better drowned than duffers

I've been reading books meant for young readers since the late 1980s. Back then, I began managing a cataloging operation which included something called the Children's Literature Team. The leader of that group would go to professional meetings and bring back reading lists. Starting with some books by Diana Wynne Jones it didn't take me long to get hooked. All the same, somehow, 'til now, I've missed out on the Swallows and Amazon books by Arthur Ransome. I've just finished the first of them.

It's well loved and has been discussed at length by admirers and some detractors. A review on Amazon by an eleven year old reader pins down one of the books main attributes: Its story is set in place that feels real and its characters feel just as true. Their adventures involve great amounts of imagination but everything they do might easily be done by any other children in their situation. The eleven year old writes: "What's best about their adventures is that all of them are possible! They don't do impossible things like ride on dragons or become invisible. Their adventures really could happen! I loved this book from the start, and have read it again and again. I would also recommend the other books in this series. They are all super, and will become treasures to pass on to later generations. Thank you, Mr. Ransome, for writing such a wonderful book!"

The defects found by detractors also bring out interesting attributes of the book: It contains lots of lore — particularly lore related to some leisurely summer weeks on a large, well-situated lake. The children (and occasional grown-ups as well) swim, row, fish, and most of all sail. With exception of a pair of fascinating charcoal burners there's little information about doings on the shores of the lake. But there's much about its islands and about what it takes to sail upon it. With so much description of managing a sailboat and so much plot devoted to the imagination-sprung adventures of sub-teen children, the book disappoints readers whose taste bends more toward dragon-riding coming-of-age stories.[1] Here are excerpts from reviews by two such disappointed readers: (1) "The vocabulary is VERY sophisticated, quaint, and old-fashioned. Also, it's hard to understand all the sailing terminology. It has sentences like this: 'Is there a cleat under the thwart where the mast is stepped?' Who talks like that???" (2) "The real problem is in the lack of plot. The kids just go and do their thing. There isn't any problem or climax."

The author's passion for things-on-the-lake-as-they-are shows in a short description of a bird as observed by one of the children:


The eldest of the children is 12, the youngest 7. They are distinctly their own selves, different from one another, yet each, for his or her age, is admirably competent and well informed. In the passage quoted above Tilly, who is barely 9, knows her pirate literature well and it is she who recognizes that a lookout point above the lake must be their Darien. Ransome writes so skillfully that the reader (this reader anyway) does not question her extensive though apparently narrowly focused book learning.

His skill also keeps you from wondering why the children do not bicker; there's no whining, pouting, name calling, tale telling, or similar behavior and this is one of the reasons reviewers overwork the word "idyllic" in discussing the story. The idyllism is there, but it's not idyllic pleasures in the normal sense that concern the children (not picturesque nor redolent with pastoral simplicity). For them, the story of this brief part of their lives is one of self-directed adventure, of invented games, of a childish freedom that gives full rein to their separate imaginations. It's idyllic largely because the responsible adults — two mothers, an absent father, and some neighbors who inhabit the lake's shore — all watch over the children's doings from a distance; they provide care and nurturing while keeping themselves apart.

The only adult exception is Uncle Jim, alias Captain Flint. He's a responsible adult who has not lost the ability to join in childish imaginings with a wholehearted enthusiasm. As an adult he takes offense at a prank and a later burglary which he assumes (based on reasonable evidence) to have been committed by the eldest, John, and the other Swallow children. This adult side of him is too quick to condemn and, he soon finds out, is wholly wrong to do so. He handsomely apologizes and, in making amends, plays host to the children in a climax to their summer adventures. Ransome handles this character so deftly that it doesn't seem odd that this one adult is so different from the others.

In the passage shown just below Uncle Jim has just come back on board his house boat having been overcome by two gangs of pirates and made to walk the plank. Before the attack he had had the foresight to obtain materials for a feast which he and the children now sit down to enjoy. (Rio is their name for the nearest village and Mate Susan is second in age rank among the four Swallows.)


After Titty has observed the dipper her mother rows across to the island where the Swallows are camping. She, Titty, has been left behind as lookout while her brothers and sister are off adventuring in the little sailboat. Mother is a "native" in the children's way of seeing the world, that is to say an adult who's not part of their game of exploration and pirating. Left all alone on the island Titty imagines herself to be Robinson Crusoe and her mother instantly realizes that she herself must be Man Friday. (The Blackett children are a pair of sisters, both tomboys, says their mother. They are the Amazons of the title and it is they for whom Titty has been on watch.)


In her conversation with Titty, Mother talks about her own childhood in Australia and, in doing so, reminds Titty (and the reader too) that life is not all summer holidays. The ocean, as first seen from Darien, might seem pacific, but it is not always so peaceful. Here's the brief chat between the two. Note the snake, an adder kept by a charcoal burner for good luck, and the drought in the Australian sheep ranches.


All this interested and pleased me while reading the book, but what I paid most attention to was the children's self-assurance. They know what they're doing. They know how to set up and maintain camp, to make fires and cook out, to swim, to fish, to row, to sail. They know how best to treat one another, the elders among them watching out for the youngers and the youngers pulling their weight and respecting the older ones. When one of them does something well the others give credit and praise.

They do not just observe middle-class conventions, they honor them. Twelve-year-old John behaves much like his Navy Commander father, providing his siblings with an easy and unquestioned leadership. Eleven-year-old Susan is like her mother, tending to the needs of the Youngest (Roger) by (for example) sewing on his loose buttons, as well as organizing food, preparing meals, and keeping the campsite tidy.

I'm sure the children's confidence comes from the ascendancy of families like theirs (the English middle class of the time) and its shared values.

All 6 children, the 4 Swallows and the 2 tomboy Amazons, are well-spoken, considerate even when in mock-fierce competition with each other, and share a set of values that need not be expressed to be evident. The two sets — the 4 and the 2 — meet for the first time at the beginning of the story, but they have no trouble recognizing themselves as social equals: by upbringing and education they share with each other much more than they do with other children who inhabit the lake. These other children must be present, but they are never mentioned. The only local whom they encounter who has a child-like personality is a local policeman, entirely grown up but still easily cowed by the elder of the two Amazons.

In the exchange shown here, Ruth is the elder Amazon (though called Nancy while adventuring on the lake) and she's berating Sammy, the policeman, for interviewing John about a burglary that John is wrongly supposed to have committed (it's this false accusation that Uncle Jim has to answer for later in the book). There's no difficulty in seeing that Ruth and Sammy are social unequals. Sammy, in fact, is the son of the woman who was nurse both to Ruth's mother and to herself. I infer from this conversation that it's almost unthinkable that local children have any common ground with the 6 children whose story is being told.


This passage is not typical of the book. It jars in the same way Uncle Jim's hasty accusation jars and, since Ruth/Nancy is stepping in to right that wrong, her outburst is the mirror her uncle's. And it shows the divide between the Ruths and Sammys of 1929 England. This divide was the subject of my last blog post. The families of the Swallows and the Amazons are not literally "gently born" as I use the term in that post, but they possess the same social qualities. They are well spoken, sure of themselves, and well-versed in a shared set of social conventions which they do not question. There's a gulf between them and those of "mean birth," like Sammy and his mother, and like the somewhat exotic yet kindly charcoal burners.[2] You can see this in the contrast between the forthright and articulate apologies that Uncle Jim makes and Sammy's stammered ones. Although he has done no more than follow orders, Sammy is abject and cringing.[3]

Sammy is a descendant of Bottom and Shakespeare's other clowns. He is a large, ungainly fellow. Like Uncle Jim he is an adult who's retained childhood habits, but in him the adult does not seem to be in control of the child. He is awkward and clumsy and retains a childhood fear of his mother's anger. It's this last trait that enables Ruth to command him. Ransome shows the great distance between this large adult creature and the bright, agile, adventurous young Swallows and Amazons.

Sammy lacks their poise and it cannot be pleasant for him to contemplate his second-class status. While he is not in the same crowd as a pair of outsiders who drink at the pub and provoke themselves into burglarizing Uncle Jim's houseboat, you can nonetheless imagine him — at some point in his life — becoming outraged at the attitudes of his "betters" (sorry for the scare quotes) and striking back.

Ransome's Sammy is an individual, not a type. But if you take him as representative of a class, it's easy to see a main source of the massive grudge held in common by that class during the 1920s. This grudge famously exploded in the general strike of UK trades unions of 1926. The book makes no reference to the strike but since it was published only a few years later and since it presumably takes place at about that time, many readers would easily be able to recall it.

The families of the Swallows and Amazons do not exploit workers as the great industrialists exploit them, but they are found together on one side of the social divide I'm trying to describe. The members of these families have an unassuming grace of manner, are cultivated, live comfortably, and of course speak well. The exploited ones either do not have these traits or are not thought to have them. The family of the Swallows has a nurse who minds the youngest child, infant Vicki. Unlike Sammy's mother, who is given a name, this servant is simply called "nurse." She is generous and kindly. Her interactions with Mother are cordial, but it's pretty clear they are employer and employee and just as clear that there's no point in referring to her by name.[4]

The presence of this nurse does not mean the family of the Swallows are well to do. You can tell they just comfortably sufficient because they live on a naval officer's salary and because they do not have their own holiday villa but rather rent rooms in a lake-side farmhouse. The family of the Amazons are better off. The mother, who is a widow, owns the villa in which they spend their summers and they have been coming to the lake for long enough that they are treated as rather high-placed residents by locals. But it's obvious the two families have much more in common with each other than with any locals. They share a familiarity with each other which they do not offer to people not so privileged as they.

--------

You might think Arthur Ransome to have been something of a snob, or at least ridden by unconscious assumptions of place and class. There may be some truth in this, but it is also true that he approved of the Russian Revolution and supported the Bolshevik regime.[5]

{Arthur Ransome; source: drgodine.blogspot.com}

-------

When I was studying British History in the 1960s a professor, G. Peter Browne, told me two anecdotes that touch on this subject. First, he said when Oxford began admintting more than a token number of lower class students the upper class ones would sneer at them in a cultivated sort of way. The example he gave was a request by one of the uppers in the dining hall. Glancing at one of the lowers nearby he said "Do please pass the vege..., oh excuse me, please pass the greens." It sounds innocuous but was vicious all the same.

Brown also told me, however, that on going to an American dentist's office for the first time, he was surprised when the assistant said "Hi, I'm Jennifer and I'll be cleaning your teeth today." He told me it would never occur to him to address her by any other name but "nurse."

----------

LibraryThing.com is a good place to learn about the setting, protagonists, and plot. It contains a short description and some extended reviews.[6]

---------

{Film still (1974) of John, Susan, Titty, and Roger in the Swallow; source: dare.co.uk/cinema}

{Endpaper map from the first edition; source: stellabooks.com}

    

{Dustjacket of the first edition (wikipedia) and cover of the Puffin edition of 1974 (childrensbookshop.com)}

---------

About the title of this post:

In Swallows and Amazons, the Swallows all write letters to Daddy at Malta (but under orders for Hong Kong), asking for his permission to sail Swallow to Wild Cat Island and camp there.

Daddy replies in the famous Duffers telegram:

BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN

Susan says that he added the won't drown to comfort Mother.

John says that Daddy thinks we shall none of us get drowned, and that if any of us do get drowned it’s a good riddance. He is particularly keen not to let Daddy down. Hugh Brogan comments: John’s father’s telegram is famous. John’s comment is enormously significant: ‘Daddy knows we aren’t duffers’. It was something that the boy Arthur could never have said to himself with any confidence; yet how much he wanted to! Now, in fiction, all could be arranged.

-- Arthur Ransome Wiki

Duffer (OED)

A person who proves to be without practical ability or capacity; one who is incapable, inefficient, or useless in his business or occupation; the reverse of an adept or competent person. Also more generally, a stupid or foolish person.
1889 J. K. Jerome Three Men in Boat 171 ‘Is it all right?’..‘Lovely..You are duffers not to come in’.
1891 A. Lang Angling Sketches 8 Next to being an expert, it is well to be a contented duffer.

---------

Some sources:

manners unfaulted

Swallows and Amazons, 45 editions First published in 1930, on Open Library

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (London, Random House, 1930) on WorldCat

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, work description on LibraryThing

Swallows And Amazons by Arthur Ransome (reprint Godine Publisher, 1986) on Google Books

Swallows and Amazons series on wikipedia

Arthur Ransome wiki, a wiki maintained by fans

Nancy Blackett on wikipedia

"'Which One's the Mockingbird?' Children's Literature from the 1920s to the Present" by Sheila Egoff in Theory into Practice, Vol. 21, No. 4, Children's Literature (Autumn, 1982), pp. 239-246 (Taylor & Francis, Ltd.) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1476345.
Excerpt:

I was working at the Toronto Public Library during the 1940s and I can still remember the excitement engendered in the children by the appearance of a new Ransome book. In the Ransome books we have the between-the-wars and post-war children healthy, happy, sane, self-reliant, friendly-and yet they aren't prigs in any conceivable way. These children are allowed to go off adventuring without adult supervision, the youngest being only seven years of age. Yet Ransome does not strain our credulity. First of all, the children have been trained in various skills and what they don't know, they soon find out. They pore over maps, charts, plans, books; they can cook over an open fire, mend a net and tickle trout ("Tickle trout?" said a friend of mine. "You made that up." "It's in a Ransome book," I said, "therefore it must be true."). Above all, the children can sail. It has been pointed out to me that you could actually learn to sail a boat by reading the Ransome books. It is quickly noticeable, I think, that the children fall into adult patterns as do the children in the Narnia books when they become kings and queens, which was what the society of the time expected from children. Susan, for example, takes on the mother's role. But the point of reality here is that without adult supervision, would anyone allow their children weeks of sailing and camping alone? Susan is an anchor in a world of high adventure that helps the reader believe it really could happen-independence from adult supervision-if Susan will supervise toothbrushing.

Small-boat sailing; an explanation of the management of small yachts, half-decked and open sailing-boats of various rigs; sailing on sea and on river; cruising, etc by Edward Frederick Knight (New York, E. P. Dutton & co., 1902) was Ransome's bible

Arthur Ransome on schoolnet

Arthur Ransome and Communism

Swallows, Amazons and Bolsheviks ‘The Last Englishman,’ by Roland Chambers a review by Ken Kalfus, NYT, May 25, 2012

Arthur Ransome Russia in 1919

V. I. Lenin Interview With Arthur Ransome Manchester Guardian Correspondent, October 27 - November 5, 1922

Arthur Ransome 1884-1967 on marxists.org

These two Marxist (and critical) reviews are both by the same author:

The Family as an Ideological Construct in the Fiction of Arthur Ransome by Ian Wojcik-Andrews in The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 14, Number 2, December 1990, pp. 7-15
Excerpt: "As Marx and Engels note in The German Ideology: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." Familiar family hierarchies set up in the opening scenes establish the Walker parents in traditional work and sex-related roles which they (and the children) maintain as the novel comes full circle—it opens and closes with the same characters in the same place bound by the same parental/child hierarchy. ... In short, Ransome uses the Walker family to paint a powerful portrait of middle-class family life, one that foregrounds conventional work and heterosexist ideologies."

Introduction: Notes Toward a Theory of Class in Children's Literature by Ian Wojcik-Andrews in The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 17, Number 2, December 1993, pp. 113-123
Excerpt: "Arthur Ransome wrote the quintessentially middle-class Swallows and Amazons. Complete with nurse, the Walker family (actually the mother and children) are on holiday in the idyllic Lake District whilst Navy Commander Mr. Walker sails the high seas, symbolically defending the British Empire."

Behind the scenes at Radio 4 by Clarissa Maycock 10:30, Monday, 23 April 2012
Excerpt: "Crawford Logan has voiced a new 5-part recording of Swallows and Amazons for BBC Radio 4 Extra. He writes:

Look at the comments for 'Swallows and Amazons' on Amazon(!), and you'll find very polarised opinions, almost all either five stars or one. For the fives it's a vivid childhood memory with characters they loved, a picture of a world which has disappeared, if indeed it ever really existed at all. But for the ones, Swallows and Amazons is an easy target for every modern brickbat--it's old-fashioned, dull, middle-class, sexist (Susan does all the cooking), slow and in serious need of editing. Worst of all: "nothing happens".

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (London, J.M. Dent and sons, 1889)

Diana Wynne Jones on wikipedia.

Diana Wynne Jones, the web page of British fantasy and science fiction writer Diana Wynne Jones.

The Many Worlds of Diana Wynne Jones

Accessible Adventure in 'Swallows and Amazons' by Nicholas Thomas in Anthropology Today, Vol. 3, No. 5 (Oct., 1987), pp. 8-11 (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3032888 .

----------

Notes:

[1] I don't mean to imply that readers can't like both dragons and swallows (I'm one) but some do like a great deal more tension in their narratives than this book provides.

[2] I put "mean birth" in quotes because it's a term used in the seventeenth century. People of Ransome's generation might have said "lower classes." I think "mean birth" to be a little more expressive, particularly in contrast to "gently borm."

[3] Lovers of his novels have made an Arthur Ransome wiki for us. Its entry on Sammy's mother, Mrs Lewthwaite says: Mrs Lewthwaite used to be Mrs Blackett's nurse, and that of the Amazons when they were young. ... Sammy, her eldest son is a policeman. He is afraid of Nancy.

[4] I expect Sammy's mother is named because she belongs to the lake-side community, the way the charcoal burners (who are also named) belong to it. The nurse of the Swallow family, being of no special community, can be treated a bit like an appliance.

[5] Ransome was a journalist in Russia during the Communist Revolution. While there he was was recruited by the British espionage office, MI6, as a spy. However, he showed such great sympathy for the Communists that when he returned to England in 1919 he was arrested by the police under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act. He convinced the police that though he was sympathic to Communism he was not himself a revolutionary.

[6] Here are brief extracts from LibraryThing reviews:

"Swallows and Amazons, a paean to children’s make-believe play and exploring their surrounding world, is a very pleasant story that involves the great outdoors, boats, fishing, and camping, with rich characterization, vivid descriptions, wholesome reading, and old-fashioned ideals. It includes a good deal of everyday Lakeland life in the early twentieth century, from the local farmers to charcoal burners working in the woods. Seldom have I ever come to the end of a book and felt sorry that it was over."

"One thing that the book does really well is to explore the imaginative life of children, taking the everyday world around them and turning it into something much more exciting and exotic."

"The Walker and Blackett children are given an amazing amount of freedom and use that gift to its fullest. They are adventuresome, curious, imaginative, and mischievous. Oh to be able to spend weeks on end sailing and camping and exploring. Even though Ransome was writing in the 1930s, the girls and women he created are strong and capable: good swimmers, good sailors, smart, fearless, and reliable. It's no wonder that this series was among my favorite childhood books. Here is a quote that has stayed with me since I was in fourth grade: "Her real name isn't Nancy," said Peggy. "Her name is Ruth, but Uncle Jim said that Amazons were ruthless . . . [so] we had to change her name." (p. 119)

manners unfaulted

I recently finished reading Hilary Mantel's new book, Bring Up the Bodies, and I liked it, every page. She's a marvelous writer, so good that it's difficult to pin down what she's doing that's so much better than anyone else does. Putting her work into the "historical fiction" warehouse doesn't make sense; it isn't genre, it's simply literature.

My affection for the book comes partly from my interest in the lives of early modern Englishmen who did not receive a university education. I've been studying one of them, the mathematician John Collins, and Mantel's subject, Thomas Cromwell, is another. The lives of the two men were very different. Cromwell lived a full century and a half before Collins and achieved wealth and power as an able politician and chief minister to a king (Henry VIII). Collins attained neither wealth nor power. He was a clerk, teacher, author, accountant, and, on the side, an "Ingenious Obstetrix of the Press promoting the laudable Design of getting Learned Men to impart their Labours to be Printed; and exciting others to encourage the same, as being of singular Use and advantage to the Republick of Learning; through the want whereof many Learned Mens Works of much worth have been lost, suppressed or long delayed."[1]

Nonetheless they were in some ways similar. Both were born "of low estate," Cromwell as son of a blacksmith and small businessman and Collins as son of a poor clergyman who was barred from preaching in any church. Both left England while young and, while on the Continent, gained knowledge and skills that served them well on their return home. Both were largely self-taught, learning more by experience than education. On returning to England both attracted the notice of high-placed men and used these contacts to advance themselves. Both married only once and were devoted to their wives and families.

I don't mark up books I'm reading, or turn down corners -- none of that. But I do occasionally write out something -- a phrase, line, paragraph, or page -- that seems especially meaningful and this I chose to scribble into my Moleskine from Bring Up the Bodies. In it we see Cromwell's thoughts about his son:

Gregory is a good boy, though all the Latin he has learned, all the sonorous periods of the great authors, have rolled through his head and out again, like stones. Still, you think of Thomas More’s boy: offspring of a scholar all Europe admired, and poor young John can barely stumble through his Pater Noster. Gregory is a fine archer, a fine horseman, a shining star in the tilt yard, and his manners cannot be faulted. He speaks reverently to his superiors, not scuffling his feet or standing on one leg, and he is mild and polite with those below him. He knows how to bow to foreign diplomats in the manner of their own countries, sits at table without fidgeting or feeding spaniels, can neatly carve and joint any fowl if requested to serve his elders. He doesn't slouch around with his jacket off one shoulder, or look in windows to admire himself, or stare around in church, or interrupt old men, or finish their stories for them. If anyone sneezes, he says, “Christ help you!”

I was able to copy and paste this quote, rather than key it, because a reviewer chose to quote it as well. Writing in the New Yorker on May 7, James Wood uses the paragraph to show how Mantel uses a "cunning universalism" to link Cromwell with modern parents, indeed any parents, whose concern about their children leads them to catalog their strengths and weaknesses.

I did not see this aspect of the quote. For me it shows in glorious detail some of the main attributes of the "gently-" as against the "meanly-" born young men of early modern England. Cromwell and Collins were "of mean birth" and by their attainments came to be known as gentlemen. As adults they mastered the forms of address, techniques of polite conversation, and deportment sufficiently well to be accepted among the gently born. By contrast Cromwell's son Gregory, as Mantel presents him, was raised from childhood to be "courteous" in the original sense of the word.[2]

Spenser gives this sense of "courtesie" in the Faerie Queene.

Of Court, it seemes, men Courtesie doe call
For that it there most useth to abound :
And well beseemeth that in Prince's hall
That vertue should be plentifully found
Which of all goodly manners is the ground.
And roote of civill conversation.
-- Spenser, Faerie Queene, VI, i, i.

It's implied that Gregory knows how to behave in Court, that is the chambers where royals and nobles gather. He knows how to restrain any of his impulses which might be considered impolite, he shows deference to his betters, and possesses a confident demeanor which frees him from distasteful arrogance. His manners are easy and graceful. This ease and grace is the basis of what Spenser calls "civill conversation."[3]

Mantel puts most of Gregory's courtly achievements as negative virtues — bad habits he has had to overcome — and this is typical of the many books of polite manners that appeared in the centuries after the invention of the printing press. She and they take it as given that people are born with unsocial impulses which must be restrained if they are to get along well with each other. It's also implicit that those belonging to the courtly classes have advantages which others lack — chiefly wealth (or at least credit) and leisure. To them being industrious is not a virtue, and, although many of the gently born do work hard, they are encouraged not to make a show of it. Their leisure is not one of idleness, ideally, but their energy should be expended in sport (tilting or hunting) and social engagements (such as riding and dancing) rather than any effort that would appear busy.

Gregory is not literally "gently born." Writers of courtesy books divided pretty much evenly over those who equated gentility with good breeding and those who said it could be acquired as well as bred, but they all acknowledged that people were accepted as gentles either way. They also implicitly or explicitly accepted that this characterization — gently born — applied pretty much equally to all those who belonged in the upper classes, from the lowest of gentry through to the highest of nobles and royals. The gap between people of mean birth and those of gentle birth was, in this instance at any rate, more significant than the gap between a poor but well mannered landowner and a duke or earl. Men like Cromwell and Collins breached the first sort of gap, but they did not do so easily and their hold on their new status was tenuous. I suspect they hoped their sons would, as men, be able to accept gentility with unselfconscious ease.

{Cromwell by Holbein from the Frick Collection; source: wikipedia}

-----

Some sources:

The ideal of a gentleman; or, A mirror for gentlefolks, a portrayal in literature from the earliest times by Abram Smythe Palmer (Routledge; New York, Dutton)

"The English Gentleman," by Sir George Sitwell in The Ancestor, No. I (Westminster, April 1902)

Peacham's Comple'at Gentleman (1634), with an introduction by G. S. Gordon (Oxford, 1906)

Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature by Jennifer Richards (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003)

From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England by John Gillingham, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 12 (2002), pp. 267-289. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679348.

Invitation to a Beheading, The Thomas Cromwell novels of Hilary Mantel, a review by James Wood in The New Yorker, May 7, 2012.

-----

Notes:

[1] ... -- The sphere of Marcus Manilius [by Marcus Manilius], made an English poem with annotations and an astronomical appendix by Edward Sherburne, squire (1675).

Sherburne says:
We should be injurious to him, if we did not farther inlarge, by telling the World how much it is obliged for his Pains in exciting the Learned to publish their Works, and in acting the Part of an Ingenious Obstetrix at the Press, in correcting and in drawing of Schemes; So that he hath been Instrumental in furnishing the World with the many learned Mathematical Books here lately published (for which, his chief Reward hitherto hath been to obtain from the Learned the Title of Mersennus Anglicanus) and many more may be expected, if moderate Encouragements towards Printing such Works, and Leisure for such an Affair be not impeded through the necessary Avocations for a livelyhood, and though it be besides my Design, yet I cannot but digress in giving him and others like minded (which are very rare to be found) their due commendations, in promoting the laudable Design of getting Learned Men to impart their Labours to be Printed; and exciting others to encourage the same, as being of singular Use and advantage to the Republick of Learning; through the want whereof many Learned Mens Works of much worth have been lost, suppressed or long delayed.

a Barnabas among those mathematical apostles, his tact and
devotion in calming the headstrong and drawing out the reticent
being above all praise.

[2] "Courteous" comes from the 14th-century French word curteis and it then meant "having courtly bearing or manners." The phrases I put in quotes were common in early modern England. In the 16th and 17th centuries a literature, quite a large literature, grew up giving instructions on courtesy.

[3] As one source says, Spenser took the term "civill conversation" from an Italian work of 1574 in which gentles are shown as harmoniously intermingling with an unselfconscious grace. (The Spenser Encyclopedia by Albert Charles Hamilton (Taylor & Francis, 1990)).

Palladian

The forecast promised downpours and maybe thunderstorms but the rain crept in out of a gray mist and fell sparsely, hardly dampening the earth.

Scenes in the book I'm reading take place in such somber weather. The book is Elizabeth Taylor's second novel, Palladian and its theme is wisdom, as you can tell from the title, but its underlying subject is death.

The chief character is introduced to us in the first sentence: "Cassandra, with all her novel reading, could be sure of experiencing the proper emotions..." The character's name might put the reader on guard, expecting onslaught of tempestuous love ending tragically, but the book's style is playful and we can tell that our heroine is (somewhat ambivalently) both Englishly proper and girlishly eager for romance. Her parents dying, she becomes governess to a girl named Sophy in a romantically dilapidated mansion whose inhabitants are ill-matched but kept together by ties of family, circumstance, and an unbreakable bond with Sophy's mother who died giving birth to her.

Though Taylor does not say so, you can tell that Cassandra feels the novelistic elements of the situation — some Charlotte Brontë, some of Jane Austin, some of George Eliot.

In their first meeting together in his study, her employer tells her there are no diversions where she now finds herself. There is only the forward stretch of time with little to fill it. "When there is so much time," he says, "there is never enough."

He speaks of a conversation that takes place in Turgenev's A Month in the Country; quoting him:

Will you walk about in the garden with a book in your hand, which you will never read? That is all there is to do here. There is all day long and the night, too; and yet, there is only time to dip into books and turn over a few pages. You'll find that. When there is so much time, there is never enough. Those long summers in the Russian novels — the endless bewitched country summers — and the idle men and women — making lace. Do you remember in A Month in the Country — that was how Natalia described their conversation — it was love conversation, too — that it was making lace ... they never moved an inch to the left or right ... only idle people are like that ... they talk to pass the time for they know that time is only a landscape we travel across. . . . They hope to make a busy journey of it ... (ellipses in original)

After she leaves him, Cassandra considers what he has said about the unending succession of one moment to another — an unmoving transition which negates change, in which only time exists and time is without meaning.

Cassandra understands this notion of time without meaning to convey a belief in life without meaning. She does not reject the thought but seeks to compartmentalize it. Taylor writes of her:

She had come a long way from the life of yesterday, of the day before that — the shabby home, the traffic, the bush full of tram tickets, the crowds on the pavements, clotting, thinning out, pressing forward; travelling across time, Marion had called it but they were really going to work, or going home from work, or shopping, or wooing one another. 'Quite separate,' she thought. 'Each quite separate. That is the only safe way of looking at it. And we can never be safe unless we believe we are great and that human life is abiding and the sun constant and that we matter. Once broken that fragile illusion would disclose the secret panic, the vacuity within us. Life then could not be tolerable.' Marion, with his talk of lace-making, had threatened to reveal the panic and confusion and so create an intolerable world for her.

In this gentle satire, it is not just Cassandra who tries to make life tolerable by repressing a secret panic. Taylor examines, charitably, but with painful clarity, all the book's main characters as they seek refuge from despair and their own regrets.

Marion's younger cousin, Tom, for example, "had been early overthrown, had failed to recover, and now cloaked himself in melodrama — the laconic drunkard or the sordid roué — to put himself beyond the reach of his mother or other women, or men." And they are, each differently, hounded by death. Tom, for example, in a brief exchange which embarrasses Marion, says "I am drinking myself to death." And this, says Taylor, was a melodramatic statement, but one, all the same, which "had the seeds of great tragedy in it." Marion responds: "In a different way, I am done for too. ... I am reading myself to death, that is all the difference is."

The book swims with allusions to classical Greece. The title refers not just to Cassandra's reverence for Pallas Athena, but also, prosaically, to the façade of the old house where the action takes place. The house is medieval at the core, but has been layered over in successive attempts to conceal its origins, the latest being a Palladian front, which is to say an 18th century imitation of classical Greek ideals. Athena's attribute is sophia, wisdom, personified in Cassandra's charge, Sophy.

The Cassandra of classical mythology is a tragic figure, a prophetess gifted with second sight whose knowledge is wasted on those around her. Taylor's Cassandra has no such heroic dimensions. When Taylor has Cassandra seek safety in her belief that "human life is abiding and the sun constant," she alludes to the relationship between the Cassandra of myth and Apollo, god of healing and of the sun and brother to Athena. It was Apollo who instilled in Cassandra the ability to see the past and future as if they were present. This insight is generally described as a gift which he later reversed by causing her to speak prophesies that no one believed but the "gift" can be seen another way: as sight so clear that there can be no "fragile illusion" (as Taylor has it) of "the vacuity within us." Unlike Taylor's Cassandra, the classical one has no choice but to see clearly what she wishes she could not.

Early in Palladian, Mrs. Turner, her school-mistress and mentor, gives Cassandra a book and the gift shows the unbridgeable gulf between the larger-than-life reality of Attic Greece and the depressed life of the English in the years following World War II. The book is called The Classical Tradition and it's meant to provide a guide for right living. Cassandra loves her disorganized, well-meaning friend but finds her writing to be unreadable. In Cassandra's hands this gift book "had a strange fungus smell and its pages were stippled with moles. The prose was formal and exact, remote from Mrs. Turner's personality and yielding up nothing between the lines..."

The time and place of Palladian is not that of classical Greece. Aeschylus's Cassandra can shriek in a mad fury about the murder she is about to suffer at Clytemnestra's hands and pray to the sun that her enemies pay a bloody penalty for slaughtering herself who has become a slave, an easy prey.[1] Taylor's Cassandra is proper and conventional. What little she knows of life she has learned from novels and immediately expects that Marion will be Rochester to her Jane.[2] The Cassandra of Aeschylus has seen much death and destruction and has no romantic illusions. Wild with grief she is eager for the fates to revenge her murder. For her, death does not steal quietly in, and a pleasant life of aristocratic ease can be wiped out in a moment: "the dash of a wet sponge blots out the drawing and that is far the most pitiable thing of all."

Taylor's setting is not classical Greece where a bright light can be brought to shine on the misdeeds of humankind, but shadowy England, "a mouldering and rank corner of earth," with its leaden skies and inescapable damp, where emotions are not primitive and raw, but rather where personalities are quirky and human lives intersect with one another obliquely. Words, rationally deployed, are used to wound and wounds are often self-inflicted. The tone of Palladian is not heroic but humorously ironic and in its pages human life is made tolerable not through hubris but by maintaining illusions.

Taylor's characters live out their lives in more-or-less desperate passivity. Although Elizabeth Taylor and Samuel Beckett seem to have had nothing in common save their roughly contempraneous lives, these characters and those of Beckett's first novel, Murphy, share this comedic absence of affect, agility in deflecting the concerns of ordinary life, and sense of death as constant companion.

Neither Taylor's Cassandra nor any others of her characters, as with Beckett's, have anything in common with the Cassandra of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (out of Aeschylus) who moans at the doorway to her death-chamber with wild eyes and "wide nostrils scenting fate."

For the rest, — a mystic moaning,
        Kept Cassandra at the gate,
With wild eyes the vision shone in, —
        And wide nostrils scenting fate.
-- from The Island Wine of Cyprus by Elizabeth Barrett Browning[3]

{Source: LibraryThing}

I began this post thinking it would be about Taylor's Cassandra and the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, how her statement concerning the fragile illusion concerning the meaning of life connects with his insight about the need for humans to free themselves from illusions concerning their personal significance and their collective permanence in an impersonal and impermanent universe. But I have written something else, haven't I?[4]

I've written three other posts on novels of Elizabeth Taylor:

• Elizabeth Taylor's view, May 22, 2009
• A Wreath of Roses, June 22, 2009
• what is the use of it?, August 13, 2009

-------

Notes:

[1] In Aeschylus's Agamemnon Cassandra has fallen from princess — daughter of Priam, sister of Hector — to slave. Agamemnon himself has taken her as concubine and she is to be murdered along with him by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover. Her mad scene is powerful theater.

Once more the dreadful throes of true prophecy whirl and distract me with their ill-boding onset. Do you see them there — beating against the wall — shapes that gather in a dream? Children, they seem, slaughtered by their own kindred, their hands full of the meat of their own flesh; they are clear to my sight, holding their vitals and their inward parts. And their father drank their blood.

For this cause I tell you that a lion, wallowing in his bed, plots vengeance, a watchman waiting for my master's coming home — yes, my master, for the yoke of slavery is nailed about my neck. The commander of the fleet and the overthrower of Ilium knows not this she-wolf's tongue which licks and fawns, and laughs with ear up-sprung, to bite in the end like secret death. Such boldness has she, a woman to slay a man. What odious monster shall I fitly call her ... a raging, devil's mother, breathing relentless war against her husband? ... And yet, it is all one, whether or not I am believed. What does it matter? What is to come, will come. And soon you, yourself present here, shall with great pity pronounce me all too true a prophetess.

[2] Marion Vanbrugh is ambiguously sexed (or perhaps unsexed). As his first name suggests he is a male with feminine attributes. There is nothing Byronic about him; he is not a reincarnation of Jane Eyre's Edward Rochester. Nor has he anything in common with Fitzwilliam Darcy. And while he is bookish, he is no self-defeating scholar like Edward Casaubon. His surname suggests his character might be like that of John Vanbrugh, but it is not.

[3] Aeschylus has Cassandra say: "Since first I saw the city of Ilium fare what it has fared, while her captors, by the gods' sentence, are coming to such an end, I will go in and meet my fate. I will dare to die. This door I greet as the gates of Death. And I pray that, dealt a mortal stroke, without a struggle, my life-blood ebbing away in easy death, I may close these eyes."

[4] This is from Into the Silence by Wade Davis: "The essence of the dharma, which the Buddha had distilled in the Four Noble Truths. First, all life is suffering. By this the Buddha did not mean that all life is negation, but only that terrible things happen. Evil was not exceptional but part of the existing order of things, a consequence of human actions, or karma. Second, the cause of suffering is ignorance. By ignorance the Buddha did not mean stupidity, He meant the tendency of human beings to cling to the cruel illusion of their own permanence and centrality, their isolation and separation from the stream of universal existence. The third of the noble truths was the revelation that ignorance could be overcome and the fourth and most essential was the delineation of a contemplative practice that, if followed, promised an end to suffering and a true liberation and transformation of the human heart. The goal was not to escape the world but to escape being enslaved by it. The purpose of practice was not the elimination of self but the annihilation of ignorance and the unmasking of the true Buddha nature, which, like a buried jewel, shines bright within every human being, waiting to be revealed. Padma Sambhava's transmission, in short, offered nothing less than a road map to enlightenment."

a phrase

I've been reading Peter Matthiessen's Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea. It's an excellent book. You can find it used in the usual places and it can be had for free at Internet Archive. He writes gracefully and some of his descriptive paragraphs are startlingly beautiful.

As are some of his phrases. Here's one that caused me to pause and reflect during my lunchtime reading. Two small children he said were "caught in the grave immobility of time". Here's the passage with some context:


I wondered if Matthiessen used the phrase in homage to a piece of writing he admired, but I could find nothing among authors who wrote in English. Some further searching turned up one possibility in another language. This was the phrase "immobilité du temps" in Le lys rouge by Anatole France. Matthiessen pairs well with France. Both crafted elegant prose, both attacked the narrow-minded prejudices of their day, and both found success in fiction and non-fiction, literary writing and journalism, short works and long. (I write of Matthiessen in the past tense, but at 81 he's still going strong.)

Their similarities make it possible that Matthiessen was consciously alluding to France's novel in using his arresting phrase. The phrase is not uncommon in French. I suspect, however, (though I'm not at all sure) that in ordinary usage its meaning is generally closer to "stillness of time" than "immobility of time." If I'm right, and France is unusual in employing the latter, then it's possible (barely so I guess) that Matthiessen consciously echoed France in choosing his words.

Here's a bit of the context in Le Lys rouge: "Elle n’osait pas regarder sa montre, de peur d’y voir l’accablante immobilité du temps. Elle se leva, alla à la fenêtre et souleva les rideaux. Une lueur pâle était répandue dans le ciel nuageux. Elle crut que c’était le jour qui commençait à poindre. Elle regarda sa montre. Il était trois heures et demie." -- Le lys rouge by Anatole France (Lévy, 1896).

I'm not sure which I'd prefer — that Matthiessen graciously alluded to the great French author or that the words came to him with no whisper of their heritage.

Matthiessen

{Source: Hilldale Lecture in the Arts and Humanities, September 12, 2006, University of Wisconsin}

France

{Posté par Baschus, mercredi 18 janvier 2012, on Scolies}

Walter Benjamin, a quote

I found a nice quotation on one of my favorite tumblr pages this morning. The blog is Chimin faisant by the artist, Catherine Willis, and one of its excellences is the author's insistence on providing descriptive captions and source data for her entries. Here's this morning's post with its caption and source:

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

— Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (via mythologyofblue)

After reading a gazillion quotations over years of internet appreciation I've noticed that many (possibly most) have been subjected to substantial rewriting; others are entirely made up. It goes without saying perhaps that very many appear innumerable times on quotations pages, odd blogs, and the social sites.

This one does appear all over the place, mostly without citation, but, blessedly, its text is close to the original. Benjamin wrote: "Arbeit an einer guten Prosa hat drei Stufen: eine musikalische, auf der sie komponiert, eine architektonische, auf der sie gebaut, endlich eine textile, auf der sie gewoben wird." A more exact translation than the one that circulates webwise is Edmund Jephcott and Kinsley Shorter's: "Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven."* The statement (in original or translation) sounds more self-consciously aphoristic that most of Benjamin's writings. It's too pat. He wrote staccato sentences which did not flow into smooth-reading paragraphs and is thus considered to have had an aphoristic style, but he wasn't at all a sound-bite writer and most of his writing is more muscular than pretty. It does not generally have the musical, architectural, and textile qualities which he pronounces to be the mark of good prose. He wrote, in the words of a publisher, "in a disconcertingly concrete language."

Here's an example.

{From "Antiques" in One-Way Street, in One-way street, and other writings by Walter Benjamin, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, Verso, 1997)}

Benjamin's ticket of admission to the Bibliothèque nationale.

{Walter Benjamin’s library card, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 1940; source: a piece of monologue}

I've written about Walter Benjamin on another occasion: Walter, Hannah

-------

Note:

* From "Caution: Steps," One-Way Street, in One-way street, and other writings by Walter Benjamin, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London, Verso, 1997)

you who know nothing of the works of God

I'm reading a book called How to live, or, a life of Montaigne: in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Its author, Sarah Bakewell, does a good job of showing the man's life through his written works. She writes about the tower chamber where he thought and wrote and describes the ceiling joists on which he inscribed Biblical and classical quotations that he wanted to keep in mind.

As it happens, there's currently another well-reviewed book that covers much the same ground — When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me? — and its author, Saul Frampton, quotes a few of these Sentences de la «librairie», as the French call them. One of them Frampton renders as "You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of God."

This, in its aphoristic certitude, reminds me of the ersatz Carl Jung quote I wrote about the other day ("Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate"). However, unlike the one credited to Jung, the quote Frampton gives us has an exact source. Frampton's comes from Montaigne's Latin: "SICVT IGNORAS QVOMODO ANIMA CONIVNGATVR CORPORI SIC NESCIS OPERA DEI" which in turn comes from a statement in Ecclesiastes.[1] Others have rendered Montaigne's Latin into English somewhat differently than Frampton does, but all the translations have the same sense: if you don't know how the mind (or soul) is joined to (or united with) the body, you know nothing of God's works.[2]

Montaigne, it emerges, was paraphrasing his source. The text he drew upon — eleventh verse, fifth line of Ecclesiastes — is all about fate intervening in the affairs of humankind, of one's inability to read the future, and, specifically in this line, what is present but not visible. It reads, in the Vulgate, "quomodo ignoras quae sit via spiritus et qua ratione conpingantur ossa in ventre praegnatis sic nescis opera Dei qui fabricator est omnium." Even not knowing Latin you can tell this is quite different from Montaigne's joist inscription. We've "spritus" instead of "anima" and a whole extra clause about "ossa" and "ventre praegnais" not to mention a replacement of "sicut" with "quomodo" as the intro word.

As with all Biblical texts, there are plenty of English versions of this passage. The New American Standard Bible gives: "Just as you do not know the path of the wind and how bones are formed in the womb of the pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes all things." This is somewhat clunky but also pretty close to Young's Literal Translation: "As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, How -- bones in the womb of the full one, So thou knowest not the work of God who maketh the whole." In contrast, the KJV has "As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all." Word for word, the Hebrew text reads: "who not know how long the path of the wind bones the womb of the pregnant so not know the activity of God who makes all."[3]

We do not know why Montaigne made the change or what it meant to him. Frampton says there was an earlier inscription beneath the one he paraphrased from Ecclesiastes. The earlier one came from Lucretius: "There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer."[4] Frampton believes that in overwriting Lucretius with Ecclesiastes Montaigne "shifted from the philosophy of death to the philosophy of life; from being not afraid to die to being not afraid to live." Whether literally factual or not, this statement is consistent with Montaigne's shifting viewpoints as viewed through his writings.

I can't find that Frampton or the (very many) other students of Montaigne's writings take up his paraphrasing Ecclesiastes as he does, but I am nonetheless interested in what he's done. I like the way Montaigne has taken a fairly routine statement of God's unknowable majesty (much like the one that God forced on Job about which I've previously written) and twisted it into a somewhat more profound philosophic challenge. The end result is a surprisingly concise statement of religious certitude: there are things, like the interaction of mind and body, about which we know practically nothing and about which, quite likely, we never will know very much. These areas of ignorance are the space occupied by religion in human societies. Using many more words, Spinoza in the 17th century and more than a few thinkers in succeeding centuries have said much the same thing.[5]

So, again, side by side: the Jungian challenge that Jung seems not to have uttered: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" and the Biblical challenge as poetically reinterpreted by Montaigne: "You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of God."

Portrait of Michel de Montaigne, date and artist unknown

{source: wikipedia}

Le Château de Montaigne (ca. 1890). The château burned in 1885 and later restored. The library was damaged by the fire but not destroyed.

{source: wikipedia}

A closer view of the tower.

{source: firstknownwhenlost blog}

Diagram of the ceiling beams.

{source: philo5 blog}

A closer view of part of the beams

{source: citations-latines-et-grecques-gravées-au-plafond-de-la-librairie-de-montaigne-source-cliquez-sur-l-imagepersonae.jimdo.com}

----------------

Some sources:

A Catalog of Montaigne’s Beam Inscriptions

Montaigne avait fait peindre sur les poutres du plafond de sa tour des sentences grecques et latines.

As Sentenças pintadas nas vigas da “librairie” de Montaigne publicadas em 1861 e 1894 (pdf)

The Man Within, Why Montaigne is worth knowing, a review by Liam Julian, in the Weekly Standard, May 30, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 35. The book reviewed is When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That
She Is Not Playing with Me? Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life by Saul Frampton (Pantheon, 2011)

Two Books on Montaigne: review by Nicholas Shakespeare in the Telegraph (UK) February 14 2011, reviewing Frampton and What Do I Know? by Paul Kent (Beautiful Books, 2011)

Biblos.com: Search, Read, Study the Bible in Many Languages also known as ScriptureText.com Multilingual Bible

Montaigne les sentences de sa librairie

When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?
Saul Frampton (Random House Digital, Inc., 2011)

Montaigne avait fait peindre sur les poutres du plafond de sa tour des sentences grecques et latines.

Studies in Montaigne by Grace Norton (The Macmillan company, 1904)

Ecclesiastes 11:5 on the biblegateway web site

LES SENTENCES - DE MONTAIGNE

Montaigne les sentences de sa librairie

Sentences de la «librairie» par Michel de Montaigne

De rerum natura Titus Lucretius Carus, 97 - 55 a. Chr. n.

Mezentius the Epicurean by Leah Kronenberg (Transactions of the American Philological Association, Volume 135, Number 2, Autumn 2005)

-----

Notes:

[1] Others render this differently. An earlier author, Grace Norton, tells us that the inscription is much obliterated and thus the exact text is thus somewhat in doubt. She renders it as "Quare ignoras quomodo anima conjungitur corpori, nescis opera Dei." -- Studies in Montaigne by Grace Norton (The Macmillan company, 1904)

[2] Here are four other renderings of the Latin into English:

• "You who do not know how the soul embraces the body, you know nothing of God's works." -- Montaigne les sentences de sa librairie
• "You who know nothing of how the soul marries the body, you therefore know nothing of God's works."
• "Since you do not know how the soul is united to the body, you do not know God's work." -- LES SENTENCES
• "You who know nothing of how the soul marries the body, you therefore know nothing of God's works."

[3] I like the comparative texts given on the Biblos site, but there are quite a few others to choose from (see ScriptureText.com Multilingual Bible).

[4] Lucretius wrote: "nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas" which is probably closer to "nor is any new pleasure forged by living" than the translation Frampton gives, but the sense is the same: there's no assured pleasure in prolonging life merely for the sake of living. (See Mezentius the Epicurean by Leah Kronenberg (Transactions of the American Philological Association, Volume 135, Number 2, Autumn 2005)

[5] For Spinoza, the mind is "a certain modification of the divine intelligence" companion to and not separate from the body. He says mind and body are made up of the same elemental substance. They are different aspects of the same being and that being is God. (See for example descartes and spinoza, mind and body: the problem of interaction by Daniel Siksay

Hall Caine

In turn-of-the-century NYC the Sunday supplements weren't just devoted to graphic stories and comics.[1] The visual, literary, and performing arts also showed up, including, it hardly need be said, theater (or "theatre" as, then and now, it seems generally to be spelled in the Anglophiliac world). For this reason it's probably not out of the ordinary for the New York Herald's Sunday magazine for October 15, 1905, to have featured a celebrated British writer who had a play running at the New Amsterdam Theatre. The playwright was a prolific author named Hall Caine and he was, as wikipedia tells us, "exceedingly popular." His novels sold better than any of his peers and were thus among the first stories to be translated into the first wave of motion pictures.[2] Search his name in a newspaper archive and you'll be given hundreds of links to book, play, and film reviews, as well as appreciations and biographic sketches of the man.[3] It helped that his life was eventful and his appearance unusually striking. [4]

Here is the cover page of the Herald's feature on Caine.

{Hall Caine, the New York Herald, October 15, 1905; source: NYPL Digital Gallery}

His distinctive face, dress, and posture were a magnet for caricaturists as this page of the New York Times demonstrates.[5]

{Hall Caine Caught by a Caricaturist; Novelist-Dramatist Tells Something About His Method of Play-Making and Says a Few Things Anent Bernard Shaw, New York Times, October 1, 1895}

It looks to me like the artist who made the drawing on the cover page of the Herald's Magazine Section in 1905, drew upon this caricature from Vanity Fair in 1896.

{Hall Caine, Vanity Fair, July 2, 1896; source: wikipedia}

Do you agree?


Caine was notorious for wearing what Americans called knickerbockers and the British called plus fours and, after being elected a representative to the legislature of the Isle of Man, would find himself rebuked for wearing them on the floor of that chamber.[6]

The play which was the subject of the Herald's profile of Caine was The Prodigal Son, which also appeared as a novel of the same name. It opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on September 4, 1905, and closed before the end of October. Like quite a few others of Caine's works, the plot involves a love triangle. Magnus loves a woman who herself loves Magnus's brother, the Progidal. The Progidal marries the woman, takes cruel advantage of his generous-hearted brother, and becomes famous and successful in the eyes of the world. The woman eventually realizes her mistake, and, in the end, the Prodigal comes to a miserable death full of regret for his misdeeds. Caine's habit of reusing plot elements lent itself to parody, as in this treatment by a Punch cartoonist.[7]

{Mr. Hall Caine, in "Why Read at All?" Punch, December 8, 1902, part of a series of cartoons. Others include: Arthur Conan Doyle, William Le Queux, and Robert Hichens.}

Here's a review of the production from the New York Tribune.

{Review: "The Prodigal Son, the New Amsterdam, New York Tribune, September 5, 1905}

Other reviewers were a bit more charmed by the spectacle.[8]

Here's an ad for the production.

{Ad for The Prodigal Son, New York Sun, August 29, 1905}

Part of portrait in oils was painted c. 1898 by R E Morrison.

{source: wikipedia}

This is the New Amsterdam Theatre.

{New Amsterdam Theatre, New York, Detroit Publishing Co., 1905; source: Library of Congress}

----------

Some sources:

Works by Hall Caine in the Internet Archive

Thomas Henry Hall Caine, 1853-1931 on Isle-of-Man dot com.

New-York tribune. (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, September 05, 1905

Some Ideas of Hall Caine, New York Times, December 3, 1904.

WHERE HALL CAINE DREAMS OUT HIS ROMANCES; On His Native Island the famous Manxman Lives Like an Uncrowned King in a Literary Atmosphere of His Own Making, by Bram Stoker, New York Times, September 6, 1908.

Bram Stoker in wikipedia

Hall Caine Caught by a Caricaturist; Novelist-Dramatist Tells Something About His Method of Play-Making and Says a Few Things Anent Bernard Shaw, New York Times, October 1, 1895

GENIUS OF HALL CAINE; Physically the Author, Like Daudet, Is the Man of His Books. HIS INHERITANCE FROM THE BARDS The Isle of Man, Which He Has Seen with Sombre and Grandiose Fancy, Described -- Caine Could Be Its King, New York Times, September 15, 1895

HALL CAINE REBUKED.; Protest Against His Wearing Knickerbockers in House of Keys, New York Times, January 19, 1908

HALL CAINE ON WEALTH TO ROCKEFELLER CLASS; Says It Is a Menace to the Individual and the Nation. HIS FAREWELL TO AMERICA King Edward the Most Popular Man Here Next to Roosevelt -- Kaiser Called a Pagan Monarch, New York Times, October 30, 1905

RECENT FICTION, New York Times, November 19, 1904. Extract from this book review: '"The Prodigal Son" is the Strongest and Most Sincere of Hall Caine's Later Novels. Since "The Manxman" Hall Caine has written nothing so moving in its elements of pathos and tragedy, so plainly marked with the power to search the human heart and reveal its secret springs of strength and weakness, its passion and strife, so sincere and satisfying as his much-heralded story "The Prodigal Son."'

New Concerted Attack on the Fame of SHAKESPEARE; TOLSTOY, Bernard Shaw, Hall Caine and Dr. Bleibtreu assail the Genius and Genuineness of the Bard of the Avon

THOMAS HENRY HALL CAINE in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition. Extract: "THOMAS HENRY HALL CAINE, novelist and dramatist, was born May 14, 1853, on the Isle of Man, of Manx and Cumberland parentage. He was educated at schools in the Isle of Man and at Liverpool. Brought up as an architect, he never followed this profession, but ... became a journalist and was for six years a leader-writer on the Liverpool Mercury. At the invitation of D. G. Rosetti, the poet-painter he went up to London, living with the latter until Rosetti died in 1882. ... His career as a novelist began when "The Shadow of a Crime" ... and real success came with "The Deemster" in 1887. ... "The Prodigal Son" was produced in London, in 1905, scoring a pronounced success. The same play was done in America the fall of the same year, but failed as an artistic or financial success. Despite his activity as a writer, Hall Caine found time to lecture before the Royal Institution in 1892, and to do some extensive traveling. ... His first visit to the United States was in 1895, though he returned in 1898 and in 1906. As ambassador of the Authors' Society he went to Canada to negotiate terms with the Dominion Government with regard to the Canadian Copyright Association, submitting this to the Canadian Cabinet, and receiving for his services the thanks of the Colonial Office. Hall Caine has had a great deal to do with the breakdown of the three volume novel. He is an enthusiastic horseback rider and mountain climber. He lives on the Isle of Man but spends quite a little time in London where he is a member of the National, White Friars, Maccabeans and Authors Clubs."

The Burr McIntosh monthly, Issues 47-53 (Burr McIntosh Publishing Co., 1907)

Public opinion Volume 33 (Public Opinion Co., 1902)

Punch Volume 122 (Punch Publications Ltd., 1902)

Why Read At All?, a portfolio of work from Punch cartoonist Lewis Baumer from 1909-1910, in a blog post by John Adcock.

"THE PRODIGAL SON" PUT ON.; A Large Audience Sees Hall Caine's New Play at Washington WASHINGTON, Aug. 28. -- Hall Caine's new play, "The Prodigal Son," was produced for the first time on any stage tonight at the New National.

----------

Notes:

[1] I've done two earlier posts on the Sunday papers, one on a graphic feature in verse, called Fluffy Ruffles, and the other on comics, particularly the most visually interesting ones (New York Sunday comics in the 90s & aughts). The two are part of a larger series on New York newspapers in general and the New York Herald in particular. The series began with a post exploring photographs of New York's Herald Square in the late 19th and early centuries.

[2] And, versatile as well as prolific, he made some of his own screenplays.

[3] A search for "Hall Caine" in archives of the New York Times yields 850 hits dating from February 6, 1882, to December 2, 1980, with most (507) clustering in the two decades from 1890 to 1910. Here's a Google Ngram showing the relative popularity of Caine, James Barrie, and Kenneth Grahame.



And this one, restricted to the pair of decades from 1890 to 1910, for Caine, Barrie, and Grahame, plus Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad, and Lewis Carroll.



[4] The wikipedia capsule biography is good. Born in 1853, he had roots in Cheshire and the Isle of Man. He earned his living as both draftsman and author, mainly working for the local press in Liverpool. Intellectually, he became a follower first of John Ruskin, then Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Politically, his views were socialist but not revolutionary. Both his intellectual and political inclinations led him also to environmentalism and activist in a movement led by William Morris to save scenic spots and ancient structures. In the summer of 1902, when his novels and memoirs had brought him recognition and a degree of fame, Caine did not let his radical views prevent him from associating with members of the British Establishment and apparently had no qualms about accepting an invitation to join King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra during a visit to Isle of Man. As wikipedia says, "the Queen had enjoyed Caine's Manx novels and Caine was invited to join the royal couple on their yacht and to accompany them on their tour of the island the following day."

[5] Here are some caricatures of the man.

{Drawing from The New Student's Reference Work (1914)}

{Cartoon of Hall Caine by Harry Furniss; source: wikipedia}

[6] HALL CAINE REBUKED.; Protest Against His Wearing Knickerbockers in House of Keys

[7] This appeared in Punch in 1909:



It was part of "The Chantey of the Nations" Punch, June 25, 1902:


[8] See for example "Prodigal Son Review," Newtown Register, September 14, 1905.

Auden's God

A couple of weeks ago we attended the funeral of an aunt. We'd had tea with her maybe a month before, but didn't know she had an aortal aneurysm that could have killed her at any time. We loved her, wish we'd seen more of her, and miss her now.

The celebrant was an Episcopalian priest who didn't know her and didn't pretend to. He conducted a short, dignified, and to me a memorable ceremony. His voice was gently sonorous and his diction precise. He did not declaim but simply spoke, yet the effect, if in no way the act, was as a musical performance, like listening to a string quartet and being carried away by the complex and familiar sounds. I felt dreamy-contemplative, one part of me communally present and the other privately wandering. He spoke the words of the King James version of the Bible, so familiar to him that he did not so much read as render them from memory. And so familiar to me that the words did not convey their usual prosaic meanings but rather, as when hearing a difficult poem, they had a collective, emotional impact more than a commonplace intellectual one.

I listened more attentively when the priest quoted Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. The letter says we are transformed when called into heaven. "All flesh is not the same flesh." As people, beasts, fishes, and birds all differ, "so also," the passage reads, "there is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars." When a person dies, he says, the "natural body" "is raised a spiritual body."[1]

Thinking about the "spiritual body" I recalled a homily once heard at Mass in which the priest said God is eternal, immaterial, without dimension and outside time. This description conforms to Spinoza's definition of a being that is infinite, necessary, uncaused, and indivisible.

W.H. Auden's concept of God was similar. He felt that God as father, lord, or other anthropomorphic descriptors was an artifact of language. We can't comfortably request blessings from Spinoza's God, can't envision such a being in our prayers, can't invoke what's basically indescribable in normal discourse. It followed for Auden, as Spinoza, that the immaterial God for which the anthropomorphized one stands isn't outside us but lies as much within as without. However, where Spinoza said all religion is superstition, Auden found a way to craft belief — and a commitment to religious observance — out of his faith. It mattered to him greatly that it was an act of this God to breathe into his Adam not just life, but consciousness, understanding of time's motions, and the ability to plan, make judgments, and cause things to happen.

Auden called this gift "making, knowing, and judging."[2] He believed that the way to God was through God's human creatures. Although Saint Matthew has Jesus say there are two fundamental commandments, Auden says they are one: "love thy God" (the first) is "like" (meaning identical with) "love thy neighbor" (the second).[3] Auden wrote "If it [i.e., an expression, a poem or other work of art] praises the Creator, it does so indirectly by praising His creatures..."[4] This gift which Auden's God gave humans was a terrible one; not terrible in the sense of wrongly done, but terrible in the sense of unimaginably frightening. This gift — the freedom of humankind to perceive themselves as separate beings, to make individual judgments, to create and to destroy — was once thought to have God-imposed limits, but events of the 20th century, particularly from the rise of Nazism onward, proved this belief to be a false one.

Auden considered this subject more than once, probably most memorably in a poem called Friday's Child.[5] The poem was a tribute to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who was executed by hanging on April 9, 1945, for his efforts to assassinate Hitler. He was one of a very few religious leaders who not only opposed National Socialism but actively worked to subvert it.

In writing about Bonhoeffer Auden concealed in a kind of joke the depth of his feeling about what seems have been a cosmic injustice. Concerning the power that totalitarian states use in order to destroy the lives of millions the poem asks:

What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?

The poem says the God-given human mind (the "self-observed observing Mind") has little skill in using the freedom it possesses:

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

The poem ends with a sorrowful meditation on Good Friday.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

Auden agreed with what Bonhoeffer said: "To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism.., but to be a human being. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world." The awful freedom which humans possess necessarily entails suffering. For Auden, the pain endured by God and humankind is mutual. We have the freedom not to experience this, but he believes we are wrong when we so choose.

These words make Auden seem profoundly pessimistic, but he was not. He believed in laughter, in getting on with life. He recognized that he had a choice between hope and despair and he chose hope and therefore learned to "bless what there is for being:"

That singular command I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?[6]

As Hannah Arendt said of him, his response to "the curse" was a "praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man's condition on this earth and sucks its strength out of the wound." Arendt wrote this as a comment on lines in Auden's poem on W.B. Yeats.[7] Addressing Yeats, Auden makes a request:

With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse.

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

--------

Some sources:

canzoni

"w. h. auden - family ghosts" website by Nicholas Jenkins, Department of English, Stanford University

Auden and Christianity by Arthur C. Kirsch (Yale University Press, 2005)

Auden’s Memorial to Yeats by Katherine Bailey

W. H. AUDEN’S WISDOM, FAITH, AND HUMOR by Walter G. Moss (pdf)

Auden and God by Edward Mendelson, reviewing Auden and Christianity by Arthur Kirsch (pdf)

"Reflection on the Right to Will": Auden's "Canzone"and Arendt's Notes on Willing by SUSANNAH YOUNG-AH GOTTLIEB

"The Quest for Auden" by Austin Warren in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Spring, 1979), pp. 229-248. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27543545

"Auden's Religious Leap" by Justin Replogle in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter - Spring, 1966), pp. 47-75. Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207210 .

Auden and the Limits of Poetry by Alan Jacobs

Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity 2011 April 12,
by Joshua Miller

Regions of sorrow: anxiety and messianism in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford University Press, 2003)

"Auden in the Fifties: Rites of Homage" by Monroe K. Spears in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1961), pp. 375-398. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27540685 .

The Bible Is Dead; Long Live the Bible by Timothy Beal

Auden Explains Real Function of All Ritual published in the April 1, 1944 issue of the Phoenix

Prose: 1939-1948 by W.H. Auden, Vol. 2 (Princeton University Press, 2002)

----------

Notes:

[1] This is I Corinthians 15:39-41, 44. It concludes,

And so it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being.' The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.

[2] "Making, Knowing, and Judging" by W.H. Auden, from The Dyer's Hand, Part IV

[3] Matthew 22:36-40 (King James Version)

Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him,

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

[4] Auden wrote this in The Dyer's Hand ("Making, Knowing, and Judging"). Here is the context:

The impulse to create a work of art is felt when, in certain persons, the passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship or homage, and to be fit homage, this rite must be beautiful. This rite has no magical or idolatrous intention; nothing is expected in return. Nor is it, in a Christian sense, an act of devotion. If it praises the Creator, it does so indirectly by praising His creatures among which may be human notions of the Divine Nature. With God as Redeemer, it has, so far as I can see, little if anything to do.

[5] Here is the whole poem. It's available on a number of web sites. I don't mean to abuse copyright, however, and will remove it if shown that I've put it here improperly.

Friday's Child

(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945)

He told us we were free to choose
But, children as we were, we thought---
"Paternal Love will only use
Force in the last resort

On those too bumptious to repent."
Accustomed to religious dread,
It never crossed our minds He meant
Exactly what He said.

Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves,
But it seems idle to discuss
If anger or compassion leaves
The bigger bangs to us.

What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?

It might be jolly if we felt
Awe at this Universal Man
(When kings were local, people knelt);
Some try to, but who can?

The self-observed observing Mind
We meet when we observe at all
Is not alarming or unkind
But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

Since the analogies are rot
Our senses based belief upon,
We have no means of learning what--
Is really going on,

And must put up with having learned
All proofs or disproofs that we tender
Of His existence are returned
Unopened to the sender.

Now, did He really break the seal
And rise again? We dare not say;
But conscious unbelievers feel
Quite sure of Judgement Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,`
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

[6] This comes from Auden's poem Precious five of 1950.

[7] On this, see my last blog post: insufflation.