Books Do Furnish A Room

After the storm

The night after my walk round Eggardon Hill, there was a tremendous gale and violent rain, and as soon as possible the next morning, I hurried to the coast, hoping for boiling seas and scudding skies.  I walked from Burton Bradstock, over sandy cliffs with seagulls elegantly wheeling, as if storm winds were nothing, and down onto the very western end of Chesil Beach, small pebbled here, but still frustrating and demanding walking.  Great sea and skyscapes, lots of small birds fighting the wind – including a flock of stonechats (left) – and lots of dogs having more fun than their owners.

In several of the pictures, you can see, small, low and distant, the highest point on the south coast, Golden Cap, with its distinctive flat profile.

 

Momijigari revisited

Some pure self indulgence here – my Dorset garden is awash with beech leaves, smothering the lawn, blocking the gutters and shrouding the bare bushes, caught in cobwebs and swirling constantly down in the wind.  I love them, glistening in russet and gold when wet, crisp, browner and yellower when dry, and I have just assembled a few pictures of the mother tree and the leaves it is shedding.  Some I have played with in the photo-editor – I think they’re fun, but if it’s a bit too much like Ikea art, I apologise!

 

love is more thicker than forget

Here's some more e e cummings.  I don't know why this works, I just don't - it must be something to do with the brilliant mastery of metre and words which seem to be related but actually aren't - so, in my post title, there are so many grammatical and verbal errors you can't count them - but, hey, doesn't it mean something quite strong and visceral.  And I can't talk about something I don't understand; or at least, I can't unless I think I might understand it, and here, I just give up and revel in it.  So this is e e cummings' love is more thicker:

 

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

 

it is more mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

 

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

 

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

The delicate masterpiece of the Abbé Prévost

Manon Lescaut is hardly a novel, more a long short story, although still almost picaresque. It is a classic I have heard of again and again in my reading – and the title of the post is from Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, when the book holds the key to the crime Wimsey is solving -and gives his friend the book to read while he brings the case (of course) to a triumphant conclusion.  I have had a copy for a couple of years, but something about this book discouraged me, made me feel it would be worthy but dull.  Well, apologies to French friends and fans of Abbé Prévost, but how right I was!  I really struggled with Manon Lescaut.

It’s only about 140 pages, but I grounded after 60 pages, and had to really force myself back to duty.  I then finished it in a concerted effort, but it felt like taking enemy ground under fire, and the relief as I turned over the last page was something indescribable.  I really don’t know what the fuss is about, I found it shallow, contrived, unconvincing, and just plain boring.

Chevalier Des Grieux is a young man intending to study to become a Knight of St John (or a Knight of Malta, same thing), with a marked tendency to priggishness – boringly good, moralising left, right and centre, and tempted by a career in the Church.  He meets, by chance, a beautiful young woman – Manon – who turns his head in spite of an appalling series of accidents, betrayals and disasters.  All ends in the worst possible disaster, with Des Grieux weeping on Manon’s grave in New Orleans, and then coming back to become a reformed character (yawn, yawn).

I found the moralising insipid and tedious, but the real weakness of the whole thing was its plot.  Action comes thick and fast, but the causes of action are either obscure or laughable.  Tremendous escapes are made from secure prisons by just walking out; an Abbé decides not to mention a murder he has witnessed, and so saves Des Grieux; a man decides to risk his life and his reputation after half an hour’s conversation with Des Grieux to whom he feels a lifelong friendship; an enemy duels with Des Grieux – is left for dead, recovers immediately, and saves Des Grieux from a terrible fate through his great good nature! The plot is more farce – more Boccaccio or Chaucer – than novel or uplifting moral treatise, and in the end, I could no more believe in Manon’s unfading attraction and virtue than I could in the choking, suffocating, disabling love he feels for her.

On Eggardon Hill

One recent weekend, over and round Eggardon Hill in Dorset, just east of Bridport, and just a few miles from the sea.  This is, I suppose, a steep natural hill, on which Iron Age people built a fort – there are also Bronze Age burials.  I parked near the summit, walked the length of it, admiring views in all directions, including the glinting, shifting sea, and scrambled down the steep north slopes – followed lanes and a disused railway, and circled the hill, climbing it again to find my car.  It is in the middle of gorgeous Dorset country, steep combes, copses and gorse commons, and farms and villages everywhere – just what foreigners think of as the English countryside.  I was there on a grey afternoon, with weak sunshine occasionally nervously casting shadows and then changing its mind; I started late, and then added to my route, so by the time I neared the summit for the second time, climbing steeply from the south, it was growing dark and mist was falling fast – a suitably pre-historic crepuscularity.

Here are some photographs of a brisk, exhilarating afternoon's walking!

Secrecy and sickness

You may recall my irritation with the BBC’s Emma, a reaction that seems widely shared to judge by television critics in the paper.  I felt the need to cleanse my palate, and indeed have picked up Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility with both relief and joy.  Yes, there are lingering elements of the gothick in Marianne’s passionate ideas, her love and despair; and the confusion over Edward Ferrars’ engagement is perhaps too drawn out for credibility.  Yet the overall is charming, witty and engaging, and the quietly barbed comments about the boorishness, selfishness, or mere stupidity of people have lost nothing in two hundred years.

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Toby Tanner remarks that “Sense and Sensibility is, of course, about sense and sensibility, but it is also about secrecy and sickness”.  I find that an illuminating comment, and an immediate balance to the modern tendency to portray Jane Austen as a kind of up-market rom-com, a mere comedy of manners and young love – though her novels are all of that, as well.  And “balance” itself is an interesting word, because Tanner draws attention to Jane Austen’s belief that balance is a prime virtue in her characters’ behaviour, or should be at least an aspiration, or a development of age and experience; he also draws attention to the way her prose directly achieves that balance in metrical and syntactical form: “The prose, like the plot, tends towards, and even acts out, those steady symmetries which Jane Austen regarded as indispensable for a truly civilised existence”.

This is an engaging book, and the characters of the two main female characters – Eleanor and Marianne – are contrasted without being stereotypes, and the three men providing the emotional interest are also all interesting – Edward, shy but upright, perhaps a more impressive figure in truth than Hugh Grant made him out to be, but certainly not full of address and élan; Willoughby, a weak scoundrel whose romanticism is offset by his mercenary flaws, although he comes to harbour at last, not happy, but at least knowing why he has missed happiness; and Colonel Brandon, whose virtues are sub-fusc but extremely well laid.  Each of them is flawed, each has redeeming characteristics, and each, probably, gets his just deserts,  Nor are minor characters any less interesting, Mrs Jennings with her inconsequential chatter and her gossip is a particular favourite of mine, from the same stable that produced Mrs Bates, but there are many others, demonstrating narrowness, boredom, goodwill, cupidity and selfishness, generosity and every other vice or virtue Jane’s readers could conceive.

I enjoyed Sense and Sensibility all the more because I was comparing it to the BBC’s insensitive Emma, and revelling in the language, the observational acuity, and the wit.  But honesty compels me to say that even this, refreshing and cleansing as it was, is not the very best Miss Austen has offered us – it must play second fiddle to Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.  But what a fantastic novel to have written when not at the top of your form!

Women reading: November

The November painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress) from 1868.  Jane Morris, of course, was William Morris's wife, and has the ultimate "pre-Raphaelite" face, heavy haired, sensuous, but rather distant and remote, suitable damsel for chivalric danger.  Across the top of the picture is an inscription which names the sitter and gives the date, then continues (in Latin) "famous for her poet husband, more famous for her face, may she now be famous for my picture".

I love these pictures in a guilty way, so technically accomplished and yet so near kitsch and sentimentality - and often in the pre-Raphaelite canon, stepping boldly right over the line into insufferable, cloying sickliness.  But this is a woman you would, must admire, but perhaps one you would take care not to be introduced to, lest she should be "La Belle Dame Sans Merci".

She seems to be reading a manuscript, perhaps a mediaeval one, more likely some faux-ancien concoction of her husband's.  Perhaps it's his 1868 poem, The Earthly Paradise, or perhaps its a draft of the forthcoming (1869) Grettis Saga: The Story of Grettir the Strong, which he translated (with Eirikr Magnusson) from the Icelandic; either of these, in a manuscript of his own, would fit the picture tellingly!

 

Voice, love and hate

Rupert Brooke, a young man's poet, and a young man when he wrote all his poetry (he died at 27 in 1915), is not always much loved nowadays.  But he could write, though the bitterness and immaturity of some of his writing seems gauche and overwhelming to a modern taste.  I liked him when in my teens, and I still find him quotable and occasionally very enjoyable, though I am sometimes laughing up my sleeve as I read.  This is a passionate, confused poem ahout a girl he loves - or hates, and it draws heavily on the symbolism of night, silence and woods which is so common in Brooke, with an ending of fierce bathos.  This is Rupert Brooke's The Voice:

Safe in the magic of my woods

  I lay, and watched the dying light.

Faint in the pale high solitudes,

  And washed with rain and veiled by night,

Silver and blue and green were showing.

  And the dark woods grew darker still;

And birds were hushed; and peace was growing;

  And quietness crept up the hill;

 

  And no wind was blowing …

 

And I knew

That this was the hour of knowing,

And the night and the woods and you

Were one together, and I should find

Soon in the silence the hidden key

Of all that had hurt and puzzled me  -

Why you were you, and the night was kind,

And the woods were part of the heart of me.

 

And there I waited breathlessly,

Alone; and slowly the holy three,

The three that I loved, together grew

One, in the hour of knowing,

Night, and the woods, and you -

 

And suddenly

There was an uproar in my woods,

The noise of a fool in mock distress,

Crashing and laughing and blindly going,

Of ignorant feet and a swishing dress,

And a Voice profaning the solitudes.

 

The spell was broken, the key denied me

And at length your flat clear voice beside me

Mouthed cheerful clear flat platitudes.

 

You came and quacked beside me in the wood.

You said, "The view from here is very good!"

You said, "It's nice to be alone a bit!"

And, "How the days are drawing out!" you said.

You said, "The sunset's pretty, isn't it?"

 

    *   *   *

 

By God! I wish - I wish that you were dead!

Logue's Homer

Husbands and All Day Permanent Red are the fourth and fifth volumes in Christopher Logue’s version of Homer’s Iliad, covering respectively Books 3 & 4 and “The first battle scenes” of the original.  The first two Homeric volumes, War Music and Kings were quite tremendous, lifting me off my feet with their power, rawness and imagination – Homer, always a favourite, had never been this exciting.  So I was keen, after a gap of many years, to try these volumes too.

The Husbands is principally an account of the attempt to bring the Trojan war to an end, by single combat, as ten years' strife had not resolved the issue.  Agreement is reached, sacrifices are made, and oaths taken, and the combat begins between Paris and Menelaus, the rival Trojan and Greek husbands of Helen, peerless among women.  But when Paris is wounded, the gods carry him off to save him, and cause treachery in the Trojan ranks, ensuring that the war will go on – and, eventually, that Troy will be destroyed.  Logue’s rendering is free, modern, and imaginative:

Hera and Athene hear of the plan to stop the fighting by making a common sacrifice to Him (Zeus, lord of the Gods):

“What for?”

“For peace.”

“Peace – after the way that Trojan treated us?” [Paris had judged Helen more beautiful than either of them]

“Peace, home, friendship, stuff like that.”

“It must be stopped.”

“At once.”

And so, with faces like NO ENTRY signs they hurried through the clouds.

 

All Day Permanent Red is a vigorous account of some of the early battle scenes of the Iliad, and captures well the chaos and brutality of war, and the drunken glorying in combat of glory-intoxicated men, often in a fierce modern idiom:

 

Drums in the dust. Inside its mid-ridge overcast

Flags tossing above the agitated forms.

Chylabborak, holding the centre firm.

Blurred bronze. Blood? Blood, like a car-wash:

“But it keeps the dust down.”

 

Both of these volumes are full of excitement and wonderful lines, but they’re not, in my view, the best volumes of Logue’s Homer; I find them harder to follow than the earlier ones, but it’s full of life and energy, and of modern, lively images that bring the Greek concepts and passions very alive.  If you’re new to Logue’s Homer, you mustn’t be put off by this – it’s fantastic reading and the narrative force and glorious poetry of War Music is an utterly wonderful achievement.

In the mustardseed sun

Today, my friends tell me, is a special day - and my mother, back in 1956, would certainly have agreed - and she, more than anyone else, would have known why this post is appearing at 1.15 in the morning!  To mark the day, here is an extra poem, Dylan Thomas' On His Birthday.  What verbal thunder, what meaning and chaos intermingled, what glory and delight - and final, bitter sadness.

  In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
  Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
  And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
  He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
  Herons spire and spear.

  Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
  Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
  Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
  Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;
  Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.

  In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
  In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
  Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
  In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
  Herons walk in their shroud,

  The livelong river's robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
  And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
  Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,
  The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
  Slides good in the sleek mouth.

  In a cavernous, swung
Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
  Thirty-five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,
  Steered by the falling stars.
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
  Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
  And love unbolts the dark

  And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
  And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
  Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
  And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
  The dead grow for His joy.

  There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
  Or the stars' seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
  And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
  And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in young Heaven's fold
  Be at cloud quaking peace,

  But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
  With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
  The bones out of the hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
  Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick starts,
  Faithlessly unto Him

  Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
  As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
  And druid herons' vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
  Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
  Count my blessings aloud:

  Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
  Tangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
  And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
  Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
  And this last blessing most,

  That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
  The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
  And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
  With more triumphant faith
That ever was since the world was said,
  Spins its morning of praise,

  I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
  Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
  More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
  Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
  As I sail out to die.

So sweet a kiss ...

This is a gorgeous, sensual poem, albeit slightly disturbing too.  It's a sonnet by Montgomerie (?1547 - 1597), written in Scots.  It's not at all as difficult as it might look on a quick glance, with only one word really puzzling - yistrene means 'last night'.  It's a sonnet to his mistress, and it says, roughly: I stole such a kiss from you that I left my life within your lips; my spirit followed, and then I sent my heart to look for my spirit, and you have kept all three; so if your breath had not kept me going, I would have died.  This is Captain Alexander Montgomerie's To his Maistres:

 

So swete a kis yistrene fra thee I reft,
In bowing down thy body on the bed,
That evin my lyfe within thy lippis I left;
Sensyne from thee my spirits wald never shed;
To folow thee it from my body fled,
And left my corps als cold as ony kie.
Bot when the danger of my death I dred,
To seik my spreit I sent my harte to thee;
Bot it wes so inamored with thyn ee,
With thee it myndit lykwyse to remane:
So thou hes keepit captive all the thrie,
More glaid to byde then to returne agane.
Except thy breath thare places had suppleit,
Even in thyn armes, thair doutles had I deit.

 

Books in the dark

Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night is one of those books which looks as if it will be really interesting when you get around to reading it – bit it looks quite serious, and in the meantime, there’s a tense thriller or a weepy novelette to tempt you away.  While, after several months, I ceased to be tempted away recently, and opened the Manguel in earnest, starting with a description of his own library in a medieval barn in the Loire valley.

It’s clearly a book to read in instalments, and I shall pick it up from time to time when in Dorset, where I have left it.  But the first essay – The Library at Night – has an interesting observation: that during the day, Manguel is in charge, is orderly, productive, sequacious of learning and successful in finding the books and references he needs.  But at night, the library is in charge – Manguel is lead astray, ideas coming from the books themselves, producing a chaos and litter of meaning only half understood, of books in the wrong places, of time expended without progress.  Maybe this is why Montaigne famously did not venture in his library after dark, though I find any experience I have in a library always combines the two states, whether my visit is diurnal or nocturnal.

Each successive chapter of the book is called The Library as ...; the first three are The Library as Myth, Order, and Space ...  These are delightful exercises – full of wit, insight and instruction – with comments that every collector of books will recognise:

The existence of every library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present.  It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here.

And everywhere there are discussions of the key problems of the library – what to keep when space is limited, whether to discard (No, never!), in what order to keep the books.   Again and again, the tendency of the books to govern the reader or librarian, rather than vice versa, raises its head.  We learn about the library of Alexandria, about the ordering of the earliest Chinese catalogues, and about the life of digital media.  For the book lover, there is delight on every page.

I have arranged, in homage to Manguel's vision of the library at night, that this post will appear at 13 minutes after midnight - a suitable dark time of the soul, although I might well still be reading.

Dorset miscellany

In Dorset for a week, as autumn threatened winter - then let summer back for a day.  So a miscellany of photographs - first, my winter's supply of logs has arrived; then a fantastic view of a raven on the Dorset cliffs a little east of Lyme Regis - so close and still I could hardly believe my luck (and we also had wonderful views of hunting kestrel); third and fourth, my Aga having its annual service - the poor old dear is showing her age (late 1940s or early 1950s), but still gives sterling service (though soon after this photograph she malfunctioned badly, sending flames leaping out of the front and up towards the ceiling - now waiting for the doctor to come); and finally, a beautiful small copper butterfly on some late bramble flowers - it was constantly bullied off them by a crowd of much larger painted ladies.  A glorious summer day gave me the birds and the butterflies, in the same week I prepared for the coming frosts.

 

I cannot see you acting wrong without a remonstrance

The words of my title are, of course, those of Mr Knightley to Emma, but I address them to the BBC.  Bored and slightly shocked by the latest television Emma, I gave it up after half an hour, and picked up the book itself.  It’s not, to be fair, Jane Austen’s finest – for me, it is clearly the weakest of the big five (not including Northanger Abbey, the runt of the litter).  But Austen in a weaker strain is still extremely fine, and there is no need to eviscerate it so completely as the BBC seemed intent on doing.  And do they think Mr Woodhouse is Emma’s grandfather, not her father – he looks about a hundred?

Emma is now a novel I pick up thinking that I ought to like it, and hoping to like it.  I used to feel this way about other Austens, but I have gradually grown into them all, and feel nothing but excitement and delight as I pick up Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, or Persuasion.  I don’t think this is because Emma herself is such a dolt – she’s irritating and trivial beyond belief, and her judgement of other people is quite extraordinarily bad – and her judgement of her own feelings.  I wouldn’t want her in my life (though Gwyneth Paltrow, in a previous version, was quite lovely), but then that’s true of others – Jane Bennett is sickly sweet good, and Fanny Price is so wet you need wellies to walk all over her, but both these books are on my “most loved” list.  I think it’s because there are so many odd characters, and because the novel really has remarkably little shape or direction.

Mr Knightley is splendid in all sorts of ways, but is a tedious prig at times – and it’s hard to believe in either his or Emma’s passion; Mr Woodhouse needs a good shaking and a reality check; the Eltons are a fearful couple.  And the plot is a cloud of unknowing in which events occur, rather than a journey through Emma’s development – as Pride and Prejudice is a journey through Elizabeth’s (and many other things); and all that nonsense with Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax – that’s all of a piece with the Gothick I wish she had left in Northanger Abbey.  I am in a severe mood with my goddess today, but I still love it – the Miss Bates monologues for example, are quite wonderful, and the Westons are drawn well, and the picture of small town social life is wonderfully conceived and executed.  Perhaps I just need a draft of the true, the blissful Hippocrene, perhaps Sense and Sensibility, the longest unread, and I’ll return to Emma another time.  In the meantime, I shall steadfastly ignore the BBC!

Petrella

I posted some Christina Rossetti on Friday, including "Who has seen the wind", which reminded me of two fine books of crime short stories by Michael Gilbert - Young Petrella, in which Patrick Petrella is a police constable, then sergeant, and Petrella at Q, when he has achieved much greater seniority in the (mythical) Q division of London's Metropolitan Police. 

Michael Gilbert is an able writer, and his stories have a pleasantly old-fashioned feel about them, from the London of the 1960s-1980s, and I commend any of his thrillers to you.  But the two Petrella books are especially engaging, being short stories with a wry humour and a warm humanity as well as the normal ingredients of realistic police work, a good story, and plenty of thrills.  And the Rossetti strikes a chord because it is a clue which Petrella uses in one of the earliest stories, when he notices the quiet of an alleyway normally alive with noisy children, and makes the correct deduction that they are kept indoors by the presence of a dangerous and unpleasant escaped convict who normally lives there.

Petrella is half English and half Spanish, so the stories are not confined to London - there is one in Paris, one in Spain (as a child), and one in Pauillac.  Entertaining, plausible, a very pleasant read, and realistic without gratuitous violence.  Look them up in the library, you won't regret it!

There was a radio drama with Philip Jackson as Petrella a few years ago, but I never heard any of the episodes, which look to be "based on" rather than faithful realisations.

Sing-song

Some childish, but affecting rhymes this week, from Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song.  Here are three of the sets of verses, starting with Who Has Seen the Wind?

Who has seen the wind?
  Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling
  The wind is passing thro'.

Who has seen the wind?
  Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
  The wind is passing by.

...........

The lily has a smooth stalk,
  Will never hurt your hand;
But the rose upon her briar
  Is lady of the land.

There's sweetness in an apple tree,
  And profit in the corn;
But lady of all beauty
  Is a rose upon a thorn.

When with moss and honey
  She tips her bending briar,
And half unfolds her glowing heart,
  She sets the world on fire.

..............

"Ferry me across the water,
  Do, boatman, do."
"If you've a penny in your purse
  I'll ferry you."

"I have a penny in my purse,
  And my eyes are blue;
So ferry me across the water,
  Do, boatman, do."

"Step into my ferry-boat,
  Be they black or blue,
And for the penny in your purse
  I'll ferry you."

Musth

Thanks to Mr Cornflower for the recommendation to read Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, a Buchan-esque thriller set substantially in Dorset, a place of deep lanes and private coombes – very much the area where I am lucky enough to have a cottage, in fact.  Rogue Male was published in 1939, but has a gung-ho cheerfulness about it, in spite of its dark matter, which smacks of Richard Hannay and the years before and after the First World War.

The main character – “hero” is not quite the right word – narrowly fails in an attempt to assassinate a foreign head of state.  We don’t know why he wanted to kill this particular dictator until almost the end of the book; at the beginning, he protests that he was acting independently and not on behalf of his country, and this turns out to be true.  But it means that when he escapes from the country in which he has been operating, he has the police of England and the secret services of the other nation both hunting him down, for different reasons (he added to his crimes by killing a man in London while getting away from his pursuers). 

We never know his name, but he is well known in England, and he has once lived in Dorset, where he decides to hide up.  He travels down to the country almost on auto-pilot, then realises that his unconscious is leading him to a perfect place to hide – some of those deep lonely lanes in the hills above Bridport, damp and grown over with trees, that are no longer heavily used.  He finds such a place, and camouflages it until it is a snug hidey hole where he passes weeks away, with only a wild and rather ruffianly cat for company.  The descriptions of Dorset are fine, and he mentions plenty of places I know – Bridport, Chideock, Powerstock, Eggardon Hill, and Beaminster – but the development of the novel comes of course with the opposition secret service discovering him.  He makes stupid errors and marvellous recoveries; he endures deeply uncomfortable nights in the open and on the run, but is finally holed up in a kind of impasse by his chief persecutor.

A deal is proposed; he declines.  After some days of debate – the enemy not killing him because they want him to sign a confession incriminating Great Britain – he makes a near miraculous escape, gets abroad, and changes his identity.  Then, in the final pages, we learn that he is planning another attempt on the life of the dictator he so narrowly missed the first time – and finally we learn why.

The book is fun, especially if you know this part of Dorset.  However, it’s pretty silly, and the plot has enough holes in it to make a colander.  It is also infused with this “jolly good show, old chap” ethos which I find both irritating and already out of date – he is in a sordid life and death chase, after all, and neither side will stick at anything.  But it is lively, moves fast, and is a rattling good yarn.  Boys, men of a certain mental outlook, and those looking for two or three hours’ escape, will enjoy this, but I cannot imagine it will have many female readers.

Et in Arcadia ego

In Tom Stoppard's wonderful, magical Arcadia, one of the characters - Lady Croom, the eighteenth century chatelaine of rather grand house and (even more importantly) a wonderful garden - is succeeded by another Lady Croom in the twentieth century, who is passionate about her garden and its history.  This is the basis for a dazzling drama of understanding and misunderstanding - of sexual intrigue and mathematics on the borders of the philosophical.  It's very funny, very clever, and was beautifully staged to full houses during its long original run and in the recent revival.

I caught the last week of the latest revival of this masterpiece in London -there's a wonderful review by Michael Billington here, so I'm not going into much detail.  I enjoyed it greatly, although I thought the relationship between Thomasina and her tutor was too blatantly sexual; it was more subtle, more regretful, in the original production, which I saw twice.  Out of interest, I looked up the cast of that first production - what a collection! Harriet Walter and Felicity Kendal on stage together!

Thomasina Coverly...............Emma Fielding
Septimus Hodge...................Rufus Sewell
Jellaby..................................Alan Mitchell
Ezra Chater..........................Derek Hutchinson
Richard Noakes....................Sidney Livingston
Lady Croom..........................Harriet Walter
Captain Edward Brice R.N....Graham Sinclair
Hannah Jarvis.......................Felicity Kendal
Chole Coverly.......................Harriet Harrison
Bernard Nightingale..............Bill Nighy
Gus Coverly......................... Timothy Matthews
Valentine Coverly..................Samuel West
Augustus Coverly..................Timothy Matthews

 

A History of God

No, not the History of God, of course, but a history of attitudes to God in the Abrahamaic traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Karen Armstrong is as well known for her studies of religion and belief as for her brief experience as a nun; she is on a religious journey of her own, but has not thrown her lot in with any of the major established religions (yet, she says), though clearly far from being without religious belief.  This is a well written book, instantly accessible for those of us – like me – without significant knowledge of the history or theology of which she speaks.  But it is a serious, thoughtful book, acclaimed by authors like A N Wilson (biographer of Jesus), Robert Runcie (former Archbishop of Canterbury) and Rabbi Julia Neuburger.  I am finding it full of interest, even though I am without a shred of belief in any of these religions.

In the chapter One God, she lays out the historical context of the rise of mono-theistic Judaism, explaining that the worship of Yahweh was a minority practice, and then as part of a pluralistic worship of many gods, all remarkably human in their desires and attitudes – rather like the Greek gods of the Iliad, say.  Yahweh emerged as dominant through a series of historical accidents, and many of the texts which are now read as monotheistic were originally meant to be interpreted quite differently: from Yahweh demanding that you ignore all other gods, and worship only him, Judaism moved to Yahweh claiming that he was the only God.

I am taking a long time to read this – although beautifully written, it demands my full attention, especially as I am so ill-versed in the underlying material.  But I have read the opening chapters on Judaism, and now the emergence of Christianity and its gradual separation from Judaism, and also the emergence of the Nicene creed, the doctrine of the Trinity and even in the fourth century, the tensions between the Eastern and Western churches.  This is marvellous stuff – clear, humane and lucidly intelligent, not taking sides, appreciating every difficulty and making all clear to the ignorant or non-technical reader.

The aim of the book is important: it is not a history of religion, or a history of the Christian church(es); rather, it is a history of how people thought about God – what they expected of their gods, whether they were experienced through reason or revelation, whether they claimed exclusivity, whether they were remote and unknowable or engaged in the daily life of men.  On this basis, Armstrong gives us more than a glimpse into the expectations and aspirations of both the common man and of the spiritually sophisticated, relating beliefs in and about God to the intellectual backgrounds of Hellenism and the warring empires of the early Middle East, and also to the political events of the time.

She uses comparisons of beliefs and practices in different religions most illuminatingly – seeing Jesus for example as a Hindu avatar, a form or expression of God who can reveal himself to and lead men on earth;  or as a bodhisattva in Buddhism, one who puts off his assumption of the divine or paradisiacal state of Nirvana to help others find the true way.  This kind of linking telling informs her introduction to the chapter about the beginnings of Islam – just as Christianity was originally part of mainstream Judaism, the Muslim prophet received his revelation from the same God, and in the same tradition, as Jewish or Christian prophets – but with a dramatic effect:

Christians, [ ] like Jews, were scandalised when a prophet arose in Arabia who claimed to have received a direct revelation from their God and to have brought a new scripture to his people.  Yet the new version of monotheism [Islam] spread with astonishing rapidity throughout the Middle East and North Africa.  Many of its enthusiasts in these lands (where hellenism was not on home ground) turned with relief from Greek trinitarianism, which expressed the idiom of God in an idiom which was alien to them, and adopted a more Semitic notion of the divine reality.

I look forward immensely to the rest of this book – and will probably post again on so large a subject.

 

Honey coloured ramparts

This poem is a bit of a wallow - it's so sensual, and really rather silly.  But I loved it when I was young, and I love it still.  Frankly, if you can resist the charm of "honey coloured ramparts at your ear", you're probably past praying for, and you've certainly never fallen in love with auburn hair in front of a wood fire!  This is William Butler Yeats' For Anne Gregory:

“Never shall a young man,

Thrown into despair

By those great honey-coloured

Ramparts at your ear,

Love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.”

“But I can get a hair-dye

And set such color there,

Brown, or black, or carrot

That young men in despair

May love me for myself alone

And not my yellow hair.”

“I heard an old religious man

But yesternight declare

That he had found a text to prove

That only God, my dear,

Could love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.”