they knew that it was modern - J. Alfred Prufrock looks for a girlfriend

Howling Frog inspired me to revisit, after a couple of decades, T. S. Eliot’s first book, or pamphlet, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) – what an enticing cover – which in 31 pages contains “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and other good poems.

I find that the status of Eliot, however eroded now, mutes his humor, so what a good reminder how funny he can be, in his grim way.  Plus I made two “discoveries,” first that the poems make perfect sense – more sense – if they are assumed to be about and in the voice of a single character.  Prufrock, I’ll call him.

He is timid and anxious; he imagines proposing to a woman but does nothing but dither; he is constantly in the society of Boston women of an intellectual type – lots of afternoon concerts – many of whom are his cousins and aunts; he exists in a state of perpetual sexual frustration.  The horsey cousin, Nancy, is especially exciting and unattainable.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
but they knew that it was modern.  (34)

Prufrock is going abroad soon (see “Portrait of a Lady” – “’You hardly know when you are coming back, / You will find so much to learn’” – also see Eliot’s biography) and by the end of the sequence takes, or possibly imagines, his farewell to Boston and one or more real or imaginary woman (“La Figlia che Piange”).

Prufrock is commonly taken as middle-aged, but my second “discovery” was that the poems seem more comprehensible and funnier if Prufrock is young, if he is somewhere around Eliot’s age, twenty-five, maybe.  Just as an example, his anxiety about his bald spot is funnier if the balding barely exists.  His related anxiety about his sexual potency is more pathetic, and the poem (“Rhapsody on a Windy Night”) where he spends the night wandering the streets, resisting the temptation to engage a prostitute, more frightening.  His strong senses of disgust and inadequacy help him in that case.  Poor guy is a mess.

Eliot omits a lot of narrative information from any given poem, so what I am doing is filling in the gaps in one poem with scraps of the other poems.  If I pull out a poem by itself, I get a different interpretation, sure.

Marina Tsvetayeva called newspaper readers faceless skeletons.  Eliot says

The readers of the Boston Evening TranscriptSway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.
When evening quickens faintly in the street,

Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.” (32)

First,  the joke, of the “there are two kinds of people” variety, and what kind is the poor speaker?  Second, if I take this to be Prufrock then he has come over from Cambridge to attend one of his aunt’s “evenings” where the women talk of Michelangelo or “hear the latest Pole / Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips” (17-18).  Actually, that is specified to be an afternoon concert in “Portrait of a Lady,” the one poem where the narrator is directly identified as young, unless you want the person addressing him to be older, in which case the passage is ironic in a different way.

‘You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.’
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea.  (19)

The famous fog-as-cat passage of “Prufrock” is the best thing in the book.  The fogs coils its way into several other poems.  Maybe I should have just written about that.

“Squalid,” Howling Frog calls these poems.  I say they’re the all time great poetic sequence about a guy who needs a girlfriend.

The composing influence of Standard Literature - Wilkie Collins, first and greatest

What amazes me about The Moonstone (1868), I mean what is right on the surface, what makes for the shallowest possible blog post, is not just that it is “first and greatest of the English detective novels,” as T. S. Eliot called it, but that it contains so much of what later became identified with detective fiction, “the same old futzing around with timetables and bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window,” as Raymond Chandler described the standard detective novel template (“The Simple Art of Murder,” 1950).

Wilkie Collins got it right the first time, good and bad.  He created a mold from which thousands of later novels were stamped, a Standard Literature, readymade in one novel.

In The Moonstone, a character uses “Standard Literature” to refer to 18th century books, “all classical works; all (of course) immeasurably superior to anything produced in later times; and all (from my present point of view) possessing the one great merit of enchaining nobody’s interest, and exciting nobody’s brain” (Ezra Jennings, June 25th), a funny joke in context and much funnier given the subsequent history of the detective novel, by which I mean its eventual conquest of English culture, the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Have any of my readers tried an Edgar Wallace novel?  He wrote 170 of them, and almost a thousand short stories.  Said it took about three days to write one.  I have never read him, but that supposed fact stuck with me, as did this one (quoting Wikipedia): “In 1928 it was estimated that one in four books being read in the UK had come from Wallace's pen.”  I doubt the precision of the estimate, but not the approximate truth, that the craze for a specific kind of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s dwarfed, in intensity and length, recent fads for teen vampires and dystopias.  Add in Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner, Of course, the interest has never really ended, even if much of the activity has shifted to television.  So many of us have such a strong taste for murders.

The Eliot quotation is from “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” written in 1927, so Eliot is right in the thick of things.  He is pro-detective novel:

Those who have lived before such terms as “highbrow fiction,” “thrillers” and “detective fiction” were invented realize that melodrama is perennial and must be satisfied.  If we cannot get this satisfaction out of what the publishers present as “literature,” then we will read – with less and less pretence of concealment – what we call “thrillers.”  But in the golden age of melodramatic fiction there was no such distinction.  The best novels were thrilling…

Examples: Bleak House and The Mill on the Floss (!).  That pretense is gone now, or has shifted to other kinds of books.  I wish readers arguing about so-called “Young Adult” literature would quote Eliot more.  He just wants the melodrama to be better, to be more like The Moonstone.

Some other things amaze me about The Moonstone.  One amazement per post, maybe.

Tradition and Individual Blogging - the past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past

Ask a graduate student in the humanities – an A(ll)B(ut)D(issertation) is who I really have in mind – what he “does” and you will likely hear something along the lines of “I do 16th century Venetian painting” or “I do 17th century French opera” or “I do 18th century English curate’s diaries.”  If you hear that last one, escape as quickly as you can; you are at risk of being bored into a coma.

Period, language or location, form.  Sometimes the period is replaced by a movement (Romantic), or a sub-period of a century (Restoration, Victorian), or an expansion in time (medieval, early modern).  Once in a blue moon, a human is named (“I do Rembrandt’s landscape drawings”).  An emendation:  I assume, but do not actually know, that 20th centuryist humanities students always subdivide even more (“post-war Austrian post-serialist tone poems”).

I always start with these categories, too.  This is all bedrock information for classifying a work of art.  I place every work in its tradition.  There may be a kind of imaginative freedom in not worrying about any of this, allowing works to fortuitously collide with each other, but the study of an artistic tradition has its own pleasures.  When I wander into a reading project, like Yiddish or Portuguese literature, I am working not just on the texts but the tradition, discovering how writers play with and argue with other people’s texts.  A scholar of, say, the 19th century Portuguese novel has a responsibility to read everything I am reading and then several shelves of books that I cannot read (because not in English) and do not want to read (because not as good as Eça de Queirós*).

I am beginning to sound like T. S. Eliot:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.  His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.  You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.  (“Tradition and Individual Talent”)

Please set aside the words “cannot” and “must” (“Yeah, Stearns? Make me!”).  One of the pleasures of reading Eça de Queirós and Fernando Pessoa and Machado de Assis is that not only are the Portuguese and Brazilian literary traditions intertwined, but these writers were also directly responding to French and English literature.  Eça even made Portugal’s complex cultural relationship with French art one of his recurring themes.

A reader might reasonably wonder if knowledge of Flaubert or Tristram Shandy is then necessary before bothering with The Maias or The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, but the effect is bidirectional.  Reading Sentimental Education affects how I read The Maias, but the reverse will also be true.  The Maias (and Zola and Julian Barnes) changed Flaubert.  Eliot again:

… what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it.  The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them…  the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

Something similar is true for the reader.  Anthony at Time’s Flow Stemmed is reading about re-reading: “Re-reading a once favourite book is potentially a perilous encounter…  we re-read through the filter of every other book we have part-remembered.”  But reading new books changes the old favorites, too.  I have no doubt that Sentimental Education will look different when I re-read it, but it has already changed enormously since I read it twenty years ago, now that I have read far more in Flaubert’s tradition, both the writers he was responding to and the writers who responded to him.

This is actually a continuation of my question about how to use the word “classic,” although I fear it is a bit oblique.

*  But what of the books that are not in English, but are as good?  Please, do not speak of those!  *sob*

Writing a great work with patient plan - Bysshe Vanolis and the poetic quotation

His pen name should have been the first clue.  Bysshe Vanolis - Shelley and Novalis.  This might be a poet awash in poetry, a poet of poets.  The City of Dreadful Night has three epigrams, one from Dante and two from Leopardi.  The first two lines are:

Lo, thus, as prostrate, 'In the dust I write
   My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears.'

The quotation is, it turns out, from Act III of Titus Andronicus.  Vanolis can't write five words without referring to another poet.

Yesterday I described an entire canto that is basically a bizarre riff on Dante's "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."  In a list of meaningless activities, Vanolis includes "writing a great work with patient plan \ To justify the works of God to man"  (XII  45-6)  Sorry, Milton!  Canto XIV has some tigers burning "with beauty and with might," surely a nod to a fellow visionary poet.

I'm actually not very good at this.  These are the obvious ones, but they were enough for me to realize that the poem must be packed with more, and may very well be constructed out of lines from other poets.  Is that bit from Shelley?  Could that be Richard Crashaw?  Is there any way to even identify a Leopardi or Novalis reference?  Hopeless.  Canto IV contains a journey through a horrific desert landscape, and feels much like "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," but rereading Browning I didn't pick up anything specific.  Who knows.

The City of Dreadful Night climaxes with a vision of Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia I, precisely described, with the winged woman in the engraving looming over London "in bronze sublimity."  Citizens gaze upon her for "confirmation of the old despair."

Hey, wait a minute.  This, I have seen before.  Visionary poet Gérard de Nerval (click for a look at the engraving) invoked Melencolia I in both a poem in The Chimeras (1854) and his account of his mental breakdowns, Aurélia (1855).  Meanwhile, the conceit of The City of Dreadful Night, the London flaneur, strongly suggests the presence of Baudelaire.  The two secondary studies I have consulted have no interest in French poets whatsoever, but they're wrong.

I am describing one of many reasons The City of Dreadful Night reminds me so strongly of The Waste Land.  Parts of Eliot's poem are also mosaics of poetic quotations.  The climax is little more than a succession of quotations, Nerval among them, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." 

But why does Vanolis use so many poetic references?  Why, given his pessimism, his despair, does he write poetry at all?  Well, he answers that question in the Proem:  "To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth" and so on.  Fine.  But then why do it so well?  For me, the aesthetic quality of The City of Dreadful Night actually destroys its central idea.  This, sir, was worth doing.  And if this, then perhaps other things, too.

Now, I came up with that myself, but it turns out that someone else had the same idea.  Tomorrow:  George Eliot vs Bysshe Vanolis.  They corresponded.  It is A. Scream.

Postscript:  Has anyone, by any chance, read After London (1885), a novel by the English nature writer Richard Jefferies?  My understanding is that Jefferies hated London so much that he wrote a novel destroying it. The city's sewers explode, rendering London a poisonous, uninhabitable swamp, killing all who enter it.  Is this novel insane and good, or merely insane?

The sighs of the saint, and the fairy's screams - the obscure Chimeras of Gérard de Nerval

El Desdichado

I am the shadowed - the bereaved - the unconsoled,
The Aquitanian prince of the stricken tower:
My one star's dead, and my constellated lute
Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia.

You who consoled me, in the tombstone night,
Bring back my Posilipo, the Italian sea,
The flower that so pleased my wasted heart,
And the arbor where the vine and rose agree.

Am I Love or Apollo? . . . Lusignan or Biron?
My brow is red still from the kiss of the queen;
I've dreamed in the cavern where the siren swims . . .

And twice a conqueror have crossed Acheron:
Modulating on the Orphic lyre in turn
The sighs of the saint, and the fairy's screams.

If a person does not want to read this too closely, I can't say I blame him. It's arcane, from the title on, and doesn't make sense. Hard to focus on it. It is, in some ways, a really famous poem. Here's what I did.

The Spanish title is from, or at least in, Ivanhoe, of all things: "the device on his shield was a young oak-tree pulled up by the roots, with the Spanish word Desdichado, signifying Disinherited." (Ch. 8) The knight Ivanhoe adopts the word as his secret identity.

Now I have a clue to the second line. Maybe you didn't need it, but I did. The Aquitanian prince in the tower might be Richard the Lion-Hearted, imprisoned in Germany on his way home from the Crusades.


The Black Sun of Melancholy is a reference, at least, to Dürer's Melencolia I print (1514) - see the upper left corner. How can I tell that from the poem? I can't, but it comes up again in Nerval's Aurélia.

Posilipo is a seaside suburb of Naples that Nerval had visited. Goethe was there on February 27, 1787 (see The Italian Journey). He said it was very beautiful, which is not too enlightening. But Nerval made his first splash, at the age of twenty, with a translation of Faust, Pt. I, so, hmm.

Plus, the, or a, tomb of Virgil is in Posilipo. So that ties in to the crossing of the Acheron, into, and presumably back out of ("twice a conqueror"), Hell, both through The Aeneid and through Dante, and which seems to lead Nerval to the first poet and conqueror of Hell, Orpheus.

Have I accomplished anything yet? Maybe this is crazy; maybe it's how the poem was meant to be read. The second line, Le prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie, is also line 430 of The Waste Land (1922), one of the "fragments I have shored against my ruins," along with Dante and The Spanish Tragedy and "London Bridge is falling down," all ruins about ruins, fragments about fragments. Nerval called these poems The Chimeras, mythical monsters composed of the pieces of many beasts.

Translation by Peter Jay, The Chimeras, 1984.