by D J Enright
Mr Jeremiah Cruncher, the odd-job man in A Tale of Two Cities, ‘always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it’.
It was with some reluctance that I referred to the lady as Mo Mowlam, but that is how she is commonly known and presumably content to be.
There are times when it seems one must be living in a parallel universe. The reviewer (female, young) of a reprint of Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, first published in 1932, tells us that such was the author’s struggle in a male-dominated establishment to get the book published that she was discouraged from ever trying to write another. The enemies of promise in this case could be said to be the Cambridge English Faculty (male-dominated, but equally or more hostile to her husband, and both of them gave at least as good as they took), ill health, and (though she would never have advanced this, let alone lamented it) bringing up three children.
In fact publishers, albeit predominantly male at the time, were eager for further books from Mrs Leavis. Besides essays printed mainly in Scrutiny on Jane Austen, Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte and (at length) Emily Brontë, and others, she contributed over 250 pages to the book, Dickens the Novelist, written in collaboration with F. R. Leavis.
The reviewer, recoiling from the male-dominating married name, refers to the author as ‘Queenie’. If ever there was a woman you wouldn’t even think of by her forename (even if it weren’t what it happened to be) it was Q. D. Leavis.
Still, it’s good that her name isn’t totally forgotten, and that Fiction and the Reading Public has been reissued.
When the news broke of the closing down of the Oxford University Press’s poetry list, I happened to be reading the second volume of Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, specifically the story of the tinker’s boy calling at the house in Highgate where Coleridge was staying, and asking if they had ‘any old poets’ in need of attention.
No point in rehearsing the rights and wrongs of the affair. On the side of the Press’s bosses there were no rights at all, only ignorance, stupidity, hypocrisy, an open, possibly unprecedented contempt for a considerable body of their authors, and a general ineptitude beggaring description. The poetry editor, Jacqueline Simms, alone believed what she was saying. ‘Cet animal est très méchant, Quand on l’attaque il se défend’: what gross impertinence! The Oxford bosses were aghast – a slip of a girl, a mere part-timer, answering back! She won a clear moral victory. The list was broken up and she lost her job.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘publisher’ thus: ‘a person or thing that publishes’.
‘How vain painting is.’ Pascal observed that painting excites admiration by resembling things whose originals we do not admire. Goethe viewed it from a slightly different angle: painting is the most indulgent of the arts, we let the poorest reproduction pass because we are used to seeing even sorrier original objects. Some such thought may have inspired Roland Barthes to claim: ‘Écrite, la merde ne sent pas.’ If anything, it smells worse. If it honestly didn’t smell when written, it wouldn’t get written.
‘The Chinese have never regarded novel-writing as anything more than a rather doubtful diversion for a literary man,’ said Colonel Clement Egerton, the 1939 translator of the novel Chin P’ing Mei (The Golden Lotus) into English, or where deemed appropriate into Latin. Poetry has been another thing altogether. Discussing English versions of Chinese poetry, in 1983, David Hawkes judged that ‘the erotic element is perhaps a little overplayed at times in these translations, partly because of Dr Birrell’s choice of “loins” for chang, “bowels”, which is where the Chinese thought their emotions were seated. I don’t think strong feelings in the bowels were associated in any way with sex.’
Poetry readings are strange affairs. In the distant unregenerate past I would sense every now and then an instant air of indignant affront emanating from some close-knit poetry group, as if by a freak mishap their usually reliable secretary had invited quite the wrong speaker. Perhaps the most satisfying readings are those where (so you have been tipped off) Special Branch officers or their equivalents are to be present. For one thing, this makes the whole affair seem (rightly or wrongly) more meaningful; for another, you can be sure they won’t draw attention to themselves by asking awkward questions. They’ll be too busy trying to work out what you are driving at – just as you wish all listeners and readers would do. (A word of caution: you should choose your country with care.)
In his autobiography the German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki quotes Martin Walser, novelist and satirical playwright, born 1927, as identifying the prototypical author with an Egyptian shepherd named Psaphon who taught the birds to sing his praises: a picturesque but lowering version of the view, ascribed to Coleridge, that every great and original writer must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
‘Criticism is a goddess easy of access and forward of advance,’ Johnson asserted in The Idler, ‘who will meet the slow and encourage the timorous’ – that’s to say, a deity promiscuous in acquiring votaries and prodigal with her favours.
However, it is unwise to wax categorical on details of diction. In The Rambler Johnson took issue with Macbeth’s (i.e. Lady Macbeth’s) vehement invocation, ‘a wish natural to a murderer’:
Come, thick night
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heav’n peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’
– a passage in which, he says, all the force of poetry is exerted, yet its efficacy is destroyed by the intrusion of a low epithet, ‘dun’, seldom heard outside the stable. Today, stables having moved up-market, the word’s ignominious association has evaporated; in fact the Concise Oxford Dictionary’s second definition describes it as ‘poet. dark, dusky’ – with, quite likely, Shakespeare’s use of the word in the forefront of the lexicographer’s mind. The ‘utmost extravagance of determined wickedness’ that follows, Johnson continues, is debased by ‘two unfortunate words’ which tempt him to laughter: the avengers of guilt are represented as peeping through a blanket. (God or his agents as peeping Tom.) True, we are pulled up short, but only for a moment, such is the impetus of the lines. The other unfortunate word is ‘knife’, this being ‘an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employments’, so that we do not – or not at once – conceive that ‘any crime of importance is to be committed with a knife’, an object habitually involved in ‘sordid offices’. Johnson might have preferred ‘dagger’ (‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ Macbeth asks a little later), but these days a knife is quite sufficiently dreadful: it is what throats are cut with, while daggers are largely confined to costume dramas.
It was Johnson’s acute and fearful responsiveness to the sentiments of the passage and the energy of their expression that impelled him to incidental censures (perhaps an instinctive gesture of self-defence) which we incline to think comically misplaced. There is nothing here for us to exult over. Johnson notes, shrewdly and amusingly, that such ‘imperfections of diction’ will be wholly imperceptible to a foreigner whose knowledge of the language comes from books rather than active life, and less obvious to a ‘solitary academic’, unlikely ever to venture into a butcher’s shop or a domestic kitchen, than to a ‘modish lady’ who keeps an extensive set of cutlery. (For example, Lady Macbeth herself, a notable hostess.)
‘Karoline, you must read Wilhelm Meister.’
‘Of course I have read Wilhelm Meister,’ she said. Fritz was disconcerted for a few seconds, so that she had time to add, ‘I found Mignon very irritating.’
‘She is only a child,’ cried Fritz, ‘a spirit, or a spirit-seer, more than a child. She dies because the world is not holy enough to contain her.’
‘She dies because Goethe coul
dn’t think what to do with her next. If he had made her marry Wilhelm Meister, that would have served both of them right.’
A rousing piece of practical criticism, in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, feminine in forthright spirit rather than masculine, perhaps more British than German. Like the author, in fact.
Reviews of new novels are almost always laudatory. It would appear that the production of novels, whatever their subject-matter, is an outstandingly virtuous activity, of inestimable benefit to society. Seemingly novelists are blessed with human rights of a kind denied to writers in other genres. The Times (Play): ‘… his propensity to employ pithy quotations from Shakespeare, Milton and Polonius one moment, and to revel in the comic joys of anal sex a hair’s breadth later. It is bathos such as this, and much else besides in this accomplished book, that makes it such an unalloyed pleasure to read.’ Neither literary nor literate. (Polonius, we suppose, is one of those famously deep Romans.) Increasingly reviewers sound like inferior blurb-writers.
*
The story is told of Angus Wilson, at work in his garden, hearing a passing child say, ‘Look, Mummy, there’s an old man writing.’ The mother replied, ‘Yes, darling, it does them so much good.’ Indeed it does – even writing literary criticism, I dare say.
Have just turned down a kind request by the editor of the Times Literary Supplement to review a book published by Oxford University Press. Can’t bring myself to touch any of their products, aside from ageing, prelapsarian dictionaries. An enticing subject, too: literary representations of the afterlife over the centuries. It might have done me so much good.
There are two simple reasons why people don’t make good writers: (a) they have nothing to write about, (b) they are not at home with the written word (however fluent they may be in the spoken word). The latter is by far the more potent reason. If you can write, you’ll find something to write about; having something to write about doesn’t make you a writer.
Not that there is the slightest obligation to write, moral or social, as far as I can see. I have the deepest admiration and respect for people who can live perfectly well without writing, who get along without this crutch. (A crutch posing as a mission.) Unfortunately, writing – whether attended by the ability to write or not – seems to have joined those proliferating ‘rights’ which no one dare doubt, ignore, gainsay or waive.
Herodotus reported that the Massagetae, a nomadic people living to the east of the Caspian Sea, discovered a tree ‘whose fruit has a very odd property’. When they held parties, they sat around a fire into which they threw some of it. It burned like incense, and the smell intoxicated them, so that they jumped up and danced and sang.
The Scythians used to creep into a little tent and throw hemp seeds on to a dish containing red-hot coals. They enjoyed the resulting vapour so much that they ‘howled with pleasure’. This, Herodotus commented, was their substitute for bathing in water, which they never used.
In the late 1940s a group of students and staff from Farouk I University (later and more elegantly designated the University of Alexandria) toured the antiquities of Upper Egypt. Near Luxor a small cache of hashish was found in a boat plying the Nile. A hookah was sent for, and some damp coarse tobacco, and a local boy volunteered to prepare red-hot charcoal. A wild party ensued with loud laughter and cries of wonder. (No alcohol involved, of course, and with their customary discretion the young ladies made themselves scarce; so did the senior Egyptian staff.) The mouthpiece of the pipe passed from mouth to mouth: ‘Very good exercise for the lungs!’ A mini-lecture on the derivation of the word ‘assassin’ met with approbation.
The following morning a second cache was discovered. It seemed too good to be true, and a little research made it sadly plain that the small cakes of hypothetical hashish were dried pellets of Nile mud dropped from between the boatman’s toes. Sobriety descended on us, and we returned our attention to the monuments of unageing intellect.
If a drug isn’t addictive it can’t be up to much. The question is, can the addiction be lived with? Opium smokers in Thailand in the 1950s – the only ones I’ve known – if they ate well, had a job and a family life, they got by. Prosperous businessmen (generally of Chinese stock) were said to become more prosperous, their wits sharpened by a few pipes; certain university teachers recruited from abroad marked exam scripts at twice normal speed and with rare equanimity (though a cautionary tale had it that on one occasion the scripts were left behind at the ‘den’ and used as spills). Opium was legal then, cheaper than beer, for all that the state took its modest impost. But the poor who couldn’t afford food as well as opium, grew feebler, and hence more deeply addicted, and might in desperation attack passers-by for the coins in their pockets. (Such muggings never approached Western levels: the poor souls didn’t have the strength.)
Remote from the squalid and febrile drug scene of our time and place. But the West never knew how to handle drugs. We were greedy, we expected too much (the Doors of Perception), and we gobbled them down like jelly babies. The wind must be tempered to the most shorn of lambs. The law protects the weakest, or seeks to. And addiction is a hazardous, unpredictable condition. So, no opium or cannabis for you, old fellow, no matter what relief it might bring.
Anthony Hecht speaks of university English departments (in America, as it happens) and ‘the ill effects of interdisciplinary promiscuity’. A proposed course for schools was called ‘Ebonics’ (i.e. black street vocabulary). In the eastern parts of the US, Hecht remarks, educated Haitians, well-spoken and bilingual, are highly respected in the black community, which has led some less well-educated though well-intentioned mothers to name their sons ‘Antwan’. (Not everyone is besotted with street vocabulary.) The given name of one black youth – ‘Rayful’ – puzzled Hecht and his wife until she worked out that it was meant to mean Raphael.
Hecht mentions a student of his who reckoned that ‘limitations of technology’ obliged Shakespeare to present the themes and emotions of his plays ‘through the words of his characters’. Before long we shall have changed all that.
Anthony Hecht’s poem ‘Green: An Epistle’ begins: ‘I write at last of the one forbidden topic/ We, by a truce, have never touched upon …’ In a lengthy interview with Philip Hoy – invoking this poem and Pascal’s pensée, ‘Le moi est haïssable’ – Hecht remarks that ‘our capacity to think well of ourselves is versatile to the point of monstrosity’. Pride can disguise itself as humility; we can quietly pride ourselves on our quietness on this score, on what we choose to see as our modest and unassuming character. And then, ‘the universal desire to think well of ourselves almost invariably involves the suppression of memory’.
Well, yes. But in age, it may be, ‘le moi’ is – until we forget everything – increasingly ‘haïssable’. For one thing, the body, progressively unlikeable (‘Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste’: better leave this thought in its original language), is part and parcel of the ‘moi’. For another, however faulty the mind grows, it tends to favour rather than suppress memories that in the hustle and bustle of earlier years were readily pushed aside: we forgot because we had to, now alas the compulsion has ceased. (Put it another way: ‘When one trains one’s conscience, it kisses while it bites,’ said Nietzsche; but the time comes when the conscience forgets its training.)
Easy for Pascal to dismiss the self as hateful: he had something else to love. Hopkins implored, ‘My own heart let me more have pity on; let/ Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,/ Charitable.’ Harder done than said, but the sestet of the sonnet points to a possible, proper comfort: if for a night, a year, the poet lay wrestling, he was wrestling with God, not trading futile punches with his own sad self.
In the absence of God, the self – detestable but unmistakably there – is all we have. (Go carefully if it invades your writing, as it will.) Except, perhaps … But even to think of such precious, mortal fragilities seems foolhardy, let alone speak of them, or – a forbid
den topic – write at last.
‘If we wish to find ourselves, we must not descend into our own inwardness; it is only outside that we are to be found … None of us possesses his own self: it is wafted at us from without, escapes us for long periods and returns to us in a breath’: Hugo von Hofmannsthal. That’s how it used to be. Inwardness, a suspect locale, was left to itself; it was by no means certain that we actually had anything as solid-sounding as a self. The books one read, the poetry – even (or especially) all of that lay ‘outside’. (Richard Hoggart has written of the ‘scholarship boys’ of his and my generation: ‘Like homing pigeons, to a loft we knew only from hearsay, we headed for the humanities and, above all, for literature.’)
I hadn’t left the house for a week or more. Now I walked to the chemist to photocopy a review, intending to drop in at the pub across the street, check the copy and post it forthwith. I joined an old lady waiting warily at the zebra crossing – our walking-sticks exchanged sympathetic nods – as a car sped in our direction. At the last moment the driver noticed the zebra crossing and us, and slammed on the brakes to let us cross. His car was struck by a car just behind. Recriminations followed, and the driver of the first car appealed for witnesses to testify on his behalf. The old lady was eager to oblige; for her the first driver was the hero – he had, if belatedly, stopped for us – and the second was the villain, travelling too fast and too close. In my view both drivers were speeding without due care and attention; the damage was minimal, only pride (which drivers tend to have in excess) had been hurt. Six of one and half a dozen of the other, I pronounced emolliently. A disgruntled silence fell, and I sloped off to the pub, firmly ordering a half-pint and spreading out my papers importantly.
My self, which had escaped me for quite some time, had returned to me in a breath, wafted on the smell of burnt rubber. No longer ‘haïssable’ (or plain boring), for a moment or two this ‘moi’ was positively pleasurable.