Stop! - for thy tread is on an Empire's dust! - the best books of 1816

Isn’t that 1816 Constable landscape pretty.  It’s Wivenhoe Park, Essex, for some reason now in Washington, D. C.  1816 was the Year without a Summer, the year of a worldwide volcano-induced deep freeze, even with the Napoleonic Wars over, a terrible year in Europe.

It was a wonderful year for English poetry, with Shelley’s first great book, Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems, and Keats’s first published poems, including “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (a book would come in 1817).  Few knew it.  Everyone knew about best-seller George Gordon Byron’s great year, with three big hits: the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (the post’s title is from stanza XVII), “The Prisoner of Chillon,” and one of his dumb Orientalist narrative poems, The Siege of Corinth, my personal favorite of his dumb etc.

Alp, “the renegade,” has been refused the hand of the woman he loves, so he has thrown in his lot with the Turks.  Is he helping them besiege the recalcitrant Greeks in Corinth for love or revenge?  Regardless, the poem ends in not just a battle scene but a massive explosion, just like it would in the Hollywood action movie of which The Siege of Corinth is a genuine precursor.  The last seventy lines describing the explosion are superb, with the shock moving out to the armies, then to the animals, to the birds, as if the world is protesting the event:

Many a tall and goodly man,
Scorch’d and shrivell’d to a span,
When he fell to earth again
Like a cinder strew’d the plain:
Down the ashes shower like rain…  (Canto XXXIII)

Horrible, violent, shocking poetry.  I had meant to reread the more allusive and difficult Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage before writing this post, but picking up the Selected Poems I was sucked into The Siege of Corinth instead.

Walter Scott published three books in 1816.  To understand this silly story it is important to remember that he was a best-selling poet but published Waverley (1814) anonymously, then Guy Mannering (1815) as “By the Author of Waverley,” and now The Antiquary (1816) as by the same.  The latter is the favorite Scott novel of many eminent writers, so I am glad I have read it.  Waverley kicked off the craze for historical novels that continues to this day; The Antiquary is in many ways about historical novels.  If only it were better.

At this point, with three hit anonymous novels under his belt, Scott decided to play a prank.  He retired “the Author of Waverley” and began a new series, with a new publisher, the Tales of My Landlord, which resulted in one short novel, The Black Dwarf and one long one, Old Mortality, published simultaneously.  To extend the prank, Scott published vicious (anonymous) reviews of his own novels.  Nevertheless, both books were hits, and readers with any sense of style knew they are by the Waverley writer.

Old Mortality is Scott’s best novel, I think, along with The Heart of Midlothian (1818).  It is about religious fanaticism, a topic of continuing relevance.  The stakes are higher than in Waverley, the world more dangerous.

What else is going on in 1816?  Goethe’s Italian Journey, Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” and “The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King,” Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe.  I have often mentioned how little French literature survived this period, but here is a major exception, a politician’s novel about a love affair with an older, stronger woman.  It is a dissection of the love affair and the narrator’s feelings about it:

We were living, so to speak, on a sort of memory of the heart, strong enough to make the thought of separation painful, but too weak for us to find satisfaction in being together.  I indulged in these emotions as a relaxation from my normal tension.  I would have liked to give Ellenore tokens of my love that would have made her happy, and indeed I sometimes went back to the language of love, but these emotions and this language resembled the pale and faded leaves which, like remains of funeral wreaths, grow listlessly on the branches of an uprooted tree.  (Ch. 6, tr. Leonard Tancock)

The entire book is written like that, with few scenes, description, or even dialogue, but rather alternating movement and analysis.  It is a kind of fiction I associate strongly with French literature.  The Albertine sections of In Search of Lost Time are in this mode.

The Empire is dust, and French literature is returning to life.

Lord Byron is a vampire who gives Bibles to poor children

Prof. Burstein has been teaching a class in the “Nineteenth-Century Gothic” this semester and I have been reading around in the syllabus, just the works I had not read, so no Frankenstein or Jane Eyre or James Hogg right now.  Mostly the, how to say this, lesser Gothic.  Third-tier Charles Dickens ghost stories.  Elizabeth Gaskell magazine fiction.  Enjoyable, but I am not expecting to stumble on the equivalent of A Christmas Carol or Cranford.

Thus John Polidori’s The Vampyre; A Tale (1819) is the worst book I have read in a long time.  It is a milestone in, you know, vampire literature, but more importantly it is built on an outstanding joke, which is that Polidori’s pal Lord Byron, the most famous writer in Europe, is a – is the – vampyre.  Polidori does everything he can to encourage the association.

The punchline comes after the story proper (“Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!” as if anyone cares), in the “Extract of a Letter, Containing an Account of Lord Byron’s Residence in the Island of Mitylene,” which on the surface has nothing at all to do with The Vampyre, and just below the surface acts as a denial that Byron deserves any of his notoriety.   His reading, for example, is not only not especially shocking; he is just a poet, a scholar:

On the tablet of the recess lay Voltaire’s, Shakespeare’s, Boileau’s, and Rousseau’s works complete; Volney’s Ruin of Empires; Zimmerman, in the German language; Klopstock’s Messiah; Kotzebue’s novels; Schiller’s play of the Robbers; Milton’s Paradise Lost, an Italian edition, printed at Parma in 1810; several small pamphlets form the Greek press at Constantinople, much torn, but no English book of any description.  Most of these books were filled with marginal notes, written with a pencil, in Italian and Latin.  The Messiah was literally scribbled all over, and marked with slips of paper, on which also were remarks.

The last line is the culmination of the joke, that Byron’s attention is focused on the era’s great religious poem.  When he is not reading, Byron gives Greek girls money for – their dowries – what did you think I was going to say?  “He also bought a new boat for a fisherman who had lost his own in a gale, and he often gave Greek Testaments to the poor children.”  He bought another “most beautiful” girl a piano.

Lord Byron’s character is worthy of his genius.  To do good in secret, and shun the world’s applause, is the surest testimony of a virtuous heart and self-approving conscience.

I don’t know how much of this is true; that is the third level of the story, the put-on.  Byron wasn’t a vampire, that part I know is untrue.

Prof. Burstein has The Vampyre paired with Byron’s Manfred (1817), an inversion of Goethe’s Faust in which Byron is a wizard who spends his time summoning demons who then refuse to serve him.  Kind of ineffective.  But Byron is doing the same thing Polidori would later do, practically demanding that his readers identify the demented Byronic character with the celebrity author.

The Vampyre is most interesting as a landmark in the literature of celebrity.

He reads the Agricultural Reports, and some other books – The Best Books of 1815

We are looking at an 1815 drawing by Hokusai that I copied from p. 194 of Hokusai by Gian Carlo Calza (1999, English translation 2003).  Calza suggests that the scene depicts the Azumaya bookshop.  The owner is on the right, a delivery boy with a bundle of text on the left, and a customer in the middle, choosing a book.

What book do you think he will buy?  Will it be one of the best Japanese books of 1815?  What were the best Japanese books of 1815?

I have picked up from what I have read about Japanese literary history that the 19th century is not thought of as a good period, a helpful judgment in that it gives me a good excuse to stay ignorant.  I enjoy playing with Best Books posts at the end of each year, but they are mementoes of my ignorance.

How many books from 1815 have I read?  I believe three, or perhaps only two, but I did read those books in particular because a long line of readers have kept them alive.  If not the best, they are the survivors.

In December 1815, Walter Scott would have topped the Best Books lists with his second novel, Guy Mannering.  Well, not Scott, but rather “The Author of Waverley.”  I do not know how high The Author of Pride and Prejudice &c. &c. would have ranked with Emma, but she was becoming pretty well-known by this point.

One of these novels is currently among the most popular in the world, while the other has retreated to graduate school, although Scott Bailey read it last spring and made it sound pretty good, if “very plotty.”  I’ve read seven Scott novels, but not Guy Mannering; what do I know.

The big celebrity bestseller of the year was Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, a collection of song settings of original lyrics published in an expensive edition.  Byron was so popular that he could immediately sell ten thousand copies of even this book.  Current selections of Byron, even fat Penguins and Oxfords, come close to ignoring Hebrew Melodies, but it is the home of “She Walks in Beauty.”

It’s the next year, 1816, when miracles start to happen in English poetry.

I know of two great books in German literature from 1815: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir (or just its first half – I never got this straight), and Part II of the first version of Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales (Part I is from 1812).

The Hoffmann novel is great fun and a standard classic for German-language readers.  No idea why it has never done much in English.  Too weird?

The Grimm brothers’ book is of the highest importance.  Which book has generated the most additional books, Emma or Grimm’s’ Fairy Tales?  This second volume has “Hans My Hedgehog,” “The Goose Girl,” “The Golden Key” with its unending ending.  I have read the complete Fairy Tales, but not in this early form.  That would be worth doing someday.

So, within the bounds of my ignorance, then: after two hundred years of erosion, three great books left.

The title is borrowed from Emma.

His volume heretofore was Man - Byron's Byronic 1814

1814 was an important year for Byronism, a Romantic text-transmitted disease that infected a number of the greatest writers of Europe.  Symptoms included melancholy, handsomeness, and conformity-smashing free-spiritedness.

George Gordon Byron’s immense celebrity began with Child Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, a travel poem in which a Byronic fellow wanders about the Mediterranean – exotic Spain, exotic Albania.  Understanding the appeal of the character, Byron began to write silly best-selling adventure stories (“Turkish Tales”) starring an Orientalized version of the character, mostly in rhyming couplets, a form of which Byron was one of the few great masters in English.  Meanwhile, Byron increased his celebrity by behaving scandalously.  This formula has been successful for two hundred years now.

With Byron the difference between self-parody and self-mythologizing can be hard to see.  Some examples from The Corsair, canto and line numbers in parentheses:

Sun-burnt his cheek, his forehead high and pale
The sable curls in wild profusion veil  (I.203-4)

There was a laughing Devil in his sneer,
That raised emotions both of rage and fear;
And where his frown of hatred darkly fell,
Hope withering fled – and Mercy sigh’d farewell!  (I.223-6)

Lone, wild and strange, he stood alike exempt
From all affection and from all contempt  (l.272-3)

I would need a specialist in the transmission of Byronism to demonstrate the case, but I think the two cleverly linked verse romances of 1814, The Corsair and Lara, perfect the character.  The first is about a pirate captain who fights a Turkish Pasha for wealth and power.  It features a sea battle, disguises, a beautiful harem girl in distress, a prison escape.  All of what I would now call the usual nonsense.

So this is why in Chapter 17 of Jane Eyre the chic, repellent Miss Ingram wants to hear “’a Corsair-song’” – “’Know that I doat on Corsairs.’”   These stories, and this character, have been copied so often and so thoroughly that it is quite hard to see anything original, but there was a time when everyone thought they were the most daring, innovative, shocking poems anyone had ever seen.

Obviously, the pirate captain is not Byron, but a reader is allowed to imagine Byron as the hero, the image of Byron, the celebrity.  Thus, Byronism.

The preface to The Corsair declares that it will be Byron’s “last production,” but within the same year followed Lara, a meta-adventure.  Not only is the hero much like Byron, but also much like the Corsair. 

The chief of Lara is return’d again:
And why had Lara cross’d the bounding main?  (I.11-12)

But the case cannot be proved.  He has a page who turns out to be a woman, a foreigner, devoted to his life – the woman from The Corsair’s harem?  Maybe!  The home to which the chief has returned – a footnote simultaneously implies that the setting is Spain and not Spain (“the country is not Spain, but the Moon,” Byron wrote in a letter to his publisher).  It is all quite clever, a kind of inside-out parody of the Turkish tales.

Regardless, I would not recommend these adventure poems to anyone who does not savor Byron’s verse, who is not happy to read 1,270 lines of this:

Books, for his volume heretofore was Man,
With eye more curious he appear’d to scan,
And oft, in sudden mood, for many a day,
From all communion he would start away:
And then, his rarely call’d attendants said,
Through night's long hours would sound his hurried tread
O'er the dark gallery, where his fathers frown’d
In rude but antique portraiture around (I.131-8)

And who is not willing to take cheap thrills where he can get them, and laugh along with Byron at the silliness of the whole thing.

A parody, an empty show - Pushkin opens his Byron

We all enjoy a fiction that attacks fiction don’t we?  Madame Bovary and Don Quixote and so on.  Eugene Onegin belongs on the list.  Like the Cervantes novel, Pushkin’s poem both attacks and rehabilitates.

The title character, the bored dandy, is not much of a reader.  The quotation I used yesterday, about how books were dullness, deceit and raving, ends with Onegin decorating his bookshelves “in taffeta of mourning black” (One: XLIV, Johnston).  Books are dead.  Later we discover that Onegin does read, but narrowly – Lord Byron, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.  He seems to only like books in which he identifies with the main character.  Literature as a mirror.

Near the end of the novel Onegin turns to books to escape from heartache – “Gibbon and Rousseau, Manzoni and Chamfort…  and at times even a Russian” (Eight: XXXV, Johnston).  Not surprisingly, none of this works.  It does serve to remind me of one of the obstacles facing the reader of Eugene Onegin, a reason Nabokov wrote a thousand pages of commentary, why the Penguin edition still has over a hundred, one page of notes per two pages of text.  Of course I have read all of those authors (the ones I have not read I hid in the ellipses), and of course you have read them.  But some unintended distance is introduced.  Or so I guess.  This never seems to bother the Janeites.

The heroine’s reading is used more ingeniously.  Young, innocent Tatyana Larin seems to be as corrupted by literature as Emma Roualt when the novel begins, although her models are more elevated.  The perfect man is the title character of Samuel Richardson’s endless Sir Charles Grandison (1753), the perfect heroine the title character of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761).

From early on she loved romances,
they were her only food… and so
she fell in love with all the fancies
of Richardson and Rousseau.
Her father, kindly, open-hearted,
but dwelling in an age departed,
could see no harm in books; himself
he never took one from the shelf,
thought them a pointless peccadillo;
and cared not what his daughter kept
by way of secret tome that slept
until the dawn beneath her pillow,
His wife, just like Tatyana, had
on Richardson gone raving mad.  (Two: XXIX, Johnston, ellipses in original)

The latter experience is common for readers of Grandison.

Tatyana is not completely corrupted, though, since it turns out she has not read Byron or Melmoth or similar books – too naughty, I suppose.  She only reads them after she has fallen in love with her idealized Onegin, once he leaves his estate after his stupid duel (Sir Charles Grandison refuses to duel).  She in fact reads Onegin’s books, in Onegin’s library (“Lord Byron’s portrait on the wall”).  She reads not just the books but Onegin’s marginal notes, even noting passages “where a sharp nail has made a dent.”  She reads, in other words, not to find herself but to find Onegin, and what does she find?

Just an apparition,
a shadow, null and meaningless,
a Muscovite in Harold’s dress,
a modish second-hand edition,
a glossary of smart argot …
a parody, an empty show?  (Seven: XXIV, Johnston, ellipses in original).

Fiction is both cause and cure.  Onegin just mimics his fictional models.  Tatyana critiques them.  He drifts, she matures.

Thomas Carlyle has a line in Sartor Resartus that always makes me laugh – “Close thy Byron; open they Goethe.”  Pushkin proves Carlyle wrong.  Tatyana finds wisdom by opening someone else’s Byron.

The Best Books of 1813 - who am I kidding, the Best Book - I cannot prate in puling strain

“Frosty Morning” by J. M. W. Turner, courtesy of Tate Britain.  Turner liked it so much he never sold it, for which I do not blame him.  It was completed in 1813, a sparse year for surviving literature.

Only one lasting novel, for example, but what an example.  Pride and Prejudice has become an inescapable book, even a best-selling book.  I wish I could remember where I read that – you have to add all of the different editions together to get it onto the bestseller list, but then Jane Austen would be side by side with James Patterson.

It was not always so.  Pride and Prejudice was never anything like a forgotten book, but it was not so gigantic until recently, surprisingly recently.  I turn to my favorite problematic but simple tool for quantifying status, the MLA International Bibliography, a database of articles, monographs, etc. reaching back to 1947, where I count 505 articles, etc. with a Pride and Prejudice tag.  The distribution by decade, roughly:

1947-1973: 13
1974-1983: 32
1984-1993: 112
1994-2003: 116
2004-2013: 232

In other words, a full 45% of the academic articles, etc. about Pride and Prejudice have been published within the last ten years!  That is amazing.  Austen was not always so ubiquitous.

My guess would have been that the 1980s Austen revival was owed to feminist criticism, and perhaps that was the first spark, but a glance through the article titles from the 1980s suggests that all kinds of approaches were making good use of Pride and Prejudice.  It is such a rich text.

1813 was an important year for English poetry.  Percy Shelley’s first major work, the allegorical radical fairy poem “Queen Mab,” was published to no interest; a decade later it had become a central text for English laboring-class reformers and revolutionaries, a story almost as surprising as the long, slow rise of Pride and Prejudice.  I am afraid, or perhaps happy to say, the contents of the poem itself have slipped from my memory.

Lord Byron had hit the jackpot in 1812 with the first parts of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he followed in 1813 with two long Orientalist romances mostly in rhyming couplets, The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale and The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale, both immensely popular, both pretty silly, and both quite a lot of fun for readers who enjoy the poetry (if not, they are unreadable).  It is all just an excuse for Byron to show off his gift:

‘The cold in clime are cold in blood,
    Their love can scarce deserve the name;
But mine was like the lava flood
    That boils in Ætna’s breast of flame.
I cannot prate in puling strain
Of ladye-love, and beauty’s chain:
If changing cheek, and scorching vein,
Lips taught to writhe, but not complain,
If bursting heart, and madd’ning brain,
And daring deed, and vengeful steel,
And all that I have felt, and feel,
Betoken love –  that love was mine,
And shown by many a bitter sign.’  (“The Giaour,” 1099-1111)

In some sense I have still only come up with a single book for 1813.  What was going on in literature outside of England?  I do not know.  A number of European countries were understandably preoccupied.  Spain was being destroyed in the Peninsular War, yet Francisco Goya was creating the etchings that make up The Disasters of War and paintings like The Madhouse (none of these have firm dates).

It seems I often turn to Goya in these Best of 181X posts.  Well, of course.

The Best Books of the Year: 1812 - The blight of Life - the demon Thought.

The dying light of the autumnal sunset reminds me that it is the season for Best Books of the Year lists, those jolly collections of well-meaning ephemera.

1812 featured two big, lasting literary events.

The most dramatic was the birth of Byronism with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a Romaunt; and Other Poems.  George Gordon had published a couple of earlier books, but it was Childe Harold that made him an international celebrity (“I awoke one morning and found myself famous”):

What exile from himself can flee?
   To zones, though more and more remote,
Still, still pursues, where'er I be,
   The blight of life – the demon Thought.

Perhaps Byron’s fatalistic attitudinizing has become the poem's greatest legacy, but the poem itself is masterful and the book surrounding the poem would have served to undercut the facile Byronism if the facile Byronists had bothered to read it, with its lengthy footnotes and appendices on Albanian linguistics, classical references, and travel writing trivia:

As a specimen of the Albanian or Arnaout dialect of the Illyric, I here insert two of their most popular choral songs, which are generally chaunted in dancing by men or women indiscriminately.

Childe Harold would surprise people who only know Byron by reputation.

The second event was the publication of the first volume of the first edition of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen.  Now it is a truism that the original versions of the Fairy Tales, more violent and weird than later redactions, are worth seeking out.  They are.

Funny how both of these landmarks are partial and mutable texts.  Not only are they both incomplete, with more fairy tales and cantos of “Childe Harold” to follow in a few years, but they would both be published in all sorts of configurations.  Almost no one reads the original books – I haven’t.

What else survives from 1812?  Not much, honestly.  Two hundred years is a long time.  Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson, the second volume of Goethe’s memoir Poetry and Truth, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee.  I have only read the Goethe.  How is The Absentee?

I am sure I have read George Crabbe’s Tales, a collection of narrative poems along the lines of his 1810 masterpiece “Peter Grimes,” but heck if I remember it.  My fault or Crabbe’s?  Either way, I can hardly pretend that this is a living book in 2012.

I wonder what I have missed?

John Constable’s 1812 “Autumnal Sunset” is owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum.  To see it, just go to the Prints & Drawings Study Room, room WS and paw through case R, shelf 29, box L.

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.