16 posts tagged “british”
Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931 (1815-1820).
Bate, W. Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
You can't do this kind of concurrent reading with every writer (the thought of trying it with Henry James gives me the shivers), but Keats's career is so brief and changes so rapidly that periodic switching from work to life and back again makes a pretty congenial project. What cheered me in the overall sad story was Keats's silliness as a person (at dinner he starts an impromptu concert with his friends; he makes the bassoon noises), his nerdy bookishness (Shakespeare and Milton are never out of his mind for a moment), and the way his ambition keeps pace about a league ahead of whatever he's actually working on. The unfathomably brilliant works -- the sonnets, odes, ballads -- appear almost by accident, while his greatest effort is turned to those longer pieces in which compositional brilliance is tied to structural flaws that he's always aware of, keeps trying to outpace, keeps discovering in new forms. It's the admission of uncertainty, the continued questing, that makes me feel so warm - maybe in this era of improved medical care there is still hope for us all.
It's understandable that Lubbock should idolize James after becoming a friend of the Master in his later years, but strange that a book first published in 1921 should stop at 1903. The Ambassadors is his example of completely dramatized mental life, and
he seems to think the technique couldn't possibly be carried any farther. So maybe it would be unlikely for him to run across Stein, but Lubbock was living in Cambridge society; Woolf gave her "Modern Fiction" lecture in 1919; he must have known something about a certain Irishman living in Paris. I guess that guy was just a crank.
The 1926 edition belongs to a series of small paperbacks called "The Traveler's Library" (also in the series, "The Intimate Journals of Paul Gaugin" and "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields" by Lafcadio Hearn), and thus conjures the image of people taking this treatise on carriages to broadcast their intellectual currency. After accepting a cigar from your traveling companion, you may use the presence of the book as an occasion for remarks such as "While Tolstoy's genius is undeniable, War and Peace lacks a centre of consciousness, while Anna Karenina suffers from an over-utilization of the dramatic method and under-utilization of the pictorial..."
This was a hard book to enjoy, and I didn't really rise to the challenge. In writing about the present by writing about the past, Pater courts some of the same dangers as Charles Johnson's The Oxherding Tale - we must cultivate beauty! Roman culture is so belated - how can we write anything when the Greeks got there first? But in general Pater wants to avoid making his second-century Italy into too transparent an allegory, so he overloads on specifics - thus endless translations and general donnish lecturing interspersed with pretty landscapes, behind which one can very dimly make out the moving outlines of the characters. It was like walking through ancient Rome with a towel over my head.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 (1873).
Here's a familiar quote in context:
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation - that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape - should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.
I'd always taken Pater's tagline as referring to the non-representational nature of music, but you can see that isn't exactly what he's saying - rather he means the inseparability of content ("matter") from form. In a way that might work out to the same thing, but if so it's with a very different emphasis; where we tend to think of non-representational art as abstract - chilly Mondrian rectangles and so on - for Pater the distinctiveness of music is the indispensability of the sensory component. Likewise it is the matter of poetry, not the form, that is addressed to the "pure intelligence" - for matter is linguistic and conceptual, while form exercises its power through the senses. It's a startling inversion of Kant's and Schiller's aesthetics, and makes a nice fit with a book whose conclusion Pater had to suppress in the second edition, "as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall."
Shakespeare, William. The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth. Ed. Tucker Brooke. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923 (ca. 1590).
Shakespeare, William. The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth. Ed. Tucker Brooke. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923 (ca. 1590).
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Richard the Third. Ed. Jack R. Crawford. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927 (ca. 1592).
Shakespeare, William. The Life and Death of King John. Ed. Stanley T. Williams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927 (ca. 1595).
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. Ed. Roger T. Petersson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957 (ca. 1596).
Shakespeare, William. The First Part of King Henry the Fourth. Ed. Tucker Brooke and Samuel B. Hemingway. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947 (ca. 1597).
Shakespeare, William. The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth. Ed. Samuel B. Hemingway. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921 (ca. 1598).
Shakespeare, William. The Life of Henry the Fifth. Ed. R.J. Dorius. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955 (ca. 1599).
Shakespeare, William. The Life of King Henry the Eighth. Ed. John M. Berdan and Tucker Brooke. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925 (ca. 1612).
Since discovering this old set of delicious blue clothbound volumes at the best bookstore in Nevada, I've been indulging the commodity fetish by working through the history plays at leisure, with pleasure. Some I remembered pretty well; some not so well; some were completely new to me. Happy surprises were Richard II and the last play-and-a-half of Henry VI, with their sympathetic but unsparing portraits of ineffectual kings; and the last three acts of King John, where the rambling plot starts to get some traction and the blank verse starts pounding.
What impressed me most this time, after a steady diet of Henry Adams and the like, was the sheer transparence and intelligibility of history in these plays. Everything depends upon character, and as character moves along the time axis it becomes fate. To the extent that chance intervenes at all, it simply brings about situations which heighten the visibility of that arc. Combine this with the usual metonymy of stagecraft, by which a single duke or cardinal represents a set of forces - a body of tradition, a faction tens of thousands strong - and the result is airtight as Euclid. (The venal and wiseass low characters might counterpoint the stratagems of the higher born, but there's never much of a causal relation between the two.) Shakespeare's scalpel slices men open, strings their bleeding hearts along the barbed rack of his pentameter, and by that verse England stands or falls.
It took me a long time to stop thinking of novels as organic wholes. The form was born as a rambling patchwork, and even if later in life it got some nicer dresses and quit dropping its h's, a skimpy bit of Romantic poetic theory can't disguise the essential bastardy of prose. Here we have the famous case of a novel consisting of two separate, semi-digested novels: on the one hand, the landed-aristocracy marriage plot which everyone can identify as a George Eliot novel, on the other, the quasi-mystical Jewish origin story without any identifiable precursors. Henry James's review for the Atlantic staged his divided reaction as a dialogue among three characters, and his account is of a book split down the middle, between the psychological masterwork of the marriage plot and the brilliant but one-dimensional Jewish plot, its characters mere shadows beside the human warmth of Gwendolyn and the human chill of Grandcourt. Lionel Trilling, perhaps lacking James's particular mix of curiosity and tolerance, thought the Jewish plot should have been excised altogether.
For my part, I'd be sad to lose it. It is certainly true that the book became most alien to me at those points where the mystic-Zionist force exerts its strongest pull; the desire to subsume oneself inside a larger group isn't one of my natural settings. But genius takes strange roads late in life, and I think the Jewish plot must stand in for a more general yearning on Eliot's part toward the absolute and alien - toward something with no correlate in Victorian society. We're left with a baffling and beautiful monolith rising out of the familiar landscaped estate. That premise granted, I can't express my admiration enough.
I think this is my new favorite Conrad; in his author's note, he feels compelled to insist that "I have not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind." I hadn't previously spent much time with Conrad in the metropolis, and it's a new kind of pleasure to read his caustic sentences on forms of human folly that one has directly expeienced, as opposed to those one has to infer from other people's travelogues. Fantastic characters. A perfectly sour ending.
The ending of this book creeped me out more than anything I've read lately, and I'm still puzzling about how it happened. A lot of it comes from a disorienting change of genre; the first two thirds of the book are recognizable as consummate, deliciously cold Flaubertian satire (half of it is Waugh's way of tracking the minute fluctuations of vanity), and the form isn't disrupted even by the major tragedy at the book's midpoint. It's afterward that things turn Gothic and exotic, adding continual degrees of weirdness; first you ask about the author - Is he doing this on purpose? He does know what he's doing, right? - and then you forget the author and simply watch the protagonist's fate close around him, a fate that would be a sour joke if it weren't so terrible, and thinking only Can't he get out? There must be a way out, if I were him I would have found a way out -
So the whole last third of the book comes out gratuitous and inexplicable as measured by the modernist formal standards evoked in its title and epigraph (I will show you fear in a...). But it kept me up that night.
We had a tasty Catalan wine the other night, which reminded me that this had been sitting on the shelf - and I can't imagine Orwell would have minded the circumstance, because he's such a humane writer, just as interested in the wine and cold and lice as he is passionate about the politics. He wants more than anything to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not:
Being hit in the throat with a bullet is, he notes, a highly interesting experience; and it is indeed, as he describes it, most interesting. The saddest part of the book is his political speculation about what kind of government Spain might expect if Franco was beaten back; that still seemed possible as he was writing, and what he feared most was infighting among the Left.Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.
I am very glad that the instant bad taste left in my mouth by Harold Skimpole turned out to be justified; for a while at the beginning I thought that he was going to ruin the novel by hanging around the margins and getting away with everything. Also of note: the megalosaurus on the first page and everything having to do with Inspector Bucket of the Police.
There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The possibility of what is called Spontaneous Combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that Spontaneous Combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers, and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. There are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described by Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in letters, who published an account of it at Verona, in 1731, which he afterwards republished at Rome.
-Charles Dickens, preface
We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort in order to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
