I hope, like you - the pre-Shakespearian minor poet John Davidson

Now I am reading Ernest Dowson, who would be a logical choice to follow Lionel Johnson – aesthete, Paterian Francophile, died young – but Dowson is still in progress and by chance I read a contemporary who followed a different path, the Scottish poet John Davidson, a Fleet Street hack who somehow developed a fresh style that was less interested in beauty, less pre-Raphaelite, less French.  He called it “pre-Shakespearian,” which was in part a joke and in part a declaration that poetry should be socially reformist:

But the woman in unwomanly rags, and all the insanity and iniquity of which she is the type, will now be sung.  Poetry will concern itself with her and hers for some time to come.  The offal of the world is being said in statistics, in prose fiction: it is besides going to be sung.  James Thomson sang it; and others are doing so…  Poor-laws, charity organisations, dexterously hold the wound open, or tenderly and hopelessly skin over the cancer…  Poetry has other functions, other aims; but this also has become its province.  (1899, pp. 157-8*)

Two notes.  First, James Thomson is better known as Bysshe Vanolis, author of the great The City of Dreadful Night (1874).  I wrote five posts on that poem in 2010.  I should have written ten.  Second, this quotation gives the wrong idea entirely of the poetry Davidson actually wrote, with one major exception, “Thirty Bob a Week,” a white-collar response to Thomas Hood’s 1843 “Song of the Shirt” about the sufferings of the thousands of clerks scraping by in London:

I couldn’t touch a stop and turn a screw,
    And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth – I hope, like you –
    On the handle of a skeleton gold key;
I cut mine on a leek, which I eat it every week:
    I’m a clerk at thirty bob as you can see.  (1894, ll. 1-6)

Kipling worked a similar vein in his Barrack-Room Ballads (1892).  No idea if Davidson had read it, but both writers are working on similar aesthetic problems.

For like a mole I journey in the dark,
    A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar’d Halls and broad Suburbean Park,
    To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight,
    A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.  (ll.  13-18)

The poem has fourteen more stanzas in this mode, denouncing the Church, his bosses, and his own foolish decision to marry young (although fortunately his wife is tough, “she’s made of flint and roses, very odd”).  The poem ends with a howl of despair.  The letters included in the edition I read suggest that there may be some autobiography here, that the clerk may have some resemblance to the hack writer:

It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;
    It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It’s walking on a string across a gulf
    With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck:
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
    And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.  (ll. 91-6)

As I said above, though, as good as “Thirty Bob a Week” is, it gives the wrong idea about Davidson.  This and another poem from the same year, “The Ballad of a Nun,” made Davidson’s reputation, for whatever good that did him.  The nun poem is, in Victorian terms, daringly sexual, which is one way to sell poems, but is even less characteristic.

So, one more post on Davidson.

*  Page numbers refer to Selected Poems and Prose, ed. John Sloan (Clarendon Press, 1995).  I also read this scanned copy of the 1894 Ballads and Songs, which includes “Thirty Bob a Week” and the shocking nun ballad.

The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2010, I guess

The best book I read all year was, easily, incontestably, Moby-Dick.  The closest competitors, in audacity, scope, intensity, were the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and the first edition of Leaves of Grass. A different kind of reader would include The Brothers Karamazov.  I don’t want to write about any of these – I wrote plenty about Melville and Whitman, did justice to Dostoevsky, and have just barely begun to pretend to comprehend that enormous bolus of Dickinson.

Makes her sound pretty appealing, yes?  One of things I had to say about Whitman was that he had dropped a Brooklyn city directory on his foot.  I forgot I wrote that.  Not bad, huh?  If you can’t make yourself laugh – where was I?

So I don’t really want to write about the Best Books of the Year.  How about the Biggest Surprises?

1.  There’s this Argentine surrealist, César Aira, who writes weird little novel-like thingaroos.  I read three of them this year.  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000) has a scene where a painter, and his horse, are struck by lightning, and then struck by lightning again, that is an unbelievable piece of writing.  Just crazy, stunning.  Nuts.

2.  I could single out every other episode of Gottfried Keller’s enormous Green Henry (1854).  In Part 3, Chapter 1, young Henry encounters the collected works of Goethe.  “From that hour I did not leave the couch, and I read for forty days on end, during which time the winter returned, and the Spring came back, but the white snow, whose shining I saw but heeded not, passed me by like a dream” (tr. A. M. Holt).  Green Henry is absolutely suffused with Goethe, dripping with Goethe.

3.  The City of Dreadful Night (1874), Bysshe Vanolis!  An amazing piece of poetic crankery, a brilliant pastiche of English and European poetry, a serious attempt to bring Baudelaire and Nerval into English.  The universe as a clock with no hands, the sinners who have so little hope that they cannot even go to hell, the Childe Roland-like wasteland of despair.  Fantastic, in all senses.

4.  Speaking of wastelands of despair, my weirdest experience of the year was reading one of my own recurring dreams in George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895).  Please read that dream-stuffed book; maybe you’ll find one of your own.  That reminds me one of the year’s true highlights, a guest post on MacDonald by my mother.  Thanks, Mom!

5.  All those French poets – Verlaine, Rimbaud, Hugo, Corbière, Laforgue, Mallarmé.  But I guess they were not surprises.  Like I didn’t know they were going to be good.  Please.

6.  Still, they were full of lots of individual little surprises.  As there were in, to switch to a novel I knew I would love, Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford.  The Armistice scene at the end of the third book, A Man Could Stand Up- (1926), it just builds and builds, and then, a joyous pow!  I looked for a quotation, but out of context, none will make sense.

That’s plenty, I guess.  No room for Moishe Leib Halpern, or Clarel, or The Ebb-Tide, or Skylark. No James Hogg or Tolstoy or Kalidasa.  Peter Pan floats away on a bird's nest.  The mayor of Casterbridge witnesses his own drowned body.  The time traveler witnesses the senescence of the earth.  This is now.

Next year, I guess: more books.  Or maybe I should just read these again.  They sound pretty good.

Who will denounce that criminal, Rhyme? - the ridiculous Bysshe Vanolis

Or "Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime?", which is a line from Paul Verlaine's "Art Poétique" (1884).*

Emily of Evening All Afternoon found The City of Dreadful Night maybe just a little bit ridiculous.  The rhyme grated on her.  Plus, the poem is ridiculous.

One reason I reread the poem so quickly was that I had a similar reaction, especially when I had just started it.  It took a certain adjustment in my angle of attack to really incorporate or absorb the rhyme.  Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) required a similar little twist.  Serious subjects treated at length demand, in English, blank verse, right?  Or free verse.  Not rhyme.

Is this just Modernist or Miltonic prejudice?  I think not.  Rather, it's the penetrating effect of ridicule and parody.  It's "On a log \ Expiring frog" and the "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Deceased," the reaction to a certain cloying Victorian sensibility.  Rhyme + serious subject = doggerel.  Even in Tennyson or Vanolis, even after my mental adjustment, there were rhyming pairs that really clanked together, rhymes that seemed lazy or in questionable taste: "mountains \ fountains," "casement \ basement," to pick a couple from early in The City of Dreadful Night.

Thomson's use of rhyme is pretty sharp, generally, and his use of form is varied.  The parodic response to Dante I mentioned a couple days ago is actually in rhyming triplets, a parody of Dante's terza rima.  Canto IV, a journey through a terrifying wasteland, is in a strange nine-line stanza that I don't recognize.  Maybe it's a parody, too, of Spenser?  It's also like a ballad, with the extra first line and the closing couplet repeated in every stanza:

As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: All was black,
In heaven no single star, on earth no track;
A brooding hush without a stir or note,
The air so thick it clotted in my throat;
And thus for hours; then some enormous things
Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings:
                   But I strode on austere
                   No hope could have no fear.

Like a good ballad, the emotional effect builds with every repetition.

Any work, fiction or verse, that attempts the sublime risks the ridiculous.  Often, they are one and the same - the sublime sometimes requires the ridiculous.  I'm thinking of Thomson's predecessor, the death-soaked Thomas Lovell-Beddoes, or Thomas Bernhard's novels, or John Webster's plays.  Since we don't really live in those worlds, most of us, I hope, they can seem absurd.  Bracing, but absurd.  One reason I wanted to mention Thomson's letters to George Eliot is that they indicate that the poet had some self-awareness of his ludicrousness.  Maybe not a lot, but some.

I should point out that Paul Verlaine's attack on rhyme is just a gag.  Verlaine, like Baudelaire, always rhymes.  I can say, with the confidence of ignorance, that he must be among the deftest rhymers in French poetry.  He makes it all look so natural, like it's just a heightened version of ordinary writing, like the rhyme words just happen to have fallen in the right spots.  Verlaine has his own fair share of poems of anguish and despair, all rhyming.

* Translation courtesy of Martin Sorrell, in Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, Oxford World's Classics, 1999.  Norman Shapiro, in One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine, University of Chicago Press, 1999, has "Rhyme! Who will its infamies revile?"

The truth of midnight does not exclude the truth of noonday - George Eliot does her best for Bysshe Vanolis

James Thomson sent George Eliot a copy of The City of Dreadful Night.  He sent it to Carlyle, too.  M. E. Lewes, as she signed the letter, was a big figure at this time, with Middlemarch three year behind her.

Eliot admires the poem's "distinct vision and grand utterance" but hopes that Vanolis will produce something with "a wider embrace of human fellowship."  Eliot concluded what I concluded yesterday, that the quality of the poem vitiated its message:

To accept life and write much fine poetry, is to take a very large share in the quantum of human good, and seems to draw with it necessarily some recognition, affectionate and even joyful, of the manifold willing labours which have made such a lot possible.  (May 30, 1874, p. 53)

Thomson's replies (two to the same letter) are hilarious, or perhaps sad, or both.  He tells Eliot that he has "no Byronic quarrel with my fellows" but sees "all alike crushed under the iron yoke of Fate."  He says he admires a physician who saves a life, even though it were better if the patient had died.  "But it is not for me to introduce such thoughts to you."  Good one, Bysshe.

Thomson writes that he sent his poem to Eliot because her works suggest to him a "character and intellectual destiny akin to those of that grand and awful Melancholy of Albrecht Dürer."  I have no idea what he means by that.

Two days later, Thomson decided his bizarre "no, I really mean it" letter to Eliot was either too weird or not weird enough, because he sent a short followup, saying that:

the poem in question was the outcome of much sleepless hypochondria.  I am aware that the truth of midnight does not exclude the truth of noonday, though one's nature may lead him to dwell in the former rather than in the latter.

For some reason, Eliot did not reply to these letters.  You become a famous writer, this is what you get to deal with.

Thomson's letters are from June 18 and 20, 1874, pp. 60-1.

All references are to Haight, Gordon S., ed., The George Eliot Letters: Volume VI 1874-1877, 1955.  Yale University Press.

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?

This insufferable inane - the originality of Bysshe Vanolis

A couple of scenes from The City of Dreadful Night, scenes that seem quite original to me.  Let me know if I'm wrong!

In Canto II, the narrator, flaneuring about doomed London, encounters - well, I'm not sure who.  A "shadowlike and frail" figure who acts as a sort of tour guide.  Just the highlights:  the graveyard where Faith died, "poisoned by this charnel air," the villa where Love died, "stabbed by its own worshipped pair," and so on.  The narrator asks "Can Life still live?  By what doth it proceed?" and gets this answer:

As whom his one intense thought overpowers,
   He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,
   Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.  (II 31-36)

The image of the distant Divine Clockmaker of the rationalists is simply demolished here.  The Surrealists are fifty years in the future.  What an image.  By the way, see what you think reading this aloud, treating it, from "Take a watch" on, as dialogue.  The pauses are just superb.

"Then turning to the right" the figure begins the dismal circuit again, like the useless watch, pausing to point out where Faith died and so on.  The narrator abandons him.
 
In Canto VI, the poet overhears two "bodiless voices in my waking dream," one of them just returned from the entrance to Hell, the Hell of Dante:  

I reached the portal common spirits fear,
And read the words above it, dark yet clear,
'Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here:'
 
And would have passed in, gratified to gain
That positive eternity of pain,
Instead of this insufferable inane.  (VI  19-24)

But he's not allowed in Hell, because he has no hope to abandon!  He, and his companion, who have already succumbed to total despair, are instead stuck in dreadful London.  The two spirits resolve to persevere, to "grope" through London, searching for "some minute lost hope," which will allow them to finally enter Hell!  This is wonderfully, brilliantly cracked, a literalization of a famous Dante line pushed to the breaking point.  I can give it one more twist, too - by hoping to find hope, they have already found it, but don't realize it.  Or perhaps not.  Who knows what the rules are in The City of Dreadful Night.
 
This is a most quotable poem.  Some fragments I enjoy, among many:  

The phantoms have no reticence at all:
The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless,
The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,
The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.  (VII 11-14)
 
Which creeps blindwormlike round the earth and ocean,  (XIII 19)
 
She clasped the corpse-like me, and they were borne
Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;  (IV  100-101)

 If you think this is something - I sure do - I'll just warn that it's not all this good.

I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me - The City of Dreadful Night - my first official Scottish Literature Challenge post

The response to the Scottish Literature Challenge has been great, just fantastic.  So now I'm going to keep the momentum going by spending the week, or a good part of it, with the greatest pessimist in, apparently, English literary history.  You want a dour Scot, take a look at James Thomson, better known as Bysshe Vanolis, author of The City of Dreadful Night (1874).  By "keep the momentum going," I mean "kill it dead and drive everyone away."  As Vanolis says:

He gazed and whispered with a cold despair,
Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair. (II 23-24)

I first read this poem a few days ago, all twenty-nine pages of it, and then immediately read it again, meaning that I am now in a flush of enthusiasm that no one else is likely to share.  The City of Dreadful Night is about nothing but death, decay, futility, suicide, and the pointlessness of all things, set in a sometimes recognizable gaslight London.  It's The Victorian Waste Land. If taken entirely seriously, it has to be among the most depressing poems ever written.   T. S. Eliot is Groucho Marx in comparison.

As an example, the narrator, who mostly wanders around the city cataloguing its horrors, joins a congregation in what I think is supposed to be St. Paul's Cathedral.  A congregant asks the minister for comfort ("What can console me for the loss supreme?" and so on), and gets this reply from the "pulpit speaker":

My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;
This life itself holds nothing good for us,
   But it ends soon and nevermore can be;
And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,
And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:
   I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.  (XVI 49-54)

The last line scans a little oddly - dactyls, right? - which helps separate the thought from the rest of the stanza.  That should give a good feel for the sound and sense of the poem.

The City of Dreadful Night is proto-modern, yet very much a Victorian poem.  Some of its imagery is highly original, and, another link to The Waste Land, the poem is infused with quotations: Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Blake, and presumably many more I do not recognize.  It in fact may be more of a pastiche than I realize.  It continually suggests other poems.  I'll see if I can write about some of this.

The perverse thing is that I am so happy to discover this poem of absolute despair.  I read it with the thrill of encountering a great poem.  It's not written for me - Vanolis specifically says so:

Surely I write not for the hopeful young,
   Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
Or such as pasture and grow fat among
   The shows of life, and feel not doubt or dearth,
Or pious spirits with a God above them
To sanctify and glorify and love them,
   Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth. (Proem 15-21)

I am in at least one of those categories.  I'll spend some time trying to get at why Vanolis might be wrong, why this poem might be for me after all.