The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2009

Three extra-large Humiliations were crossed off my list: Walden, The Scarlet Letter, and The Flowers of Evil, all highly rewarding.  Let's set those aside, though. 

Some fleeting highlights:

1. Thoreau recommends the "rich sweet cider" of the frozen-thawed apple.  "Your jaws are the cider-press."  ("Wild Apples").

2.  Charles Baudelaire smashes an itinerant glass saleman's backback of samples with a flower pot, just to hear the smash ("as of lightning striking a crystal palace"), to introduce some beauty into this ugly world of ours. "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"  (Paris Spleen, "The Bad Glazier").

3. We spend eighteen hours or so sitting next to Judge Pyncheon.  Hawthorne tells us about the Judge's big day.  They're going to nominate him for Governor!  Why won't Judge Pyncheon move?  "Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!" (Chapter 18 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables).

4. A Kazakh railroad worker battles his prize bull camel.  We gaze upon a sturgeon; the sturgeon gazes upon us.  (Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years).

5.  All that Yiddish literature, so much, so good.  The futile attempt of I. L. Peretz's poor student to come up with a story that's not about the blood libel. ("Stories").  Hodl's farewell to her father, Tevye the Dairyman.  "Let's talk about something more cheerful.  Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" (Sholem Aleichem, "Hodl," Tevye the Dairyman).

6.  Arthur Hugh Clough can't get milk for his coffee.   ("Amours de Voyage").

7.  Cranford, Silas Marner, Villette.  Three perfect novels, allowing for some variety in one's standards of perfection.  The methods varied, too: Eliot compressed, Gaskell tied up loose ends, and Brontë pushed, hard.  If I end up marvelling more at Villette, it's because it is so complex, and because after just a bit of looking at secondary souces I have developed the crackpot notion that I possess an original idea about the novel.  Forthcoming in 2010, if I can bring myself to do the work, which I mightn't.

8.  The moment in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" when they put the stuffed parrot - no, you'll have to go see for yourself.  Is this story the best thing Flaubert ever wrote?  Talk about perfection.

I just want to keep going.  The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan.  Edouard Mörike's  Mozart's Journey to Prague.  Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie.  "The benediction of the air."  John Galt!

I should skip this last part.  No, it's eating at me, since I just read it.  Worst of the year:  the second half of A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel.  The Holmes-free Utah section is so, so bad, an undramatic jangle of clichés.  It's not only terribly written on its own, but once we return to Holmes, its dreadfulness has somehow even soaked into Watson's journal, tainting the rest of the novel.  The first half was all right!

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side - sad sack Matthew Arnold finds a genuine hero

What's eating poor Matthew Arnold? Let's look at "The Scholar-Gipsy" (1853):

"the sick fatigue, the languid doubt" (164)
"we others pine \ And wish the long unhappy dream would end" (191-2)
"For strong the infection of our mental strife,\ Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest" (222-3)

So sad. Arnold retells a 17th century story about an Oxford student who abandoned the university to wander with the gypsies, and who has become a mythic figure, still encountered here and there near Oxford, "roaming the country-side, a truant boy, \ Nursing thy project in unclouded joy" (198-9), despite being dead for two hundred years.

What is that project? The scholar-gypsy is a spiritual seeker who has freed himself, somehow, from the sickness of the world that has infected everyone else. Why mince words - he's a hippie who lives in a "smoked tent" and "wait[s] for the spark from Heaven." It's not clear to me why Arnold can't simply join the scholar-gypsy, aside from family, money, responsibilities, and the general constraints of actual life.

The scholar-gypsy is another one of Arnold's borrowed heroes. This one, though, is fragile and elusive, but in some way more of a genuine alternative to Arnold's crisis of faith than are the Norse gods and mermen of his other poems, even if the poet is not sure how his hero can survive.

He's actually more worried about contaminating the scholar-gypsy. The last five stanzas of the poem urge him to "Fly hence, our contact fear!" (206), like Dido fleeing Aeneas in Hades, or, most strangely, like "shy traffickers, the dark Iberian" traders on a beach, buying "Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in brine" from Greek traders without actually contacting each other. It's apparently something Arnold found in Herodotus, and it gives a visionary cast to the end of the poem. It pushes the scholar-gypsy back into antiquity, and perhaps ends the poem on the shores of the "Sea of Faith" of "Dover Beach." The ending is very complex - I think I'm just beginning to grasp it, writing about it now. It's sure not how I expected the poem to end.

The scholar-gypsy returned to Arnold's poetry in 1866, in "Thyrsis," Arnold's elegy for his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, who died in 1861. Where the pessimism of "The Scholar-Gipsy" seems unearned, "Thyrsis," about the death of an actual person, is surprisingly optimistic. Arnold describes the changes in the Oxford countryside since his and Clough's student days. Oh no, they cut down the giant elm - as long as the elm stood, the scholar-gypsy survives, we always said. No, wait, there it is!

It's not as silly as I make it sound, although it does have a bit too much pastoral nonsense for my tastes. Here's the end (Thyrsis is Clough):

"Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!
  'Mid city-noise, not, as with thee of yore,
    Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home.
  --Then through the great town's harsh, heart-wearying roar,
    Let in thy voice a whisper often come,
      To chase fatigue and fear:
  Why faintest thou? I wander'd till I died.
    Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
    Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
  Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side."

Caffè-latte! I call to the waiter, - and Non c’ è latte, this is the answer he makes me - Arthur Hugh Clough's Rome

“Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it.
…
Ye gods! What do I want with this rubbish of ages departed,
Things that Nature abhors, the experiments that she failed in?
What do I find in the Forum? An archway and two or three pillars.
Well, but St. Peter’s? Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture!” (I, 35 & 41-44)

Alas! Claude, hero of Clough’s Amour de Voyages (1849), is a restless youngster. He’s a tourist in Rome, and not happy about it, but the passage above, nominally a letter to his friend Eustace, suggests that the problem might just possibly not be the fault of Rome, exactly.

Fortunately, for Claude and the reader, two things soon happen that interest even him. First, Claude is forced to spend time, much against his well, with other English tourists, and is surprised to find himself falling in love, although he thinks it can’t possibly be serious. He’s a bit like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the distant man who cannot quite believe that he has met a woman who is actually interesting. One wonders what kind of company these fellers had been keeping before, but that’s beside the point.

Second, this is 1849, so Claude and the other tourists wake one morning to discover that the city, under the control of Garibaldi’s Republic, is besieged by the French army (Murray is Claude’s Lonely Planet):

“Yes, we are fighting at last, it appears. This morning as usual,
Murray, as usual, in hand, I enter the Caffè Nuovo;
Seating myself with a sense as it were of a change in the weather,
Not understanding, however, but thinking mostly of Murray,
And, for today is their day, of the Campidoglio Marbles,
Caffè-latte! I call to the waiter, - and Non c’ è latte,
This is the answer he makes me, and this the sign of a battle.” (II. 95-100)

I detect a hint of a future generation of useless men abroad, those of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford, or Turgenev's fretful young intellectuals. Claude begins to find things – the Roman Republic, Mary– interesting, but he has great trouble doing anything, which eventually leads where one would expect. As goes the Roman Republic, so goes the romance of Claude and Mary.

I don’t want to overemphasize the romance, although that’s quite good, and would have made a fine plot in the hands of Jane Austen or E. M. Forster. Amours de Voyage consists mostly of Claude philosophizing and ironizing, and whining and moping, and wandering around Rome, all in his overbaked Oxford style. What he has to say, what he thinks, is interesting. What he does, that's Claude's problem.

Wonderful poet, Arthur Hugh Clough. Not quite like anyone else.

Rubbishy seems the word that would exactly suit it - Arthur Hugh Clough's hexameters

A while back I was reading Longfellow's Evangeline, and it left me wondering about the point of writing English poetry in dactylic hexameter. Longfellow's hexameter was basically a sort of rhythmic prose. The long, six foot lines and the irregular lengths of the feet seemed to violate some essential feature of English prosody, although I wasn't sure what.

It turns out that a while further back, a young Arthur Hugh Clough was reading Evangeline and wondered the same thing. He decided to do something about it, and wrote two long, narrative hexameter poems, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), and Amours de Voyage (1849). Both are about young men on vacation, and their troubles with women. Both are excellent, especially Amours de Voyage, which I think I will return to tomorrow. Now I just want to look at the verse. Clough cracked the hexameter nut, so to speak, and he solved the problem in more than one way.

Not that he doesn't still end up with prose a lot. How's this:

"It was four of the clock, and the sports were coming to the ending,
Therefore the Oxford party went off to adorn for dinner." (I.10-11)

Maybe you get a hint here of one of Clough's tools, the mock heroic. The hexameter is the meter of Homer, so let's have some Homer, but a bit silly:

"Here were clansmen many in kilt and bonnet assembled,
Keepers a dozen at least; the Marquis's targeted gillies;
Pipers five or six, among them the young one, the drunkard...
But with snuff-boxes all, and all of them using the boxes." (I.51-53, 56)

This fits the setting and theme of the poem. A passel of Oxford undergraduates are spending the summer in Scotland. They prepare for exams with their tutor, mostly, so their heads are full of the original hexameter, the Greek and Roman classics. On this evening, they attend a dinner and dance hosted by local Highlanders. The Highlanders still have some connection with the traditions of actual men of action; the undergrads split their time bewteen books and sports.

Some of the poem is still pretty tangled, and some of it is pretty flat, but a touch less seriousness turns out to help a lot.

Clough tried again, and found a complete solution with Amours de Voyage. It is an epistolary poem, so in a sort of first person, which leads straight to the answer: create a character who naturally speaks or writes in dactylic hexameter. Name him Claude. And so:

"Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand, but
Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it.
All the foolish destructions, and all the siller savings,
All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,
Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future.
Would to Heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it!" (I.19-24)

We have a young graduate now, not an undergraduate, at worst a pretentious, serious man, but with a sense of humor and an ability to see the ridiculous side of his own character. Claude's writing is not natural, really, but it's his voice, what a person like him would actually write. He's over-educated and restless; it's too late to be natural (or is it - that's a theme of this poem).

What a surprise, then, after twelve letters or fragments of letters from "Claude to Eustace," to see that the heading of I.XIII is "Georgina Trevellyn to Louisa."* Who? Here's how she writes:

"Dearest Louisa, -Inquire, if you please, about Mr. Claude -.
He has been once at R., and remembers meeting the H.'s.
Harriet L., perhaps, may be able to tell you about him.
It is an awkward youth, but still with very good manners;
Not without prospects, we hear; and, George says, highly connected." (I.252-6)

This is also dactylic hexameter, but sounds so different than Claude (more monosyllabic, less Latinate) and entirely natural, as long as we're in or near a Jane Austen novel.

So now I don't know how Clough did it. Right, the voice of the characters has to be suited to the meter. I'll note that Amours de Voyage is probably 90% Claude. Georgina's letters must have been devillishly hard to write.

Tomorrow, a bit of what Amours de Voyage is actually about.

* Update: Oops, Georgina first shows up in Letter I.III, not I.XIII. And the important character turns out to be her sister Mary, whose letters appear later. As a half-hearted defense, Clough does make this deliberately confusing.

In which I marvel at the perfectly egg-shaped head of Arthur Hugh Clough - guest starring a blear-eyed pimp

Look at Arthur Hugh Clough there, on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of his poems. His head, it is so perfectly egg-shaped. I cannot stop staring at it. I may have been called an egghead myself, possibly, but I don't think it was meant literally.

It is so, so round.

I want to talk about -

So smooth and round. Must. Look. Away. So shiny.

All right. The portrait is by "an unknown artist." Do you think Mr. A. U. Artist was trained to first draw an egg and then fill in the facial features? I do.

What did Clough write about? Skepticism, mostly. Skepticism about religion, skepticism about sex, especially the male sex drive, skepticism about his purpose in the world. Love presented some sort of imperfect solution to these problems, as did poetry.

I quoted a bit of "Epi-Strauss-ism" back here ("Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John \ Evanished all and gone!"), a poem of doubt caused by up-to-date German Biblical criticism. In that poem, Clough doubts his doubting. "Easter Day: Naples, 1849" is more strongly worded:

"Through the great sinful streets of Naples as I past,
With fiercer heat than flamed above my head
My heart was hot within me; till at last
My brain was lightened, when my tongue had said

     Christ is not risen!

   Christ is not risen, no,
   He lies and moulders low;
     Christ is not risen." (ll. 1-8)

This is a long poem, so I'll include just a bit more, an inversion of Christ's own words:

"Ye men of Galilee!
Why stand ye looking up to heaven, where Him ye ne’er may see,
Neither ascending hence, nor hither returning again?
Ye ignorant and idle fishermen!
Hence to your huts and boats and inland native shore,
And catch not men, but fish;
Whate’er things ye might wish,
Him neither here nor there ye e’er shall meet with more.
Ye poor deluded youths, go home,
Mend the old net ye left to roam,
Tie the split oar, patch the torn sail;
It was indeed 'an idle tale',
     He was not risen." (ll. 113-125)

I find this quite powerful; I also find Christ's command to be "fishers of men" quite powerful. I have little idea what Clough actually believes. In this poem, the declaration of disbelief relieves some kind (what kind?) of torment. But then I turn to a companion poem, "Easter Day II":

"So while the blear-eyed pimp beside me walked,
And talked,
For instance, of the beautiful danseuse
And 'Eccellenza sure must see, if he would choose'
Or of the lady in the green silk there,
Who passes by and bows with minx's air,
Or of the little thing not quite fifteen,
Sicilian-born who surely should be seen -
So while the blear-eyed pimp beside me walked
And talked, and I too with fit answer talked,
So in the sinful streets, abstracted and alone,
I with my secret self held communing of mine own." (ll. 1-12)

The "blear-eyed pimp"! "not quite fifteen"! Perhaps a clue to the source of the earlier poem's "fierce heat" can be found here. The poem ends:

"Sit if ye will, sit down upon the ground,
Yet not to weep and wail, but calmly look around.
  Whate'er befell,
  Earth is not hell;
  Now too as when it first began,
  Life yet is Life and Man is Man.
For all that breathes beneath the heavens' high cope,
Joy with grief mixes, with despondence hope.
Hope conquers cowardice, joy grief,
Or at the least, faith unbelief.
  Though dead not dead;
  Though gone not fled;
  Though lost not vanished.
  In the great Gospel and true Creed
  He is yet risen indeed,
    Christ is yet risen." (ll. 34-51)

There seems to be some actual wisdom here. And what poetry! I love the whole "blear-eyed pimp" stanza - the imitations of his speech, the repetitons, the fractured meter. In the line "So in the sinful streets, abstracted and alone," the sequence of sounds ("So in" to "sin," "streets" to "abstracted") can hardly be bettered. All this from a supposedly minor poet, apparently best known for being a friend of Matthew Arnold.

Something I should have mentioned earlier: Clough is pronounced Cluff. Doesn't seem right. Hyu Cluff.

Tomorrow: Arthur Hugh Clough's use of the hexameter. See you next week! Ha ha!

Poe's Eureka - angels should exercise caution in the vicinity of Jupiter

I have been organzing Poe's works by genre, I now see. My default is chronology, but that doesn't work for Poe. He's always doing more than one thing.

For example, Penguin Classics publishes a volume entitled The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, which overlaps his entire career. This book contains, I think, very little of Poe's best writing,* but Poe really was a pioneer in the genre, so I understand the book's use. And it includes the baffling Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), so it's valuable for that alone.

Eureka is a hundred page essay or pamphlet or meditation about science. Gravitation, electricity, the diffusion of light, astronomy, the distribution of galaxies, the formation of the solar system. Some of it is jokey, especially the first twenty pages or so, with the philosophers Aries Tottle and Hog (Francis Bacon). Some of it is highly technical and, to me, dull; the sections on gravitation and light, in particular, completely lost me. But most of it is readable, more or less, and, conceptually, at least, quite interesting.

Poe uses Eureka to make sense of all the shocking scientific discoveries of his day, particularly in astronomy and physics. Neptune had only been discovered in 1846, for example, and at the time of Eureka's publication, the tenth asteroid had just been discovered. Eureka is an imaginative engagement with these ideas and novelties, a "mental gyration on the heel" (1262). I suspect Poe thought he was also making actual scientific contributions, but the Prose Poem subtitle gave him an escape route. Actual scientists also create and work within imaginative conceptions of their ideas, but that's as close as Poe gets to actual science.

The most accessible section, for me, was Poe's attempt to understand the changes in the scale of the universe, in it's size and age and parameters. Poe imagines, for example, an angel in the path of Jupiter:

“Not unfrequently we task our imagination in picturing the capacities of an angel. Let us fancy such a being at a distance of some hundred miles from Jupiter – a close eye-witness of this planet as it speeds on its annual revolution. Now can we, I demand, fashion for ourselves any conception so distinct of this ideal being’s spiritual exaltation, as that involved in the supposition that, even by this immeasurable mass of matter, whirled immediately before his eyes, with a velocity so unutterable, he – an angel – angelic though he be – is not at once struck into nothingness and overwhelmed?” (p. 1335)

In other words, splat. NASA informs me that the mean orbital veolcity of Jupiter is 13 km/second, which one must admit is pretty fast. An irony of this jab at medieval scholasticists is that Poe's own exercise here is not so different from theirs.

Eureka is one of many contemporary examples of literary writers attempting to comprehend science. Tennyson's In Memoriam was being written around the same time, and a number of passages in Emerson's journal show his interest in actual scientific discoveries. And this is before Darwin unleashes the deluge ten years later.

I don't think Poe's concerns are particularly religious, which does set him apart a bit from Tennyson or Arthur Hugh Clough** or the like. Poe's religious beliefs, whatever they are, do not seem to be threatened. God is simply a writer, a superior version of Edgar Allan Poe:

"The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God." (1342)

Eureka is Poe's solution to God's tricky plot.

Page references to the Library of America Poetry and Tales. The Edgar Allan Poe society puts Eureka here. And please see Poe Calendar Rob for a clearer idea of what Poe was up to.

* But don't miss "The Descent into the Maelström," which has some of Poe's best descriptive writing, or "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," in which a dead man is kept alive through hypnotism, with horrible and bizarre results.

** Clough is more worried by historicist Biblical scholarship, but the idea is the same: "Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John \ Evanished all and gone!", from "Epi-strauss-ism."