Kipling, Twain, and a meermaid vot hadn't got nodings on - in other words, a rambler

At times I could hear Mark Twain behind Rudyard Kipling.  Pawing through a volume of Twain (the first volume of Library of America Collected Tales, Sketches, etc.) it occurred to me that Kipling might have benefitted not just from Twain’s stance or rhetoric but even from his subject, that Twain’s strange world of the Nevada territory and early San Francisco had some curious correspondences to Kipling’s world of the Himalayan frontier.  Mostly differences, yes, but both India and California were examples of a civilization re-creating itself helter skelter in a land far from wherever the settlers and fortune-seekers call home.  The order is scrambled, seams become visible, odd features are emphasized.

Did Kipling even read Twain?  Angus Wilson (The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, 1977) says yes, since he was a schoolboy in England:

They consumed Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, and later (subject to a fierce argument between Kipling and his English master) Whitman.  Here Kipling formed his taste for the American humorists, Breitmann (a long-lasting and, I think, harmful love of Kipling’s), Twain and the new craze – Harris’s Uncle Remus. (44)

An obstacle has appeared:  who is Breitmann?  Hans Breitmann, Künstlername of Charles Godfrey Leland.  A sample of Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (1871):

Der noble Ritter Hugo
    Von Schwillensaufenstein,
Rode out mit shper and helmet,
    Und he coom to de panks of de Rhine.

Und oop dere rose a meermaid,
    Vot hadn't got nodings on,
Und she say, "Oh, Ritter Hugo,
    Vhere you goes mit yourself alone?"

And he says, "I rides in de creenwood,
    Mit helmet und mit shpeer,
Til I coomes into em Gasthaus,
    Und dere I trinks some beer."  (and so on)

I see, a dialect act.  This sort of thing is pretty funny when Danny Kaye does it, right?  Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) are a little bit like this stuff.  I can see how it would wear.  Kipling’s early books of  poems, written about and in the voice of the soldiers in India, Cockney or Irish or what have you, have the great virtue of being short.

Twain, though, I still wondered exactly what Twain Kipling had read.  Kipling must have read Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper  before he returned to India.  The travel books would be more relevant – I think the tone I was picking up was like that of Innocents Abroad (1869), and Roughing It (1872) is about Twain’s adventures in the American West.

I have no idea how much of the Twain articles and squibs and miscellanea I am reading now could have been read by Kipling.  Some of it was gathered into Sketches Old and New (1875), but any number of pieces could have been republished in newspapers, especially once “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog” made Twain more or less famous in 1865.  Wilson accidentally answers my question while describing a hospital visit by the teenage Kipling:

He had told his sister that he wanted to be a doctor but that a post-mortem had put him off.  “Oh! In fact, Mark Twain had a word for it.  I believe I threw up my immortal soul.”  (55-6)

That vivid phrase is lifted directly from Twain’s “How to Cure a Cold” (1863, included in Sketches Old and New), where “a quart of salt water, taken warm” is the specific purgative.

I’ve read the Twain selections up into his early thirties.  Twain was as young as Kipling when he started writing professionally, but by the standards of Kipling, who had created a unique and outstanding body of short stories by the time he was twenty-three, Twain's achievement is minimal.  Kipling really was unusual.  And Twain had, it turns out, created the one thing he needed, though, his instrument, his voice.  His shtick.

The knights drew sword, the ladies scream'd - the heroic Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold wrote a lot of heroic poems, imitations of old stories and old forms. They are not pastiches, or updates, but are more like fake translations. His play Merope, for example, is a convincing imitation of Euripides, as if Arnold had translated a newly discovered play. Or "Sohrab and Rustam," a long episode from Firdawsi's epic Shahnameh - if it were labeled a translation from the Persian, I would believe the label, but it's in fact a convincing rewrite.

"Balder Dead" is a from the Norse Eddas. "The Forsaken Merman" is a Danish folktale. There's a compressed "Tristram and Iseult," and a couple of good ballads:

"'-I am no knight,' he answered;
'From the sea-waves I come.'-
The knights drew sword, the ladies scream'd,
The surpliced priest stood dumb."

That's from "The Neckan," also about a merman, who is miraculously converted to Christianity. What is the deal with Arnold and mermen? Seems kind of silly, now that I look at it again. Anyway.

This all adds up to 40% or so of the Oxford Poetical Works; a lot. What was Arnold trying to accomplish? Maybe I should first say that although the poetic quality varies, I enjoyed most of these poems. The Euripidean Merope seems like a botch, and the philosophical pastoral "Empedocles on Etna" is over my head, but "Sohrab and Rustam" is vivid and exciting and "The Forsaken Merman" has a lot of good descriptive lines and some interesting uses of line length. "Balder Dead" is excellent, and has an ending that I think is Arnold's own, except that I suspect it's really a dramatization of Goethe's notion of resignation. The imagery is good, too; here's the very end (Hermod has tried and failed to release the dead Balder from Hell):

"And as a stork which idle boys have trapp'd,
And tied him in a yard, at autumn sees
Flocks of his kind pass flying o'er his head
To warmer lands, and coasts that keep the sun;--
He strains to join their flight, and from his shed
Follows them with a long complaining cry--
So Hermod gazed, and yearn'd to join his kin.

At last he sigh'd, and set forth back to Heaven." (559-566)

In the preface to the 1853 Poems: First Series, Arnold makes his case for these poems, although I suspect misdirection. "A great human action of a thousand years ago is more interesting to it [our nature, our passions] than a smaller human action of to-day, even though upon the representation of this last the most consummate skill may have been expended, and though it has the advantage of appealing by its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to all our transient feelings and interests."

As evidence, says Arnold, "I fearlessly assert that Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn, The Excursion, leave the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido," because "the action is greater," and not because the Goethe and Byron poems are deliberate anti-epics and Wordsworth's Excursion is almost indescribably dull (The Prelude might too obviously challenge his argument).

Arnold proceeds to deny the value of praising individual lines in a poem, rather than the overall effect, and points to Faust, King Lear, and Keats as exemplary modern failures! Eh, enough - it's a lot of smoke.

Arnold was an immensely skilled and intelligent writer with little sense of poetic purpose. The subjects, at least, of the heroic poems are purposeful, although what they mean in a modern context becomes a problem. The problem of poetic form is similarly solved by the choice of subject. I assume that Tennyson, in The Idylls of the King, and William Morris had to deal with the same problem, and I don't know what answers they found. I'm pretty sure that Arnold found no answers at all, just frustration, empty perfection.

I associate Arnold's rummaging through antique poetry's box of heroes with Thomas Carlyle's call for hero-worship a decade earlier. Undergraduate Arnold even won a prize for a long poem on Oliver Cromwell, Carlyle's great shining perfect hero (it's one of the poems I skipped). The irony is that, among all of these slightly sterile experiments, Arnold did write one poem about a genuinely modern hero figure. But I'll save "The Scholar Gypsy" for tomorrow.

Fine teacups, a rice pounder, some salted Mermaids - Ihara Saikaku's Five Women Who Loved Love

The Anthology of Japanese Literature inspired me to take up Ihara Saikaku's Five Women Who Loved Love (1686), a collection of five tales of young women caught up in all-consuming love affairs that end, mostly, in suicide, execution, or a nunnery. They are all based on more or less contemporary events, and several of them are also the subject of puppet plays by Chikamitsu.

Five Women Who Loved Love is interesting enough for its own sake, but I inevitably found myself comparing it to more familiar Western literary traditions. Sometimes it felt quite modern, especially in the odd, indirect structuring of some of the stories. The frankness about sexual and digestive matters sometimes seemed modern and sometimes harked back to Petronius or Boccaccio or some of Saikaku's Western contemporaries like Swift. In Victorian terms, this is a dirty book, but it's hardly smuttier than William Wycherley's The Country Wife.

Actually, the open treatment of homosexuality was genuinely surprising to me. The final tale is about a girl who falls in love with, seduces (disguised as a boy), and marries a hedonistic homosexual monk. It's as much his story than hers. It ends with the ex-monk inspecting his new wife's wealth, "so happy that he wept," thinking of all the sexual pleasure (actors and prostitutes) he can buy with it. The first four stories end tragically in one way or another, but this is where Saikaku actually leaves us, ironically complicating any lessons a reader might have wanted to draw.

I don't quite trust the translator, Wm. Theodore de Bary. First, what's with that abbreviation? Second, he brags in the introduction that he owns an original edition of the book, which is admittedly pretty cool, since it was first published as five separate little books, with woodcuts, but still, kinda rude. Third, look at the display of wealth that the monk is admiring:

"There were one thousand two hundred and thirty-five flawless coral beads, weighing from one and a half to one hundred and thirty momme each; sharkskin for sword handles; celadon procelain in unlimited quantities; fine teacups from the Asuka River region, piled about carelessly because it made no difference how many got broken; some salted Mermaids; a small bucket made of agate; a rice pounder from the Taoist paradise of Han-tan in China", etc., etc., wait a minute!

The translator's footnote informed me that a salted Mermaid is "A kind of salamander," which I was willing to accept until I turned the page and found this, one of the original illustrations:

A kind of salamander? I don't think so, pal.

Maybe this is a good place to point the curious to the Bookphile's recent post on this book, which takes a rather different point of view.

George Darley: minor early Victorian poet

George Darley (1795-1846) revered both Keats and Shelley, and imitated both here and there. He was a mathematician as well as a poet, although I don’t detect any math in his poems. His poetic art is in his music. Imagine you’re reading them aloud.

Here’s one of a series of poems about mermen and mermaids, maybe my favorite poem of Darley’s:

The Mermaidens’ Vesper Hymn

Troop home to silent grots and caves
Troop home! And mimic as you go
The mournful winding of the waves
Which to their dark abysses flow.

At this sweet hour, all things beside
In amorous pairs to covert creep;
The swans that brush the evening tide
Homeward in snowy couples keep.

In his green den the murmuring seal
Close by his sleek companion lies;
While singly we to bedward steal,
And close in fruitless sleep our eyes.

In bowers of love men take their rest,
In loveless bowers we sigh alone,
With bosom-friends are others blest, -
But we have none! But we have none!

Is this actually about anything? Loneliness, sexual restlessness (or a fantasy of female restlessness). But also, mermaids. When I see a poet described as “musical”, I can’t always hear it. I sure can with Darley. Some of his poems are close to pure song, meaningless, merely beautiful.

Darley’s one long work, Nepenthe, is another fantasy, with an incoherent mythological plot, and a dozen beautiful poetic nodules:

From Nepenthe

Hurry me, Nymphs! O, hurry me
Far above the grovelling sea,
Which, with blind weakness and base roar
Casting his white age on the shore,
Wallows along that slimy floor;
With his widespread webbed hands
Seeking to climb the level sands,
But rejected still to rave
Alive in his uncovered grave.

If I remember correctly, the dreaming poet is being flown from Egypt to, um, somewhere else, over the Mediterranean. Here, there is not just music but original imagery. The sea foam is the ocean’s “white age”, the waves on the beach are “his widespread webbed hands”, the blind ocean raves “Alive is his uncovered grave”. Obscure is too kind a description of the story of Nepenthe, but it’s full of passages like this one which live independently from the whole.

Darley frequently published anonymously, and his most famous poem was mistaken for a genuine early 17th century production. It begins:

A Ryghte Pythie Songe

It is not beautie I demande,
A chrystalle browe, the moone's despaire,
Nor the snowe's daughter, a whyte hand,
Nor mermaide's yellowe pryde of haire.

You might think that the title would signal that the archaicisms are a joke, but for decades Palgrave’s Treasury had this authored by “Anonymous 17th Century”. All of those extra “e”s clouded the anthologist’s mind.

Hey wait, there’s another mermaid.