Showing posts with label Lawrence Durrell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lawrence Durrell. Show all posts

Sunday, June 30, 2019

Islomanes (1): Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia



Alberto Manguel & Gianni Guadalupi: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980)

'Now,' he said as we left the bridge and walked into Anglesey, 'now you are like Robinson Crusoe, you are on your island. How should you like to live in that house all the year round, winter and summer?' he said pointing at a white house on a little rock island in the straits. I said I thought there might be worse places. 'They live like fighting cocks there,' winked the old man with the merry twinkle in his eye and his tall white hat nodding from side to side. 'They have got a weir there and they catch all the fish.'
- Kilvert’s Diary: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, 1 January 1870 - 13 March 1879. 3 vols. Ed. William Plomer. 1938 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977): I: 360.


Walter de la Mare: Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (1930)


The fascination of islands and island living is something a great many people have written about. English poet and whimsical anthologist Walter de la Mare devoted an entire book to the subject, and of course that old reprobate Lawrence Durrell also had a good deal to say on the subject as well:



Lawrence Durrell: Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953)

Somewhere among the notebooks of Gideon I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. These are people, Gideon used to say, by way of explanation, who find islands somehow irresistible. We islomanes, says Gideon, are the direct descendants of the Atlanteans, and it is toward the lost Atlantis that our subconscious is drawn. This means that we find islands irresistible.
― Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes (1953)
He went on to say, in a letter to a friend, that 'Islomania is a rare affliction of spirit. There are people who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are in a little world surrounded by sea fills them with an indescribable intoxication.'


One of my students, Carlota, comes from the Canary Islands. She tells me that it sometimes seems to her as if the whole of New Zealand were enclosed inside a bubble – 'like a floating island.'
'I know, because I'm from an island too,' she goes on. Hers, though, was first settled by a blue-eyed, fair-haired race ('perhaps Vikings') before the Spanish arrived to wipe them all out.
'Atlanteans?' I ask. She agrees that many people think so. She's a little sceptical, though.
'A floating island.' She describes it like something out of Jules Verne: a huge transparent membrane, sealing us off from the pressures of the world outside. Or perhaps a better comparison might be with José Saramago's 1986 novel The Stone Raft, where the whole Iberian peninsula breaks off from Europe and floats into the Atlantic Ocean, splitting apart, once and for all, the pillars of Hercules.
- Jack Ross, "The Stokes Point Pillars." 11 Views of Auckland. Edited by Jack Ross & Grant Duncan. Social and Cultural Studies, 10 (Auckland: Massey University, 2010): 155.
Carlota's islands, the Canaries, are a small archipelago of seven islands situated 100 kilometres off the coast of Morocco. By contrast, our two main islands, Te Ika a Māui and Te Waipounamu - complemented by 600-odd others - are pretty much on their own: 2,000 km east of Australia and 1,000 km south of New Caledonia. 'Next stop Antarctica,' as they say.



Janet Frame: To the Is-land (1982)


One more quote before we get going properly:
When the New Zealand writer Janet Frame was 7, she found in her school reader an adventure story, 'To the Island,' that she read as 'To the Is-land.' Though corrected by her teacher, she accepted the word thereafter as meaning what it said, the Land of Is, not the Was-Land, not the Future. In this first volume of her autobiography, which she calls 'a selection of views of the Is-Land,' it is the place of her childhood and adolescence.
Helen Bevington, 'The Girl from New Zealand.' New York Times (21 November, 1982)
All of which should serve to prepare us for the actual subject of this post, the strange utopian romance Islandia (1942), by eccentric American lawyer Austin Tappan Wright:



Austin Tappan Wright: Islandia (1942)


Wright had been dead for eleven years when his immense novel finally saw the light of day. Not that the publishers of the day were prepared to contemplate the publication of the whole thing. In her afterword to the 2001 paperback edition, his daughter Sylvia explains that this 1,000-page tome 'represents only a part of the total Islandia papers.'
The original novel, containing close to six hundred thousand words, was so vast as to be virtually unpublishable, particularly during a wartime paper shortage. It was in this form, however, a manuscript contained in seven thick spring binders, too heavy for me to carry by myself, that it was accepted by the publishers.
- Sylvia Wright Mitarachi, 'Afterword.' In Austin Tappan Wright. Islandia. Ed. Mark Saxton, Margaret Garrad Wright & Sylvia Wright. 1942. Introduction by John Silbersack (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2001): 1015.


So what got left out? Sylvia Wright goes on:
With the intelligent and sensitive help of Mark Saxton, then an editor of Farrar & Rhinehart, I cut the [twenty-three hundred pages of the] original novel by about a third. This is its form today. As I indicated in a note in the original edition, my father knew the exact lineaments of every scene John Lang saw, down to its geological causes, and enjoyed describing such things. Much of the cutting was of this sort of leisurely observation. Also, as Mr. Basil Davenport pointed out in his essay on the Islandia papers, published as a companion volume to the novel, my father's writing became more succinctly his own as he went on. The bulk of the cutting, therefore, was in the early part of the book. [1016]


Austin Tappan Wright: Islandia (2006)

It seems rather a pity that the decision was taken to include this essay by Basil Davenport as part of the original publication, rather than more of the ancillary papers associated with the novel itself:
My father knew the country so well because he had considered it and travelled around it in so many guises. In one, he constructed its history, a scholarly work entitled Islandia: History and Description, by M. Jean Perier, whom readers of the novel will recognize as the first French consul to Islandia.
This document, of about 135,000 words, is the major part of the remainder of the unpublished Islandia papers. In addition, there are a large number of appendices to the history, including a glossary of the Islandian language; a bibliography; several tables of population; a gazeteer of the provinces with a history of each; tables of viceroys, judges, premiers, etc.; a complete historical peerage; notes of the calendar and climate; and a few specimens of Islandian literature. There are also nineteen maps, one geological. To use Leonard Bacon's phrase from the introduction he wrote to the first publication, here one discovers, 'the very Devonian outcrop of Never Never country.' [1016]


John K. Wright: Map of Islandia


So what is the book itself like? That phrase 'never never country,' with its echoes of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, implies a kind of fantasy world, with fairies and elves and other mythological trappings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Islandia is a fully fleshed-out, realistic fantasy world with politics, history, and - above all - human relationships to the fore.

Ursula K. Le Guin, a big fan of the book, once wrote that she and her family was Islandia-philes in the same way as a later generation would be Tolkien-freaks. They quoted from it, argued over details, and generally lived through its pages.

So, it seems, did the entire Wright family. Austin's brother John, a professional geographer, contributed the splendid topographical map pictured above to the enterprise, and his daughter Sylvia recalls it having been an inextricable part of her childhood:
We always knew about Islandia, although apparently my father did not talk very much about it outside the family. We had ideas of what it looked like, from comments like, 'This view looks like Islandia.' Our boat was called Aspara, the Islandian word for seagull. [1019-20]
It's in this same section of her afterword that she explains how the word should be pronounced: 'Aye-landia' - rather than 'Iz-landia' or 'Ee-landia':
My father originated Islandia as 'my island' when he was a boy. This is why the name is the only exception to the rule that there are no silent letters in the Islandian language.


Interestingly, this genre of imaginary Islandian landscapes appears to be alive and well in the alternate Never-never world of Facebook. There are a number of pages devoted to the subject (though it is quite easy to confuse it with Ísland, Íslendingur - Iceland, Icelandic - especially when Islandia happens to be the word for "Iceland" in Spanish and various other languages).



It's important to emphasise the slightly ponderous - though very serviceable - nature of Wright's plotting and prose generally. Islandia is a perfectly readable novel, though its interests are not quite those of the 1920s, when it was written.



It bears only a slight resemblance to a work such as outsider artist Henry Darger's 15,000 page magnum opus The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Darger's work is unpublished, and will probably remain so, though extracts have appeared in various catalogues as well as in Jessica Yu's wonderful 2004 documentary about his life, also entitled (what else?) In the Realms of the Unreal.

A great deal of Wright's text, by contrast, is devoted to a rather wistful, Edwardian-flavoured exploration of the nature of love, which the Islandians divide into four separate concepts:
  1. alia: love of place and family land and lineage
  2. amia: love of friends
  3. ania: desire for marriage and commitment
  4. apia: sexual attraction
John Lang, the hero, experiences all of these in the course of the narrative, and it is this aspect of the book which is referred to specifically in Ursula Le Guin's almost equally ambitious fantasy work Always Coming Home (1985), devoted to the future anthropology of the Kesh, inhabitants of the land now known as Northern California (and now available in an expanded, 'definitive' edition through the Library of America):



Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home (1985 / 2019)


Curiously enough, Islandia is not really set on an island - in the strictest sense of the term, at any rate. The country of Islandia is merely the tip of the immense 'semi-continent' of Karain, whose location is as elusive as that of the lost continent of Atlantis.



Johnny Pez: Karain Continent, 1907 (2006)


Sylvia Wright (as usual) sums up the evidence judiciously, if inconclusively:
Elmer Davis, and other writers, decided that Islandia is in the South Pacific. Both Lang and Perier assume that everyone knows where the country is, so neither mentions latitude and longitude. M. Perier does say, however, that the Karain subcontinent is not on the Spanish side of the Pope's line, which I have been told by so eminent an authority as Dr. John K. Wright, former head of the American Geographical Society, means that Islandia cannot be in the Pacific proper. Dr. Wright has studied the situation. He also feels that the Atlantic is too crowded.


For those of you unfamiliar with the expression, the 'Pope's line' refers to an imaginary line drawn by Pope Alessandro Borgia in 1493 (and subsequently shifted slightly in 1494) which divided up the entire world into (respectively) the Spanish and Portuguese spheres of interest.

The idea was to keep the Spanish out of the Portuguese discoveries in the far East, and the Portuguese out of the Spanish discoveries in the Americas. However, as you'll observe, the existence of one Portuguese-speaking country in Latin America - Brazil - is due largely to this shifting of the lines. Moreover, as you'll see from the image below, any line drawn on a sphere such as the earth must come, literally, full circle, so considerable latitude for debate remained even after this apparently 'definitive' decision had been reached.



There's an indescribable atmosphere to the slow unfolding of Wright's long tale which makes it immensely beguiling to read. I'm on my second run-through myself, and am finding it quite as attractive as the first time round. What's more, I'm fascinated to discover that the entire text is finally available online, through the good offices of Harvard University Library.



Here's what you'll see if you click on the link above. You can (if you wish) read the typescript of the entire novel there, without the 1942 cuts, as well as examining in detail the text of M. Jean Perier's comprehensive guidebook Islandia: History and Description.



Like all utopias, however, Wright's has its fly in the ointment. Isolationist Islandia is unquestionably dominated by white people. The 'natives' to the south are regarded by the Islandians with a certain disdain (not unmixed with fear). As described, in fact, the continent of Karain sounds a lot more like South Africa than, say, Australia, with which it would otherwise tempting to identify it.

Is it a racist state? Certainly it betrays many of the characteristics of its era. Wright describes the 'blacks' and 'mulattos' who surround Islandia with the patronising attitudes of his time. He is, moreover, careful to make it clear that the people he is interested in originated somewhere in Northern Europe. They sound quite a bit like Icelanders, in fact - stubbornly independent and proudly different - albeit displaced from the North to the South of the globe.

Hard though he tries to sideline it, this is one of the features of his work which makes it difficult for me to embrace it quite so wholeheartedly as Ursula Le Guin and all of its other fans. It also explains why this constitutes only part one of my consideration of Islomania.

In part two I'd like to look further - at the risk of being accused of reductionism - into this political dimension of such 'pure' creations of the imagination. It is with a certain discomfort that many New Zealanders, myself included, have observed the conscious transformation of our country into an ersatz simulacrum of Tolkien's Middle-earth over the last couple of decades. The fact that so many Māori were cast as Orcs (albeit with a leavening of whining Dickensian cockneys), while the Elvish roles were reserved for willowy Europeans, was, to say the least, a trifle disconcerting.



Let's not romanticise this island-mania too much, then. One of the important points about islands is that they are more easily policed and kept under control than other parts of the earth - witness the infamous rounding-up of the aboriginal population of Tasmania: a pointless enterprise in other parts of that vast, turbulent continent.

The Celtic New Zealand hpothesis does not exist in a vaccuum. Many of us would like to rewrite the history of our world to our own satisfaction, leaving certain key aspects out - islomania, in its more extreme forms, could be seen to lend itself awfully easily to ethnic cleansing ...

For the moment, though, I would like to emphasise the immense charm and complexity of Wright's Islandia. Little could be said to happen in the novel, but then it exists really to provide a setting for his own sense of displacement and Heimweh: that belief we all share that there is a true home for us, somewhere, if only we could find it - if not in the real world, than in memory, or (better) still, the realms of the imagination.

That, it seems to me, is at the heart of this thing called Islomania.



Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home (1985)



Friday, January 14, 2011

Finds: The Ocean of Story

Penzer, N. M., ed. The Ocean of Story: Being C. H. Tawney’s Translation of Somadeva’s Kathā Sarit Sāgara (or Ocean of Streams of Story). 1880-84. 10 vols. 1924. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968.
In 1974 Lawrence Durrell published a novel entitled Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness, the first volume of his ‘Avignon Quintet’ (1974-84). When I first read it (sometime in the late seventies, I suppose), I was very struck by a passage where a character named Robin Sutcliffe went ‘[w]andering in the older part of the town, near the market’:
I found a few barrowloads of books for sale, among them a very old life of Petrarch (MDCC LXXXII) which I riffled and browsed through in the public gardens of Doms ... I was not so hard-hearted as not to feel a quickening of sympathy at the words of the old anonymous biographer of the poet ...
Le Lundi de la Semaine Sainte, à six heures du matin, Pétrarque vit à Avignon, dans l’église des Réligieuses de Sainte-Claire une jeune femme dont la robe verte était parsemée de violettes. Sa beauté le frappa. C’était Laure.
- Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness, 1974 (London: Faber, 1976): 228-30.
I'd translate the passage roughly as follows:
On Monday of Holy Week, at six o'clock in the morning, Petrarch saw at Avignon, in the Church of the Nuns of Saint Claire, a young woman whose green dress was strewn with violets. Her beauty struck him. It was Laura.
I wondered at the time if Durrell had made up the passage himself, so well did it seem to fit the circumstances of his novel (not least the curious coincidence of Laura’s having been a ‘de Sade’, admittedly only by marriage).
Lawrence Durrell: Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness (1974)
Ten or so years later, in 1990, I was browsing on the bookstall run by my friend Gus Maclean in the basement of the David Hume Tower of the University of Edinburgh, when I came across a small book roughly bound in blue paper, with a tiny label, ‘Vie de Pétrarque’, pasted on its spine. The price was modest, only a pound. It was more from a feeling of serendipity than with any real expectation of success that I started to leaf through it (the pages which had been cut, at any rate), looking for Durrell’s paragraph. But there it was! On pp. 20-21:
Le lundi de la semaine-sainte, à six heures du matin, Pétrarque vit à Avignon, dans l’église des religieuses de Sainte-Claire, une jeune femme dont la robe verte était parsemée de violettes. Sa beauté le frappa: c’était Laure.
The punctuation was a bit different – as was the date – and yet the wording was the same. The book I had purchased was described on its title-page as:
Vie de Pétrarque, Publiée par l’Athénée de Vaucluse, Augmentée de la première traduction qui ait parut en Français, de la Lettre adressée à la Posterité par ce Poète célèbre: Avec la liste des Souscripteurs qui ont concouru à lui faire ériger un Monument à Vaucluse, le jour seculaire de sa naissance, 20 Juillet 1804, 1er Thermidor an 12. Avignon: Chez Me. Ve. Seguin, 1804. [Life of Petrarch, Published by the Athenaeum of Vaucluse, Augmented by the first translation to appear in French of the Letter addressed to Posterity by the celebrated Poet: With the list of subscribers who have agreed to build a monument to him at Vaucluse, on the anniversary of his birth, 20th July, 1804, 1st Thermidor, Year 12. Avignon: Available at M. V. Seguin's, 1804.]
The French Revolutionary dates ("1st Thermidor, Year 12") gave an extra touch of interest - Napoleon cancelled the new calendar a couple of years later, in 1806 - but the important point was that the anonymous preface to the book explained that this life had been composed by a certain ‘Abbé Roman’, who would undoubtedly have been pressed to join their literary society if he had not already been dead at the date of its foundation, and that ‘various slight blemishes, including a false date of birth for the Italian poet, and some printing errors, have been corrected ... We have also suppressed certain passages which seemed to impede the course of the narrative with digressions which were foreign to it’ (pp.v-vi, my translation). Perhaps these ‘slight blemishes’ included the rather more effective punctuation attributed to the passage by Durrell. The coincidence is, admittedly, rather a trivial one. After all, how many eighteenth-century Lives of the poet Petrarch in French can there be? From my point of view, though, the point is that I was actually thinking of the passage in Durrell’s novel when I made my own find. I learnt one more thing from my new book. It included a footnote, certifying the precision of the date – ‘Cette époque est sûre, nous la tenons de Pétrarque’ [this date is certain, we have it from Petrarch] – with an allusion to his sonnet, which I had never read before, beginning: ‘Voglia mi sprona, Amor mi guida et scorge’:
Vertute, Honor, Bellezza, atto gentile, dolci parole ai be’ rami m’àn giunto ove soavemente il cor s’invesca. Mille trecento ventisette, a punto su l’ora prima, il dí sesto d’aprile, nel laberinto intrai, né veggio ond’esca.
- Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Gianfranco Contini, 3rd ed. (Torino: Einaudi, 1968): 272.
[Virtue, Honour, Beauty, a noble manner, soft words attached me to those laurel branches where my heart was so easily ensnared. In 1327, at the hour of Prime, on the 6th of April, I entered the labyrinth, nor can I see any way out.]
The Ocean of Story: Being C. H. Tawney’s Translation of Somadeva’s Kathā Sarit Sāgara (or Ocean of Streams of Story), 1880-84. Edited with Introduction, Fresh Explanatory Notes and Terminal Essay by N. M. Penzer, 10 vols, 1924 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968)
As an undergraduate, I was always looking for a quiet place to study in Auckland University Library. One of my favourite haunts was down on the first floor where they stored all the fairytale and folklore books. A complete ten-volume set of Somadeva's Ocean of the Streams of Story was among them, and I used to admire it with a kind of hopeless longing, never dreaming I'd one day own a copy myself. I have to say that (at the time) it defeated my attempts to read it, though I had rather more success with their beautiful 12-volume "library edition" of Burton's Arabian Nights (albeit with all the really saucy bits cut out ...) There was just something so delightful in the idea of an Ocean into which all the streams of story flowed which kept it in my mind, though (and, apparently, Salman Rushdie's. His 1990 children's book Haroun and the Sea of Stories is clearly inspired by Somadeva's title). The only commentator I could find who had an opinion on the work itself, though, was that indefatigable story-ophile John Barth, who included a brief essay called "The Ocean of Story" in his non-fiction collection The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction, 1984 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997): 84-90 (coincidentally, he too first encountered the work on the shelves of a University Library). In 2002, I was travelling in India with my friend, the filmmaker Gabriel White. His parents had a fairly extensive network of friends there, and so, when we got to Bangalore, we had the advice and assistance of Pad and Meera Padmanabhan on what to visit in the neighbourhood. Meera shared my love of books, and guided us to a particularly rewarding little shop somewhere near the city centre. This is what I wrote in my diary at the time:
Wednesday, January 23
WHAT MY DAD CAN’T HAVE! [girl on bike] IT’S MINE!
Success! Mine at last! For 7500 rupees (– 1500 cash discount) + 450 postage (roughly $NZ300), at Premier books, The Ocean of Story – all 10 vols – still sealed in plastic – comes into my possession. Just in last month – a day later would have been too late – an American customer after it … Hurrah! For me, this makes the whole trip worthwhile. I’ve been searching for over a decade, & yet somehow I knew that in a little shop, down a side-street, somewhere in India, I would find it. •
It was waiting for me Kathā Sarit Sāgara, Ocean of the Streams of Story, saying: At this hour, 7.45 p.m. of the 31st day of travel (30 still to go) between a camera & a dosa in the moonlight (night falls faster here) you open me forever
Only it wasn't quite so simple as that. Ten volumes of ponderous folklore add up to a less than agreeable travelling companion, so I decided that the only practical thing was to ask the shopkeeper to post it back to New Zealand for me. Why not do it yourself, you ask? Well, mainly because I'd read a brief account in the Lonely Planet India describing exactly how one has to package things there to satisfy the Customs authorities (it involved leaving one end open for inspection, easily removable wax seals, and various other esoteric details). Better, I thought, to leave it to someone who did it every day. You can't imagine how frustrating it was to get home from my trip and sit there waiting for my parcel to arrive. It took months! Then one parcel, with five volumes inside, turned up. After that the wait seemed to stretch into eternity. When it finally did arrive it was in a most deplorable state, with a little note specifying that it had had to be repackaged en route. Thus:
This was the address the guy had written on it:
Never mind. I immediately set to work reading the massive tomes. I guess I'd been subconsciously expecting it to be as tedious as various other works of ancient Indian fiction I'd embarked on (The Panchatantra, for instance), but actually it turned out - after one had struggled through a rather ponderous mythological introduction - to be extremely entertaining. One surprise was just how carnal and unedifying most of the stories were: getting rich and getting laid (not necessarily in that order) seemed to be the only constant preoccupations of its many protagonists. It resembled the Decameron far more than the Buddhist Jātaka stories, with which I'd vaguely been associating it in my mind. There are, mind you, other translations you can resort to if the sight of those ten large volumes still fills you with dread. They were compiled (though not translated) by Norman Penzer, Burton's bibliographer, in conscious imitation of the latter's classic ten-volume translation of the Arabian Nights, and have been padded out with a huge amount of random folklorist information and annotation. There's a perfectly adequate selection available through the Penguin Classics:
Somadeva. Tales from the Kathāsaritsāgara. Trans. Arshia Sattar. Foreword by Wendy Doniger. 1994. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.
Besides that, the only other complete translation I can recommend is Nalini Balbir's French one, available through the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. It lacks Penzer's maniacal annotations, but is far more up-to-date (and probably far more accurate, I'd imagine). It's also a lot more compact.
Somadeva. Océan des rivières de contes. Ed. Nalini Balbir, with Mildrède Besnard, Lucien Billoux, Sylvain Brocquet, Colette Caillat, Christine Chojnacki, Jean Fezas & Jean-Pierre Osier. Traduction des ‘Contes du Vampire’ par Louis & Marie-Simone Renou, 1963. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 438. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
For me, though, there will only ever be one Ocean of Story. It seized hold of me long before I ever got to India. Since entering that labyrinth, I no longer even aspire to finding a way out ...