions, p. 148 – he also says it’s “a little too long,” snort), which is dismissive but insightful.  The beauties of the novel – or, more accurately, my guess is that the beauties of War and Peace – do not depend so much on the kind complex motifs of which Anna Karenina is built, but on a more direct feeling for the reality of the characters, even on an identification with them.

As languagehat wrote in 2009, after he had completed the novel in Russian, “I get mad at Prince Andrei with the same sort of exasperated affection I direct at my own brothers, not with the distanced feeling of irritation I experience with, say, Proust’s Marcel.”  Oh, let’s not get into Marcel – that guy gets on my last nerve.  Maybe Tolstoy’s novel is best read with the immersive identification of childhood.  I am not just watching Natasha Rostov at her first ball or Nicholas Rostov at his first battle, but for a time I am Natasha, I am Nicholas.  Not that the identification is always that close.

Two characters, Nicholas and Prince Andrew Bolkonski, are if anything too empty, too generic, early in the novel, their characters kept a bit blank to allow me to more easily wander around the Battle of Austerlitz in their bodies, akin to the officer in Sevastopol Stories (1855) who gives me a semi-fictional tour of the besieged fortress.

[Prince Andrew] is monotonous, boring, and merely un homme comme il faut in the whole first part.  That is true, but I am to blame, not he.  I intend not only to depict characters, their actions, and their encounters, but also to work history in.  This greatly complicates my task, and I’m not succeeding at it, or so it seems.  (letter to the poet Anafasy Fet, 1866, p. 1361 of the Norton edition)

But this all gets fixed pretty fast.  All five main characters – or six, counting His Supreme Highness General Kutuzov? – are good company.  I never cared which thread of the story I was reading – was never eager to get back to someone else’s story – as long as it wasn’t a section featuring that blowhard amateur historian Leo Tolstoy.

I feel that given the bulk of the thing, I ought to be able to spend a month with War and Peace, but I think it will just be the rest of the week.  My notes say: point of view, Victor Hugo, the wolf hunt, death.

an artistic and tender finish - Hardy wraps up his fiction

How incomparably the immaterial dream dwarfed the grandest of substantial things, when here, between those three sublimities – the sky, the rock, and the ocean – the minute personality of this washer-girl filled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendous inanimate scene shrank to a corner therein.  (II.viii.)

That’s not a bad single-sentence summary of The Well-Beloved from right in the middle of the novel, when the sculptor Pierston is at his most solipsistic.  This is when he is in his forties, pursuing the twenty-year-old daughter of the woman he jilted long ago.  The form of the novel shapes my response to his solipsism.  Hardy’s rocks and oceans feel as real as his characters; the washer-girl seems as real as Pierston.  More so, honestly.

Pierston idealizes women to the extent that he becomes the idealized, unrealistic character.  Early in the novel, Pierston confesses his pursuit of the imaginary Well-Beloved, who flits from woman to woman, to a more grounded friend, and is told that he is merely male and not that special.  “’You are like other men, only rather worse’” (I.vii.).  Just what I had been thinking!

Hardy routinely undercuts his protagonist.  Just after the quotation up top, the washer-girl openly tells him that she herself is pretty flighty (“’I have loved fifteen a’ready!’”) but that Pierston is “’handsome and gentlemanly’” but “’too old’” – “’But you asked me, sir!’ she expostulated.”

“I have paid the penalty!” he said sadly.  “Men of my sort always get the worst of it somehow.”  (II.xii.)

Meanwhile the rest of the novel demonstrates the exact opposite.

If Pierston is too old in his forties, Hardy needs some help to make the final section credible, when he is in his sixties pursuing the Well-Beloved in the form of the twenty-year-old daughter of the washer-girl, the granddaughter of the woman he jilted in the early chapters.  In a clever twist, the mother, ill and worn down, gets caught up in the romance of the novel.  She pressures her daughter to marry Pierston, thinking it will somehow make up for all of the various disappointments of the past forty years.

Rejecting the first Avice, the second had rejected him, and to rally the third with final achievement was an artistic and tender finish to which it was ungrateful in anybody to be blind.  (III.vi.)

These are the thoughts of that “second,” who rejected Pierston.  She is the one seduced by the artistic finish, the satisfying happy ending, because it makes a good story.  Luckily, her daughter, in line with the rest of the novel, is made of less dreamy stuff and is able to make her own ending.

Hardy returns to this idea at the novel’s end, in a kind of coda:

“That’s how people are – wanting to round off other people’s histories in the best machine-made conventional manner.”  (III.viii.)

Unsurprisingly, Hardy resists this temptation.  Remembering that The Well-Beloved is in some sense Hardy’s last published prose fiction, the last line looks like it serves more than one purpose:

At present he is sometimes mentioned as the “late Mr. Pierston” by gourd-like young art-critics and journalists; and his productions are alluded to as those of a man not without genius, whose powers were insufficiently recognized in his lifetime.

(“Gourd-like”?)

She was indescribable - Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved

Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved was published twice, serially in 1892 and as a book, revised – much revised? – in 1897, placing it among his problematic late novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895).  By “problematic,” I mean the problem facing Hardy, his frustration with the form of the novel, which was proving incapable of doing some of the things he wanted it to do.  Like a number of his contemporaries, he wanted prose to do what poetry did.  Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes not.  Eventually, he realized it would be easier to just be the greatest living English poet.

But now he is still writing odd Shelley-steeped novels.

All now stood dazzlingly unique and white against the tinted sea, and the sun flashed on infinitely stratified walls of oolite,
                                      The melancholy ruins
                    Of cancelled cycles…
with a distinctiveness that called the eyes to it as strongly as any spectacle he had beheld afar. (I.i.)

A little bit of “Prometheus Unbound” there.  That rock, that sea, they’re part of the rugged, stony “Isle” of Portland, a Wessex setting handled with as much art as in Hardy’s better known books.

The canine gnawing audible on the Pebble-bank had been repeated ever since at each tide, but the pebbles remained undevoured…

…  he stood once again at the foot of the familiar steep whereon the houses at the entrance to the Isle were perched like grey pigeons on a roof-side.  (III.i.)

“Canine gnawing,” that’s good stuff, yes?  Hardy mines the setting for all of the thematic weight it can carry.  The protagonist is a sculptor, the son of a quarryman, a child of the famous Portland stone.  He escapes to London, to art, to the Academy, but is constantly pulled back to his childhood home by self-pity and girl trouble, specifically his notion that he falls in love not with individual women but with an abstract Well-Beloved who temporarily inhabits specific women.

Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips.  God only knew what she really was; Pierston did not.  She was indescribable.  (I.ii.)

Embodiments in three women from his home, twenty years apart, Avice, her daughter, and her granddaughter, make up the story of the novel.  In his twenties, he is a dog; in his forties, pursuing the twenty-year-old daughter of an old flame, he is creepy; in his sixties, engaged to the granddaughter of the first Avice, he becomes merely pathetic, and thus learns something about loving individual people rather than idealized figures and abstract ideas.

The novel is a long critique of Pierston’s tendency towards abstraction and desire for perfection.  The idealistic artist is constantly pulled down into the messier form of the novel.  The governing idea, the three sections, twenty years apart, the small cast, make this a strange kind of novel.  A chamber piece.  A romance in the sense of a fantasy, although in a solid setting.

Eight years ago, I had read one of Hardy’s books.  Now I have read twelve of them, and The Well-Beloved is the first one where I thought: Boy I am glad I did not read this one first.  It helped to have read some of the books around it.

Tomorrow I will extend or justify or at least mess with a couple of these ideas.

“I’m no critic, I only know what I like.” - emptying my bag of McTeague notes

“Of course,” she told the dentist, “I’m no critic, I only know what I like.”  She knew that she liked the “Ideal Heads,” lovely girls with flowing straw-colored hair and immense, upturned eyes.  These always had for title, “Reverie,” or “An Idyll,” or “Dreams of Love.”  (Ch. 10)

Frank Norris absorbed French fiction pretty thoroughly.  He mocks the bad taste of his characters.  He’s as bad as Flaubert.  Trina – that’s Trina, who marries McTeague, speaking – decorates their apartment with magazine illustrations that “inevitably” included “very alert fox terriers and very pretty moon-faced little girls” (Ch. 9).  Norris is so mean.

He also turns Trina into a cruel miser, borrowing now from Balzac, from Lost Illusions and Eugénie Grandet:

“Ah, the dear money, the dear money,” she would whisper, “I love you so!  All mine, every penny of it.” (Ch. 16)

“She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth, and jingled them there” – fantastic.  Norris understood Zola the way I do, that his fiction is a kind of baroque Romanticism disguised in drab.  Norris does not share Zola’s baroque descriptive tendencies, but his imagery is pretty good when he wants.  This is across the bay in Oakland:

At the station these [poles] were headed by an iron electric-light pole that, with its supports and outriggers, looked for all the world like a grasshopper on its hind legs…  Clouds of sea-gulls were forever rising and settling upon this mud bank; a wrecked and abandoned wharf crawled over it on tottering legs…  (Ch. 5)

As far as I know, these animated ruins do not have a strong thematic connection to anything else, but I may have missed something.  They do dimly link to a long theater scene that features the Kinetoscope, the earliest reference to motion pictures that I have seen in an American novel:

McTeague was awe-struck.

“Look at that horse move his head,” he cried excitedly, quite carried away.  “Look at that cable-car coming – and the man going across the street.  See, here comes a truck.”  (Ch. 6)

His future mother-in-law is on to the seductive deception of movies, though: “’I ain’t no fool; dot’s nuthun but a drick.’”  This terrific chapter, which is packed with theatrical entertainment, also includes a little boy who desperately needs to pee, something else I had not seen in earlier fiction.

“Owgooste, what is ut?” cried his mother, eyeing him with dawning suspicion; then suddenly, “What haf you done?  You haf ruin your new Vauntleroy gostume!”

Poor little August, constantly humiliated by Norris, stuffed into that Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, “very much too small for him.”

What else?  Ah, Frank Norris gives himself a cameo in his own novel, near the end (Ch. 20).  I needed the help of a footnote to know that.  Pretty funny.

I would not call McTeague a great novel, but it is full of amusing things.

something else in life besides concertinas and steam beer - McTeague, Frank Norris's novel of Zola in San Francisco

Speaking of miserable, how about some time with Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899).  For once, the “Naturalism” label does me some good, since this novel is Zola in San Francisco.  It is mostly like L’Assommoir (1877), but there is a scene near the end where McTeague works in a mine, the noise of “which is like the breathing of an infinitely great monster, alive, palpitating” (Ch. 20), a description directly thieved from Germinal (1885).  A tip of the hat, there.  But there is a wedding feast so close to the one in L’Assommoir that the Norton Critical Edition includes the Zola scene for comparison.

It makes sense.  American readers without French could not read Zola’s most famous books, since they were considered obscene, so there was an opportunity for an American novelist to do his own version sans the smut but avec the violence, worse violence, even – this would become the standard American method of adapting French art.

Seriously, this thing turns into a Cormac McCarthy novel towards the end.  Or a Coen brothers movie.  To my memory, I had never read much about the novel itself, but I had read plenty about Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, the 1924 film adaptation, so there were several points where I thought “Uh oh, here it comes.”  And then, mostly, it didn’t.  But eventually it did.

McTeague is an unlicensed San Francisco dentist.  He is huge, able to pull teeth with his bare hands, and unintelligent, a “draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient” (Ch. 1).  His stupidity is a genuinely interesting part of the story.  There are a number of scenes which begin as comedy but turn into something more pathetic as McTeague proves unable to handle ordinary activities.  The scene in Chapter 6, for example, where he is almost too stupid to buy theater tickets in advance.  Or see Chapter 4, where the poor brute almost chokes to death on a billiard ball.

He learns there is “something else in life besides concertinas and steam beer” when he begins fixing the teeth of petite Trina.  “The male virile desire in him tardily awakened, aroused itself, strong and brutal” (Ch. 2).  Meanwhile, Trina is in some ways repulsed by McTeague but also turned on by his strength.  “McTeague had awakened the Woman” (Ch. 6), etc. – Norris has to resort to abstractions at points like this.

Reading these scenes soon after reading The Awakening, published the same year, was amusing?  Everyone is awakening!  Was the word showing up in magazines a lot or something?

The San Francisco setting is terrific, and strangely intact and recognizable.  Characters walk to the Cliff House or the Presidio; the cable car is in the same place; even McTeague’s dentist parlor, with its big gold tooth for a sign, is in more or less the right place, except now it is a saloon.

This nightmare was soon followed by another - Maxim Gorky's My Childhood

Maxim Gorky’s My Childhood (1913) is what a few years ago was called a misery memoir.  Maybe that trend is over.  Gorky’s book, the first of his trilogy of autobiographies, is, nevertheless, utterly miserable.

The book begins with the corpse of Gorky’s father.  Alexei Peshkov, the future Maxim Gorky, is four years old.  It ends with the death of his mother when Alexei is eleven.  In between, well, “[t]his nightmare was soon followed by another” (first line of Ch. 5).

The middles of the thirteen chapters were not necessarily so bad.  The ends, though, oh boy.  It was always a relief when no one ended up murdered:

I went to the window where, numb with misery, I stared down at the empty street. (last line of Ch. 6)

The house seemed to be a deep pit from which light and sound and feeling were absent, in which I lived a blind and almost lifeless existence.  (last line of Ch. 7)

Thus ended the first of a chain of friendships with the best people of my land.  (last line of Ch. 8)

And, lying on the oven ledge, I looked down on them and thought how squat and obese and repulsive all of them were.  (last line of Ch. 9)

Ah, I love that last one – that’s the chapter that ends with the brutal murder.

The strange thing is that Gorky emerges from this childhood as an optimist.  He has resiliency.  Much of this attitude comes from his grandmother, a wonderful character who is perpetually happy, sometimes with the aid of booze, no matter what life or her awful children or her brutal husband throw at her.  Some of this is religious belief – she always prays for the happiness of others, not herself – and some of it temperament, a temperament she shares with, or passes on, to her grandson.

Grandma, a terrific, imaginative storyteller, is describing the time she saw a pair of angels:

“How beautiful it was!  Oh, Alex, dear heart, things go well wherever God is, in heaven or here on earth.”

“But you can’t mean here in our house?”

“Praised be Our Lady!” said grandma, crossing herself, “everything goes well.”

I was bothered by this.  (Ch. 4)

This section with grandma becomes so happy that the chapter has too end with two catastrophes, a fire and a separate death.

I suppose I would call the grandfather a wonderful character, too, but he is more “wonderful” in the sense of making a good character in a novel.  In real life, he would be a person to avoid.  Much of the “plot” of this “novel” is about the deepening relationship between the bad grandfather and the smart, willful grandson as the family declines, one disaster at a time, from prosperous craftsmen (dyers) to beggars.

Gorky only resorts to editorial once, near the end of the memoir.  Why return to “such atrocious memoires of our bestial Russian life”?  Because along with “our animal self… grows a brilliant, creative, wholesome human type which encourages us to seek our regeneration, a future of peace and humane living for all” (last line of Ch. 12).

If My Childhood were a novel, this would sound false, but it is a memoir, and there are two more volumes.

I read Isidor Schneider’s translation.

But nothing happens - premature celebration of the the 100th anniversary of Wilfred Owen becoming a great poet

Against my recent practice, I read an academic edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1985, ed. Jon Stallworthy) rather than some version of how readers would have originally known him, like Poems (1920, ed. Siegfried Sassoon).  The difference is palpable.  The more or less chronological arrangement of the complete edition means that close to half of the book’s 200 pages is given to the minor poems of a talented imitator of Keats.  Most surprising is a twenty-page poetic version of “The Little Mermaid” (written 1912), the “Endymion” of Keats but using Hans Christian Andersen rather than Greek mythology.  It’s pretty good, for what it is.

The complete edition tells a story, then.  Young Keats, then a long gap while Owen is fighting in France, then the astounding, rapid development of a real successor to Keats, created – creativity is a mystery – by some combination of experience in combat, the discovery of a subject, the friendship and example of Sassoon, and perhaps most importantly the hospital stay that finally allowed him to write.  The speed at which this great poet appears is something to see.

Then the story ends with Poems as Owen’s first book, posthumous.  Poems is barely a book, only twenty-three short poems, but each one extraordinary.  There is no develop.  The great dead poet just pops out of the war.

Well, different books tell different stories.

Owen’s technical mastery had me – I don’t know.  It is, on the one hand, easy to be absorbed by subject, the pathos of the myriad deaths of Owen’s young men, but it is similarly easy to pause over a stanza’s language, savoring the pararhymes and searching for the assonance and so on, all of the effects that make the poem sound so good, read aloud or otherwise.

from Exposure

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
Less deathly than the air that shudders black with snow,
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew;
We watch them wandering up and down the wind’s nonchalance,
                But nothing happens.   (ll. 16-20)

The last line is a refrain.  I picked this stanza because it is transparent, the repeated “fl-“ and “w-“ words close together.  “Sudden successive… silence… shudders…  sidelong,” that last word somehow shifting into the “fl-“ cluster.  “Snow” and “renew” seem more like slant rhymes than pararhymes, but “silence / -chalance” is ingenious.  You vary the vowels, but keep the consonants, if you don’t want to look up “pararhyme” – “mood / mud,” “grinned / groaned”:

‘My Love!’ one moaned.  Love-languid seemed his mood,
Till slowly lowered, his whole face kissed the mud.
                 And the Bayonets’ long teeth grinned
                 Rabbles of Shells hooted and groaned;
                And the Gas hissed.  (from “The Last Laugh,” ll. 11-15)

His imagery is as skilled as his versifying.  The air shudders, the flakes pause, the shells groan – wonderful stuff, at a distance, but by the time any but a few poets read these poems, it was at a distance.

I suppose the beginning of a poet’s Annus Mirabilis does not lend itself to anniversaries like a death, but 2017 – more like October or November, though, not now – is the hundredth anniversary of the creation of a great poet.

Robert Graves discreetly blends Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys in Country Sentiment

In 1920 Robert Graves was still a young poet, not the baffling omni-author he later became.  Country Sentiment was his third book, if I am counting correctly.  It is a mix of children’s verse, or children’s verse for adults, with some war poems.  In his previous books the two modes were jumbled together, but this time the war poems go in their own section, “Retrospect.”

The final poem is titled “A First Review”:

Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys
    Are here discreetly blent;
Admire, you ladies, read you boys,
            My Country Sentiment.

He is mocking me for reading his book.  Wait, I can’t skip the third stanza:

Then Tom, a hard and bloody chap,
    Though much beloved by me,
“Robert, have done with nursery pap,
    Write like a man,” says he.

Graves is mocking me by name!

But I would never such I thing.  I enjoy the nursery pap, although Walter de la Mare is better at it.  My only serious objection is to a “moon / June” rhyme in the first poem, “A Frosty Night.”  Was that not already a much-mocked pop song cliché in 1920?

That poem, like many in the book, are off-kilter dialogues between a parent and child, where one or another introduces an uncanny touch.  In “Dicky,” the poor boy in the title, walking home, encounters a dead man, walking about.  Dicky’s wise mother advises him to play it cool around the dead.

Do not sigh or fear, Dicky,
    How is it right
To grudge the dead their ghostly dark
    And wan moonlight?

Good advice, right?  Graves is always good with a ballad:

One moonlight night a ship drove in,
    A ghost ship from the west,
Drifting with bare mast and lone tiller,
    Like a mermaid drest
In long green weed and barnacles:
    She beached and came to rest.  (from “The Alice Jean”)

That is a good way to begin a story.  The story that follows is pretty good, living up to the beginning about as well as it can in our skeptical age.

The war poems, in effect, become a kind of children’s poem, or vice versa, another way to tell stories about the dead and the many ways they return.  The most explicit attempt is “Haunted,” a more generalized version of a story Graves retells in Good-Bye To All That (1929), when Graves and some fellow soldiers saw, they were sure, a comrade who had been recently killed:

I met you suddenly down the street,
Strangers assume your phantom faces,
You grin at me from daylight places,
Dead, long dead, I’m ashamed to greet
Dead men down the morning street.

The Robert Graves-to-be, the mythologist, occasionally appears, as in the sinister “Outlaws,” about the creepiest of the fairy folk, old gods shrunken by lack of worshippers:

Proud gods, humbled, sunk so low,
    Living with ghosts and ghouls,
And ghosts of ghosts and last year’s snow
   And dead toadstools.

Ideas to develop after Graves says good-bye to England and the war.

If you call poetry a song - some of Jaroslav Seifert's singing

The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert (1998, tr. Ewald Osers and George Gibian) is 250 pages of genial company with the Czech national poet, a position inseparable from the troubles of his country, the multiple wars, invasions, and occupations.  Or the troubles of his city, really.  He is the great poet of Prague.

Day after day I gaze in gratitude
on Prague’s Castle
                         and on its Cathedral:
I cannot tear my eyes away
from that picture.
                       It is mine
and I also believe it is miraculous.  (from “View from Charles Bridge,” 1983)

Tourist Prague, even.  There is enough geography in the later poems that even a couple of days in Prague was a big help.

Seifert began as a proletarian poet.  “We wanted to ‘astound the bourgeoisie,’ but it seems we astounded them only mildly” (p. 226).  I detected a contemporary French flavor, which was confirmed in a biographical prose piece, although in a surprising way:

[Karel Teige] would read and immediately translate for us the poems of Apollinaire.  In this way we became acquainted not only with Alcools and Caligrammes, but also with the poems of Jacob, Cocteau, Cendrars, Reverdy, and other modern poets.  Vildrac’s beautiful Book of Love, which we had loved before that, receded into the background, because Cubism, Futurism, and Tzara’s Dada rushed towards us, thanks to Teige.  (228)

Thus Prague looks a little different in a poem from the 1920s than in the above poem:

The telescopes have gone blind from the horror
    of the universe
and the fantastic eyes of the spacemen
have been sucked out by death.  (from “Prague,” 1929)

The telescopes would have been new, and are still there.  Osers, the translator, gives most of the book to the poetry of Seifert’s seventies and eighties, when he began writing poems again after a silence of two decades, poems that circulated as samizdat.  The poems that won him a Nobel, I presume, like a long sequence titled “The Bombing of the Town of Kralupy” (1983) from Seifert’s war experiences:

I do not know if I may say at last
what crossed my mind
at the sight of the bodies
                       -- it was a shocking thought.

They lay there on the ground in tidy rows
like so many hares laid out
after a successful shoot.  (188)

Maybe hard to get this subject wrong.  A set of music poems are lighter, including tributes to Bach and Mozart:

Mozart is not buried in capricious Vienna.
His grave is in Prague
on the Petřin hillside.

The grave is by now half crumbled.
It’s been a lot of years!
And no one else knows about it.  (from “Nocturnal Divertimento,” 1983, p. 196)

Three great lifelong loves for Seifert – women, Prague, and poetry:

If you call poetry a song
–  and people often do –
then I’ve sung all my life.

And I marched with those who had nothing,
who lived from hand to mouth.
I was one of them.  (1967, p. 79)

It can be hard to hear the singing in Osers’s free verse translations, which he says is a good part of why the book includes so few poems from the more formal, lyrical poems of the 1920s.  Easy enough to spend some time with wise, friendly, lively Seifert, though.

the adventures of innocence have so often been the material of fiction - more useful Henry James short stories

“The Two Faces” (1900) was helpful in decoding the obscurities of The Awkward Age.  It is written on similar principles, but is simpler and only fifteen pages long.

Mrs. Grantham introduces a young woman into society, purposefully dressing her to look like a fool, which means “many things – too many, and they appeared to be feathers, frills, excrescences of silk and lace.”  Mrs. Grantham commits this small act of minor cruelty as revenge on the woman’s husband, who is Mrs. Grantham’s ex-boyfriend.  The point of view is that of Mrs. Grantham’s current boyfriend, Sutton.  When he witnesses the revenge – when he sees the cruelty in Mrs. Grantham’s face and humiliation in the young woman’s – there we have “The Two Faces” – he decides to dump Mrs. Grantham.

That’s a version of the story, with some translation.  Most of what I wrote has to be inferred.  For example, all Sutton does at the end is leave the party early.  If I want that action to be meaningful, I have to do something with it.  None of the sexual connections with Mrs. Grantham are explicit.  They are barely even implicit.  But to interpret what is visible in the text – to have it make sense at all – I have to start filling the void.

I first read The Awkward Age as if James would eventually provide clues to resolve the novel’s ambiguities.  “The Two Faces,” easier to absorb, showed me more clearly how much was going to remain unstated.  It is not so much a technique to allow multiple possibilities of motive, but to demand the reader work harder, and take some risks, just to piece together the plot.  Without some reasonably big leaps, “The Two Faces” makes no sense.

I want to note one fun description of a secondary character, introduced for expository purposes:

She was stout, red, rich, mature, universal – a massive, much-fingered volume, alphabetical, wonderful, indexed, that opened of itself at the right place.

Look, there is one of those mystifying superlatives, “wonderful,” used in a way I don’t understand.

James was using his short stories of this period to work on a number of techniques.  “The Story in It” (1902) works in the opposite way, removing every shadow from a simple case of unrequited love and then wondering, per the title, whether there is a “’story’ in it.”  This meta-fictional question is asked in a story which mostly consists of an argument about the purpose of fiction, an essay in dialogue disguised as a short story.

“You mean that the adventures of innocence have so often been the material of fiction? Yes,” Voyt replied; “that’s exactly what the bored reader complains of.  He has asked for bread and been given a stone.  What is it but, with absolute directness, a question of interest, or, as people say, of the story.”

The random reader of The Anglo-American Magazine likely found this story incomprehensible, but for anyone following James, who at this point had completed The Ambassadors and was writing The Wings of the Dove, it is revealing.