Showing posts with label Constance Garnett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Constance Garnett. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

The Garnett Family (4): Richard the Third



Richard Garnett: The White Dragon (1963)


It's strange how important reading the right children's book at just the right time can be.

I'm not sure just what impression Richard Garnett's White Dragon would have on me now if I were encountering it for the first time, but, as it turned out, it had the effect of introducing me to a whole set of fascinating topics which have interested me ever since:


    For more on this, I strongly recommend the following:
    E. K. Chambers. The English Folk-Play. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933.


    E. K. Chambers: The English Folk-Play (1933)


    In the book, the children find the remains of a pantomime dragon, "Old Snap," and are inspired to resurrect an almost forgotten seasonal play in which St. George battles this personification of winter in order to bring life back to the land again.





    Daniel Defoe: A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (Folio Society, 2006)

  1. Daniel Defoe's Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26)

  2. Garnett's protagonist, Mark Rutter, also centre stage in his earlier book The Silver Kingdom, reads a passage from Defoe's fascinating compendium of local gossip and anecdotes - combined with direct observation - about a mysterious 'white worm' which can only be seen at certain times of day on a nearby eminence called the 'Wormell' (or Worm-Hill).



    Richard Garnett: The Silver Kingdom (1957)


    Mark, who is (according to his archaeologist friend from the previous book) a 'born finder', discovers the solution to this mystery by sheer happenstance, and unearths another dragon to set alongside Old Snap.


    Sure enough, the second 'white dragon' in the book turns out to be a chalk figure cut into the hillside. Unlike the more familiar examples, where the turf has to be recut periodically to keep them visible, the 'white worme' of the Wormell has been made out of chalk packed into man-made ditches on this artificial eminence. As a result, it proves possible to re-establish its long-overgrown contours by the simple expedient of drilling small holes in the hillside.



    Graham Oakley: Cover illustration (1963)


    The above illustration shows the contours of the chalk figure as it is eventually revealed. Mark spots it because the snow melts more slowly on the chalk than the earth of the hill, so he is able to photograph its momentarily revealed shape one evening during the thaw: a 'born finder', indeed!





    Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne: Der Winter (1614)

  3. Ice yachting

  4. Mark's desire to construct an ice yacht for his cousin Tom, a keen skater injured in a road accident years before, and now forced to go everywhere on crutches, forms most of the actual narrative of the book.

    This was the era of the can-do hero, when a set of enterprising boys and girls could easily solve a cipher, reconstruct an old building, start an archaeological dig, or - as in this case - master the mechanics of ice-yachting.

    It's strangely inspiring to read about, however little it may resemble the pathetic constructions of cardboard and plastic which were all I and my contemporaries could achieve.



    Richard Garnett: The White Dragon (1963)


    The original cover of the hardback edition, above, shows the success that attends their efforts. 'The White Dragon' and 'The Red Knight' are the names of the two yachts they build out of a few old planks and some leftover ice-skates provided by the local junkshop owner.


    This is more of a peripheral reference in the book, but a 'white dragon' in mahjong is a totally blank tile. It's named from the fact that such a sheet of white can represent a white dragon hiding on a field of snow - or nothing at all, depending on how you interpret it.



    The book concludes with the gift to Mark from his friends of a blank mahjong tile, the fourth (and last) dragon in the story. When asked what the difference is between a white dragon and a blank tile, he replies: "All the difference in the world." Those, rather appropriately, are the last words of the text.





Julian Bell: Richard Garnett (1992)


As you'll have deduced from the title of my blogpost, the author of The White Dragon, Richard Garnett (1923-2013), was the third writer of that name, in direct line of descent from Richard Garnett the Philologist (1789-1850), and Richard Garnett the writer and editor (1835-1906). He was the grandson of Edward and Constance Garnett, and the son of David and Ray Garnett.

Despite - or perhaps because of - the weight of this family legacy, he was a pretty competent and multi-faceted character in his own right.

As well as an author of children's books (his only other published work in this vein, the historical novel Jack of Dover, is pictured below), he was also an editor and publisher.



Richard Garnett: Jack of Dover (1966)


This is his history of the firm that he mainly worked for, Rupert Hart-Davis, co-founded by his father, David Garnett:



Nicolas Barker has this to say of his skills as a publisher in his 2013 Independent obituary:
Garnett was ... [Rupert Hart-Davis]'s production manager, and soon an expert editor as well. Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet, another bestseller, and the three-volume autobiography of Lady Diana Cooper (Hart-Davis's aunt), exercised both skills. Laurence Whistler's books spurred him to become a glass-engraver. His nautical experience came to the fore with the Mariner's Library of sea classics ... But the heart of the firm lay not in these but in scholarly but readable books such as Leon Edel's five-volume life of Henry James, Allan Wade's Letters of W. B. Yeats and Peter Fleming's imperial sagas. All of these achieved their reputation thanks to the joint expertise of Garnett and Hart-Davis. Not for nothing did one of their admiring beneficiaries call the firm "the university of Soho Square".

But commercial success did not follow. Three times the firm had to be bailed out. Control passed first to Heinemann, then Harcourt Brace and finally to Granada. Hart-Davis himself left in 1963; three years later the firm was merged with MacGibbon & Kee and finally Garnett was sacked. As he left, a water-pipe burst in the attic, leaving him to say "Après moi le déluge". ... Fortunately, Macmillan was in need of just his talents, to supervise copy-editing and proof-correction. He soon became indispensable ... Gerald Durrell's books owed much to his editing, which verged on authorial, as did the natural history books of Bernard Heuvelmans.
Barker sees his two greatest achievements as:
  1. his 1991 biography of his grandmother, Constance Garnett:


  2. Richard Garnett: Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (1991)


  3. his design work for The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn et al., 16 parts in 34 volumes (Princeton University Press, 1969-2002):


  4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (1983)


That seems as good a place as any to conclude my survey of this unusually talented family of writers and artists.

David "Bunny" Garnett had six children in all. Two sons - including Richard himself - with his first wife Rachel "Ray" Marshall (1891–1940); and four daughters with Angelica (1918–2012). The eldest of these, Amaryllis Virginia Garnett (1943–1973) was an actress who had a small part in Harold Pinter's film adaptation of The Go-Between (1970). She drowned in the Thames, aged 29 - whether by accident or suicide is unclear.

Richard Garnett himself died leaving two sons, but whether or not either of them - or their own children, for that matter - have literary ambitions remains beyond the grasp of that (would-be) fount of all knowledge, wikipedia.



Joseph Losey, dir.: The Go-Between (1971)

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."


Tuesday, January 01, 2019

The Garnett Family (1): Richard, Edward et al.



Sir Leslie Ward: Richard Garnett (1895)


They certainly were a remarkable clan. And what better way to start off the New Year than with some bibliographical reflections on all these Garnetts, young and old?

I'm in the rather unusual position of having encountered the eldest of them first, in multiple adolescent readings and rereadings of Richard Garnett's entertaining short story collection The Twilight of the Gods (1888).



Richard Garnett: The Twilight of the Gods (1888)


Let's start with him, then. Richard Garnett (1835-1906) was, in the succinct words of his wikipedia entry, "a scholar, librarian, biographer and poet" - distinguished in each of those fields. Mainly, though, he spent half a century, from 1851 to 1899, working in the Reading Room of the British Museum, first as an assistant, and finally in the top job as "keeper of printed books."



Carolyn A. Heilbrun: The Garnett Family (1961)


Mind you, this choice of career was already a bit of a family affair. His father, also called Richard Garnett (1789-1850), also worked in the British Museum. His main distinction was as a philologist, though he also penned some attacks on the then-current Roman Catholic theory of miracles.

So what's so entertaining about The Twilight of the Gods? T. E. Lawrence wrote of it, in his preface to the 1924 edition:
The scholarship in these tales is beautiful: so deep, so unobtrusive, so easy and exact ... It wants no learning to enjoy the Twilight of the Gods; but the more learning you have, the more odd corners and hidden delights you will find in it.

The Gods are the main element. Poisons, the science of toxins, are perhaps third element. Second place, I think, falls to black magic. Here again, so far as my competence extends, Dr. Garnett is serious. His spells are real, his sorcery accurate, according to the best dark-age models. His curious mind must have found another escape from the reading-desk in the attempts of our ancestors to see through the veil of flesh, downwards.
"It will be a tough business," observed the sorcerer. "It will require fumigations."
"Yes," said the bishop, "and suffumigations."
"Aloes and mastic," advised the sorcerer.
"Aye," assented the bishop, "and red sanders."
"We must call in Primeumaton," said the warlock.
"Clearly," said the bishop, "and Amioram."
"Triangles," said the sorcerer.
"Pentacles," said the bishop.
"In the hour of Methon," said the sorcerer.
"I should have thought Tafrac," suggested the bishop, "but I defer to your better judgment."
"I can have the blood of a goat?" queried the wizard.
"Yes," said the bishop, "and of a monkey also."
"Does your Lordship think that one might venture to go so far as a little unweaned child?"
"If absolutely necessary," said the bishop.
"I am delighted to find such liberality of sentiment on your Lordship’s part," said the sorcerer. "Your Lordship is evidently of the profession."
It seems to me that the learned Doctor would have been in some danger, too, if the nineteenth century had been the ninth or the seventeenth.
"Yet they say it never sold," was Lawrence's reluctant conclusion. It has always remained a bit of a secret vice for many readers: a complex set of stories which, in aggregate, emphasise all the untrodden byways of the Greek and Roman classics: the bits forbidden to public schoolboys, who might find them just a bit too interesting.



Peter Koch: Map of Poictesme (1898)


As for their legacy, I think it's pretty obvious that James Branch Cabell must have read them. His imaginary kingdom of Poictesme, the setting for such works as Jurgen (1919) and Figures of Earth (1921) is not dissimilar in style or attitude (though more self-consciously erotic, certainly). They no doubt influenced Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft, too - a heritage of the comic fantasy narrative which culminates in contemporary masters such as Terry Pratchett and Jack Vance.



Richard Garnett, ed.: Original Poetry by Victor & Cazire (1898)


The influence of Richard Garnett's stories at the time can be seen directly in Kenneth Grahame, Lord Dunsany, and a number of other writers who came to prominence in the 1890s. As for his other writings - his rich crop of editions of Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock, and a host of other authors, his translations from myriad languages, and his own original poetry - these have faded with time, but The Twilight of the Gods will, I think it's safe to say, continue to be read.



George Jefferson: Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature (1982)


As for the rather surprising literary dynasty he founded, the first truly notable member of it is undoubtedly his son, Edward Garnett (1868-1937), famous not so much in his own right, as for his Max Perkins-like influence on an impressive set of early twentieth century geniuses: D. H. Lawrence, certainly, but also Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, John Galsworthy, T. E. Lawrence, and Edward Thomas. Like Perkins, he was the reader for an important publishing house (first T. Fisher Unwin, then Gerald Duckworth and Company, and finally Jonathan Cape), but his efforts on behalf of 'his' authors went far beyond this.



In retrospect, however, his reputation as a kingmaker has been somewhat dwarfed by that of his wife, Constance Garnett (1861-1946), whose translations of Russian literature are still in common use; as well as his son, writer and ocasional Bloomsburyite David Garnett (1892–1981).

I've been collecting their respective works for some time now, as part of my affinity for Edwardian writing generally, I suppose - certainly for its leading lights: Chekhov, Conrad, Kipling, Mansfield, Masefield, Wells and Woolf. I don't think I can do all those other Garnetts justice in one blogpost, though, so I'll talk about Constance and David in separate posts.

In other words, watch this space!



Richard Garnett: The Twilight of the Gods (1926)

Richard Garnett
(1835-1906)


  1. Garnett, Richard. The Twilight of the Gods. 1888. Rev. ed. 1903. Introduction by T. E. Lawrence. The Week-End Library. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head Ltd., 1927.

  2. Garnett, Richard. The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales. 1888. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947.

  3. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. The Garnett Family: The History of a Literary Family. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1961.

  4. Jefferson, George. Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.