Finds: A Japanese Doll

Yaegaki-hime doll (purchased 7/4/24)
photograph by Bronwyn Lloyd

This doll, which I found a few days ago in a Vintage shop, is clearly a rather distressed version of the one in the auctioneer's picture below. As you can see, while her showcase is intact, it appears to have suffered a little water-damage at some point. I guess what attracted me to her most was the curious white-fur-lined horned helmet she was carrying, though.

Yaegaki-hime doll in showcase (late 20th century)

Nor did I realise that the pale cardboard backdrop (in my one - not the one above) was supposed to represent falling snow.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Yaegaki-hime (1852)

This nineteenth-century print gives a better idea of the story, I think. As the description puts it:

In one of the most beautiful prints in the series, an elegantly dressed young lady dances with ghostly fox spirits while holding a samurai helmet above her head. She is Yaegaki-hime, heroine of the popular kabuki play Japan's Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety ... The play was originally written for the puppet theater and was first performed in Osaka in 1766; it debuted as a kabuki play in Edo in 1776. The story, which takes place on the shores of Lake Suwa ... is a fictionalized version of the real-life rivalry between the Takeda and Uesugi clans during the sixteenth century.

Brussels Yaegaki-kai: Yaegaki-hime (2011)

But who exactly is she, and what is she doing with that helmet?

Yaegaki is torn by conflicting loyalties to her father, Nagao Kenshin, and her beloved fiancé, Takeda Katsuyori, who has come in secret to the Nagao mansion to recover an heirloom helmet stolen by Yaegaki's father. In the scene known as the 'Fox Fires in the Inner Garden' ... Yaegaki removes the helmet, which is decorated with long white hair, from the shrine in her father's garden where it has been kept. The God of Suwa, who wants the helmet returned to its rightful owners, sends fox spirits as his messengers to help and guide Yaegaki. By following the footsteps of foxes over the ice, she will be able to make a safe crossing over frozen Lake Suwa and deliver the helmet to Katsuyori.

Brussels Yaegaki-kai: Yaegaki-hime (2011)

In her fascinating online article "Identifying 'Geisha Doll' Types," Dr. Judy Shoaf lists the following set of distinguishing motifs, under the general category of "Dance or theater roles":

Judy Shoaf: Yaegaki-Hime, a Kabuki role

Woman with helmet: Yaegaki-Hime

A princess (hime) with a silvery crown in her hair. She holds a horned helmet with a tuft of long white hair trailing from it; foxes may also figure in the design in some way. This is the heroine of the play Honcho Nijushiko, set in the 15th [sic.] century. She carries the precious helmet across a frozen lake, with the help of spirit-foxes, to rescue it and also her lover.

So, while the doll I found yesterday is a very different version of the figure, the presence of a horned Samurai helmet decorated with long white hair is quite sufficient to identify it.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Yaegaki-hime (1852)

•

Burmese String Puppet (purchased 25/5/22)
photograph by Bronwyn Lloyd

So now that I know that, what do I do? Why all this detail about a dusty old Japanese doll, found lurking in the corner of an SPCA shop?

I guess mainly because it's fairly typical of the little knick-knacks I've picked up from time to time to decorate my study.

The Japanese doll, Yaegaki-hime, is particularly attractive to me, especially now that I know who she is. She won't stop moving, for one thing: the little dangling metal strips of her headdress keep on vibrating, whether there's any movement outside to provoke it or not. And the whole subject of spirit-foxes, kitsune, in Japanese folklore also greatly appeals to me.

In fact, I can't recall coming across an object that interested me so much since Bronwyn and I found an ornate Burmese puppet - pictured above - in a Northland Hospice Shop, together with a pair of twin male-female marionettes from Rajasthan.

Burmese puppet

As you can see, my one is in much better condition than the one pictured above for sale. Mine still has his sword, for one thing, and the intricacy and detail of his costume has to be seen to be believed. He stares down at me as I work, daring me to do a bit better.

Then there are a number of book-ends and figurines of various types I've collected over the years:

Egyptian book-ends

Glossy examples of Ancient Egyptian kitsch figure largely, I have to admit, as do such pieces of Chinoiserie as the two temple lions below:

Chinese Foo Dogs

There's nothing really valuable in this collection, I'm sure. But I still like the sense of individuality about the various pieces, crafted initially (no doubt) for the international tourist market, but somehow made special by their peregrinations through the world.

How did they end up in the little vintage shops where I found them? Some are damaged, others pristine, but that just seems to add character.

Edmund Engelman: Freud's desk (1938)

A great deal has been written about the choice - and arrangement - of figures on Sigmund Freud's desk in Vienna. I doubt that any such significance can be attributed to my own selection of mainly Eastern puppets and figurines.

But they all feel like friends to me, and I like to examine them and recall the circumstances of our first meetings ...

Rajasthani Puppets

Finds: Ernest Fenollosa & Arthur Waley

Ernest Fenollosa: Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1921)

Fenollosa, Ernest F. Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History Of East Asiatic Design. 1912. Rev ed. with Copious Notes by Professor R. Petrucci. Foreword by Mary Fenollosa. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann Ltd. / New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1921.

The other day I was browsing through the new books table at Bookmarks in Devonport when I chanced across the title above. The two volumes lacked their original dustjackets, but were still quite striking in their way.

Ernest Fenollosa: Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912)

Not that I have any real knowledge of Chinese or Japanese art, mind you: it was more the name of the author that caught my attention.

Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853-1908)

I imagine that any student of the works of Ezra Pound would feel the same. Ernest Fenollosa is definitely a name to conjure with in such circles!

Ezra Pound: Cathay (1915)

The title-page above says it all. One of Pound's most canonical works, Cathay, his dazzling versions from the Chinese (or, rather, from Fenollosa's annotations on Japanese transcriptions of the Chinese originals), was based on this strange posthumous collaboration.

Ezra Pound: Noh or Accomplishment (1916)

Not only that, but the craze for Japanese Nō theatre - increasingly evident in the work of dramatists such as W. B. Yeats throughout the 1920s - could also be claimed to have stemmed from this chance juxtaposition.

Ernest Fenollosa: The Chinese Written Character. Ed. Ezra Pound (1936)

Pound's final gleaning from Fenollosa's notes is the essay above, 'edited' (i.e. rewritten) by himself, which first appeared in his book of essays Instigations in 1920, and which has attracted much argument ever since.

Ezra Pound & Ernest Fenollosa: Instigations (1920)

This blurb from the City Lights website probably provides as good a summary of the controversy as any:

The old theory as to the nature of the Chinese written character (which Pound and Fenollosa followed) is that the written character is ideogrammic — a stylized picture of the thing or concept it represents. The opposing theory (which prevails today among scholars) is that the character may have had pictorial origins in prehistoric times but that these origins have been obscured in all but a few very simple cases, and that in any case native writers don't have the original pictorial meaning in mind as they write.

However (as they go on to say):

Whether Pound proceeded on false premises remains an academic question. Let the pedants rave. An important extension of imagist technique in poetry was gained by Pound's perception of the essentially poetic nature of the Chinese character as it is still written.

'Let the pedants rave', eh? Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this 'European hallucination' about the true nature of Chinese ideograms has been immensely influential not only on the development of Imagism, but on a range of further directions in English poetry - not just Pound's, but the work of all those influenced by him.

So who was this Fenollosa, and how did these notes of his fall into the clutches of crafty old Ez in the first place?

Streets of Salem: Salem's Orientalist (2000)

It would be great if the print above depicted Fenollosa himself. Alas, the picture simply shows one of the many Western journalists who went prowling around Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century, after the enforced modernisation brought about by Commodore Perry's unilateral 'opening' of Japan in the 1850s.

Fenollosa first went to Japan at the age of 25, in 1878, and stayed there for twelve years in a variety of distinguished jobs. His sympathy for Japanese art and culture culminated in his conversion to Buddhism. On his return to America in 1890 he became curator of the department of Oriental Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He was fired from this position after divorcing his wife and marrying a much younger woman, writer Mary McNeill Scott, most famous for a series of novels written under the pseudonym 'Sidney McCall'.

Mary McNeill Fenollosa (née Scott) (1865-1954)

Fenollosa died in his mid-fifties, with his major work on Chinese and Japanese art sketched out in rough manuscript, but still awaiting work on the illustrations and referencing. His widow Mary attempted, with the help of various experts, to supply these deficiencies in her 1912 edition of the book.

The 1921 version which I bought in Devonport contains further revisions and annotations by a certain Professor R. Petrucci. Judging from the remarks made in her preface to this new edition, Mary Fenollosa somewhat resented Petrucci's suggestion that the Japanese versions of Chinese artists' names used routinely by her husband should be replaced entirely by their actual names. On the face of it, Petrucci's view seems a not unreasonable one, but it appears that Fenollosa placed great stock in his Japanese take on Chinoiserie (hence, for instance, Pound's use of the name 'Rihaku' for the poet better known as Li Bai).

The immense strain of this work must have taken a toll on her, however, and it was probably with a certain relief that she handed over his poetry notes to her fellow-American poet-about-town Ezra Pound. She may have been slightly disconcerted at the results, but there can be no doubt that it was these publications of Pound's that really put Ernest Fenollosa on the map, for all the careful fidelity of his wife's work on what he himself fondly imagined to be his magnum opus.

•

Arthur Waley: An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting (1923)

Arthur Waley. An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting. 1923. London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1958.

I found the book above in an antique shop in Cambridge (the one in New Zealand, not the one in England). The dust jacket was pretty battered but the book itself seems to have weathered the last sixty years quite well.

Waley lists Fenollosa's work with various others in the bibliography at the back of his book. He makes no direct comment on it, but simply states that the mere presence of a book in his listings should not be construed as agreement with or endorsement of its ideas.

This rather barbed comment may or may not be directed at Fenollosa - there are other books there which may have irritated Waley even more - but it would be fascinating to know what his opinion of Fenollosa's rather fanciful Orientalist theorising actually was.

It would be inaccurate to describe Waley as a protégé of Pound's, but there certainly was a time when the former was greatly influenced by the new approach to translation pioneered by Cathay. Not only that, but Waley helped Pound with his Chinese at various times in those early days. Pound could never get him to agree to revise his own translations away from accuracy to more effective sounding phrases. Hence, perhaps, their respective places on the bookshelf: Waley among the translators, Pound among the poets.

In the introduction to his 1918 volume 170 Chinese Poems, Waley outlined his own 'method of translation' - one greatly at variance with that of Pound, and doubtless designed as a riposte to his views:

It is commonly asserted that poetry, when literally translated, ceases to be poetry. This is often true, and I have for that reason not attempted to translate many poems which in the original have pleased me quite as much as those I have selected. But I present the ones I have chosen in the belief that they still retain the essential characteristics of poetry.

I have aimed at literal translation, not paraphrase. It may be perfectly legitimate for a poet to borrow foreign themes or material, but this should not be called translation.

Above all, considering imagery to be the soul of poetry, I have avoided either adding images of my own or suppressing those of the original.

Arthur Waley (1889-1966)

Waley was no inconsiderable writer. His pioneering translation of The Tale of Genji (1925-33) was as influential on Bloomsbury aesthetics as E. M. Forster or Proust. His abridged version of Wu Cheng'en's masterpiece Monkey is still the most readable and entertaining one available in English.

Nor do his Chinese Poems (1946) or his Japanese Poetry (1919) seem likely to be superseded anytime soon. His work remains both stylish and accessible. Here's one of his translations from Li Bai (whom he referred to, according to the earlier Wade-Giles conventions, as Li Po):

Liang K'ai: Li Bai Strolling (c.1200)

Drinking Alone by Moonlight

A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.

If you'd like to see a comprehensive listing of his books, here are some of the highlights of my collection (the ones I own are marked in bold):

Ray Strachey: Arthur Waley (c.1925-37)

Arthur Waley (1889-1966)

Translations:


1. One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. 1918 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969)
2. More Translations from the Chinese (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919)
3. Japanese Poetry: The Uta. A selection drawn mostly from the Man'yōshū and the Kokinshū (1919)
4. The Nō Plays of Japan. With Letters by Oswald Sickert. 1920. Evergreen Books (New York: Grove Press, Inc., n.d.)
5. The Temple and Other Poems (1923)
6. Lady Murasaki: The Tale of Genji: A Novel in Six Parts (1925-33):
   • Volume One: Part 1. The Tale of Genji; Part 2. The Sacred Tree; Part 3. A Wreath of Cloud. 1935. 2 vols. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965.
   • Volume Two: Part 4. Blue Trousers; Part 5. The Lady of the Boat; Part 6. The Bridge of Dreams. 1935. 2 vols. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973.
7. The Pillow-Book of Sei Shōnagon. 1928. Unwin Books (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1960)
8. The Way and Its Power: The Tao Tê Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought. 1934. A Mandala Book (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1977)
9. The Book of Songs. 1937 (New York: Grove Press, 1960)
10. The Analects of Confucius. 1938 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971)
11. Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939)
12. Translations from the Chinese: A Compilation (1941)
13. Wu Ch’êng-Ên. Monkey. 1942. Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973)
14. Chinese Poems (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946)
15. 77 Poems (1955)
16. The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China. 1955 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1973)
17. Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956)
18. Ballads and Stories from Tun-huang: An Anthology. Ruskin House. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1960.

Original works:


19. An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting. 1923 (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1958)
20. The Life and Times of Po Chü-I (1949)
21. The Poetry and Career of Li Po, 701-762 A.D. Ethical and Religious Classics of East and West (London & New York: George Allen and Unwin & The Macmillan Company, 1950)
22. The Real Tripitaka and Other Pieces. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1952.
23. The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes. 1958. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968.
24. The Secret History of the Mongols and Other Pieces. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1963.

Secondary:


25. Ivan Morris, ed. Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970.

Arthur Waley: An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting (1958)

Finds: The Works of Malory (1947-48)

Eugène Vinaver, ed. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947)

Vinaver, Eugène, ed. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. 1947. 3 vols. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948.

There can be few things more satisfying than walking into a bookshop and finding a book you've been looking for in vain for half your life. That's what happened to me the other day in Devonport, where I came across a copy of the original 3-volume Oxford English Texts edition of Eugène Vinaver's magisterial edition of the Works of Sir Thomas Malory.

Bronwyn says that I suddenly go quiet at such moments, then, somehow, stiffen, a bit like a gun-dog scenting prey. Until it's safely bought and paid for, I can take nothing for granted. No conversation about it can be permitted until it's packaged up, in my possession, and we're both safely outside the shop.

My copy doesn't look quite like the one pictured above. For a start, the dust-jacket's a bit ripped. For another thing, it's a second impression, not a bona fide first edition. You know what? I don't care. It's covered in mylar, so the tears in the dust-jacket are of no consequence. Also, a number of the (very numerous) errors of the first edition have been corrected in this impression, without any major rethinking of its contents, which didn't happen until the second edition of 1967 (with further addenda in 1973).

There's an interesting discussion of the whole subject in Pamela Yee's 2013 article "Eugène Vinaver's Magnificent Malory," available on the Robbins Library website.

Eugène Vinaver (1899-1979)

Essentially, Eugène Vinaver (born Yevgeniĭ Maksimovich Vinaver in St. Petersburg in 1899) argued that Malory had not written a single book about King Arthur and his Knights, but rather had composed 8 separate 'tales,' which had been combined - probably after his death - by his first editor William Caxton. Caxton's edition of the (so-called) Morte d'Arthur, printed in 1485, had thereafter been the sole witness to Malory's intentions as a writer.

William Caxton, ed. Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)

With the discovery - or, rather, re-identification - of an almost-complete manuscript of Malory's work in 1934 in Winchester College Library, the situation changed completely. Here's what it looks like:

Sir Thomas Malory: The Winchester Ms. (c.1471)

Vinaver saw it as a completely independent witness to Malory's intentions - still at some distance from the author's own manuscript, but a lot closer than Caxton's edition. Subsequent scholarship has now identified some of the ink blotches on this copy with the kinds of ink used in Caxton's workshop, which leaves the interesting possibility that this was the very copy Caxton used (or that he was at the very least aware of its contents), but this was not what Vinaver thought in 1947.

A little thing called the Second World War intervened between the completion of his editing work and the publication of this three-volume edition, but when it did eventually appear it started a landslide of reinterpretation.

Another feature of Vinaver's edition was his immensely learned account of the French sources Malory had used, and his complex justifications for their 'tapestry-like' approach to interweaving all the myriad threads of a story into the monstrous length of the 'Vulgate cycle' series of romances, was also a major contribution to Malory scholarship. Out went the automatic assumption that Malory's more 'modern' approach to storytelling was necessarily superior to that of his sources. In came the argument that he learned his craft as he went along, moving from crude beginnings to the sophisticated heights of his last two tales: 'Lancelot and Guinevere' and 'The Morte d'Arthur.'

I once wrote an essay where I compared this accretive method of storytelling in Malory to some of the narrative conventions in the 1001 Nights. In the process, I compiled an analysis of one of his early stories, 'A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake,' which still inspires me with a certain awe at the amount of free time I must have had on my hands (it was in the period just after completing my Doctorate when I would do anything to avoid thinking about any of the issues contained in that).

At the time, I was forced to use a revised later edition of Vinaver's masterwork which seemed to me to lack some of the intensity and crankiness of his original 1947 text. So you can see that it was considerable satisfaction that it is this version, not one of the revised and 'corrected' subsequent reprints that I found in the bookshop. It couldn't really have found a better home, I suspect.

So here are some of the highlights of my Malory collection:

Sir Thomas Malory (c.1405–1471):


Vinaver, Eugène: The Works of Malory (1947)



1. Vinaver, Eugène, ed. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. 1947. 3 vols. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948.




Malory: Works (1977)



2. Malory, Sir Thomas. Works. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. 1954. Second ed. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.







3. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. Ed. William Caxton. 1485. Introduction by Sir John Rhys. 1906. 2 vols. Everyman’s Library, 45 & 46. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1953.







4. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. 1485. Ed. Janet Cowan. Introduction by John Lawlor. 1969. 2 vols. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.




Malory: The Romance of Lancelot & Guinevere (1953)



5. The Romance of Lancelot & Guinevere, Taken from Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’. Illustrated by Lettice Sandford. London: The Folio Society, 1953.







6. Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur. Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. 1894. Ware, Hertfordshire: Omega Books., 1988.

Christina Hardyment: Malory: The Life and Times of King Arthur's Chronicler (2005)

As for the even more vexed question of who exactly Sir Thomas Malory was (various candidates have been proposed - with varying degrees of plausibility), don't even get me started on that ...

Sir Thomas Malory?

Finds: Modern Poetry (c. 1938)

A New Anthology of Modern Poetry

We were up in Orewa on Tuesday, enjoying the nice weather and trying to persuade ourselves that we were still on holiday. Part of the celebrations always include looking through any vintage and op shops that happen to present themselves: in this case the local Hospice Shop.

The more glamorous books were all up on the shelves, but there was a scruffy old sack labelled 'classics' to one side of them, and this is the one treasure I found in there, among all the old hymnbooks and school editions of Shakespeare and Wordsworth.

The dustjacket was a bit ripped, but the book was otherwise in fairly good nick, perhaps because it had once belonged to the Vice Consul of the United States, a certain Clarence J. McIntosh (he'd signed his name inside, as well as using an official stamp). It cost me one dollar.

So what's the attraction of this ancient, outmoded anthology of 'Modern Poetry'? it does, to be sure, constitute a kind of survey of how the field looked in 1938, but why should that be of any particular interest?

A New Anthology of Modern Poetry

Don't you just love that little picture of 'Random House' itself? There's a reassuring solidity about their books, as if they come from a world which still - however vaguely - made sense. It was, after all, 1938.

Here's what the blurb has to say:

The dominant note of this collection of modern poetry is excitement. Here all the rules of the conventional anthology are abandoned and the chief emphasis is given to the dynamic quality and content of present-day verse. Representative poems by the greatest epic and lyric poets of the past twenty-five years in America and England are included, as well as folk-songs of the Negro, acid light verse, modern humor and satire, choruses from the experimental theatre, and even the sound-track of the pioneer movies. The result is an anthology of extraordinary vigor.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? And the editor himself, Selden Rodman, appears to have had an interesting time of it - judging by his wikipedia page, at any rate. He only died in 2002, having written a whole slew of books about Haiti, Latin America, poetry, and a range of other subjects.

A New Anthology of Modern Poetry

Look again at that list of 'representative' poets on the cover, though:

Robinson Jeffers -- T. S. Eliot -- Edna St. Vincent Millay -- James Joyce -- Stephen Spender -- W. H. Auden -- D. H. Lawrence -- Robert Frost -- Hart Crane -- Dorothy Parker -- Paul Engle -- Vachel Lindsay -- Ezra Pound -- Carl Sandburg -- C. Day Lewis -- Archibald MacLeish -- Kenneth Fearing -- Stephen Vincent Benét -- Elinor Wylie -- John Masefield -- A. E. Housman -- Amy Lowell -- Josephine Johnson -- Bartolomeo Vanzetti -- William Butler Yeats -- Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Malcolm Cowley -- Horace Gregory -- Frederic Prokosch -- E. E. Cummings -- Wilfred Owen -- William Rose Benét -- Muriel Rukeyser -- Louis MacNeice -- Wallace Stevens -- AND OTHERS

Among the 'others' included in the anthology but not mentioned on the cover are: Marianne Moore (with two poems], and William Carlos Williams (with one). Imagine not mentioning either of those two today!

All the British 'MacSpaunday poets' are there: Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Day Lewis, but not Hugh MacDiarmid (one poem) or Roy Campbell (also one).

There is one New Zealander - or sort of: Lola Ridge (one poem). No Australians or Canadians have managed to sneak in, however.

Christiana Spens: Lola Ridge (2014)

That's no great insult, though - of the other Americans included, but not mentioned on the cover, we have Conrad Aiken, Edgar Lee Masters, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate. Delmore Schwartz is the only one of the younger generation of poets who would come of age in the 40s (Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, Kenneth Rexroth) to make it in.

I guess the real fascination for me is all those 'big names' (at the time) who have fallen almost entirely out of favour. The Benét brothers, Stephen and William, for instance - not to mention the latter's wife Eliinor Wylie. More of her later. That craggy old misanthrope Robinson Jeffers - the almost equally gloomy East Coast equivalent Edwin Arlington Robinson. My old friend John Masefield. Edna St. Vincent Millay (though she does seem to be making a bit of a comeback these days). Kenneth Fearing (who he?). What on earth is Vanzetti (of Sacco & Vanzetti fame) doing there?

I have a great affection for a number of these poets. Considerations of abstract merit - let alone 'importance' - seldom enter into my desultory poetry reading. I do love a long verse narrative, and a lot of these poets specialised in them.

The Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie (1932)

In fact, so much did I enjoy reading the two Elinor Wylie poems included in here - I'd heard of her, but not really read her before - that I've gone off and ordered her collected poems and collected prose - she wrote novels as well, it appears - on Amazon.com! If that isn't Quixotic, I don't know what is.

Collected Prose of Elinor Wylie (1933)

Anyway, here's a more-or-less complete list of the entire table of contents (I couldn't be bothered writing out all of the titles of the poems included, but the actual authors are all here):

Part One

Marianne Moore, 'Poetry'
Thomas Hardy, 'Afterwards'
Lewis Carroll, 'Jabberwocky'
John Masefield, 'from Reynard the Fox'
A.E. Housman, [3 poems]
Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'
Robert Bridges, "Johannes Milton, Senex'
Rupert Brooke, [2 poems]
Elinor Wylie, 'Wild Peaches' & 'Castilian'
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 'Moriturus'
Robinson Jeffers, [3 poems]
James Joyce, 'I Hear an Army Charging upon the Land'
Dorothy Parker, [2 Poems]
Marianne Moore, 'The Monkeys'
D.H. Lawrence, [3 poems]
Arthur Guiterman, 'On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness'
Gerard Manley Hopkins, [4 poems]
Amy Lowell, 'Little Ivory Figures Pulled with String'
W.B. Yeats, [5 poems]

Part Two

Carl Sandburg, 'Who Can Make a Poem of the Depths of Weariness'
A Group of Negro Songs [8 poems]
W. C. Handy, [2 poems]
Edwin Markham, 'The Man with the Hoe'
Sarah N. Cleghorn, [2 poems]
Edgar Lee Masters, [3 poems]
Edwin Arlington Robinson, [3 poems]
Robert Frost, 'Two Tramps in Mud Time' & 'The Fear'
Vachel Lindsay, [6 poems]
William Rose Benét, 'Jesse James'
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 'Last Speech to the Court'
Malcolm Cowley, [2 poems]
Lola Ridge, 'The Legion of Iron'
Stephen Vincent Benét, [2 poems]
Josephine W. Johnson, 'Final Autumn'
Roy Campbell, 'The Serf'
Paul Engle, 'from America Remembers'
Pare Lorentz, 'from The River'
Carl Sandburg, [4 poems]

Part Three

Archibald MacLeish, 'A Poem Should Be Palpable and Mute'
Ezra Pound, [3 poems]
E.E. Cummings, [5 poems]
T.S. Eliot, [4 poems]
Walter James Turner, 'In Time like Glass'
Wallace Stevens, 'Peter Quince at the Clavier' & 'The Mechanical Optimist'
Hart Crane, [6 poems]
John Crowe Ransom, 'Here Lies a Lady'
Conrad Aiken, 'Prelude LXI'
Allen Tate, 'Idiot'
James Palmer Wade, 'A Hymn to No One Body'
Archibald Fleming, [2 poems]
Horace Gregory, [2 poems]
E. B. White, 'I Paint What I See'
Frederic Prokosch, 'The Conspirators'
Archibald MacLeish, [6 poems]

Part Four

Kenneth Fearing, 'These Are the Live'
Wilfred Owen, [7 poems]
Kenneth Fearing, 'Dirge'
Louis MacNeice, [2 poems]
C. Day Lewis, [2 poems]
James Agee, [2 poems]
William Stephens, [2 poems]
Ogden Nash, [3 poems]
Stephen Spender, [5 poems]
William Carlos Williams, 'The Yachts'
Eunice Clark, [2 poems]
Alfred Hayes, 'The Death of the Craneman'
Selden Rodman, [2 poems]
W.H. Auden, [6 poems]
Edwin Rolfe, 'Definition'
Oscar Williams, [2 poems]
S. Funaroff, 'Of My Deep Hunger'
Hugh MacDiarmid, [2 poems]
Delmore Schwartz, 'For One Who Would Not Take His Life in His Hands'
Muriel Rukeyser, [6 poems]

One of the most fascinating things about this list is to compare it with the contents of the second, postwar (1946), edition of the anthology. There were a lot of additions (as well as a few subtractions - Rupert Brooke has gone, but then so has Wilfred Owen). Here are the newbies:

Robert Graves -- Louise Bogan -- Siegfried Sassoon -- Kay Boyle -- Thomas Wolfe -- Reuel Denney -- Babette Deutsch -- Mark Van Doren -- Edith Sitwell -- Jean Garrigue -- Ruth Pitter -- John Peale Bishop -- Edmund Wilson -- Robert Penn Warren -- John Wheelwright -- R. P. Blackmur -- Kenneth Rexroth -- William Empson -- Jose Garcia Villa -- Robert Fitzgerald -- Kenneth Patchen -- Dylan Thomas -- George Barker -- Dunsten Thompson -- Ralph Gustafson -- Lawrence Durrell -- Roy Fuller -- Ruth Herschberger -- William Abrahams -- Sagittarius -- Laurie Lee -- William Meredith -- Randall Jarrell -- Hubert Creekmore -- Alun Lewis -- John Manifold -- Sidney Keyes -- John Betjeman -- Robert Lowell -- Demetrios Capetanakis -- Thomas Merton -- Karl Shapiro

One thing you can't fault Rodman on is his industry. He was determined to keep up. His prescience in selecting Robert Lowell and Thomas Merton among the new American poets is impressive. For the rest, his selection of WWII poets (Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes) isn't bad, considering how little time there had been to process the verse of the war years. No Dylan Thomas, no Keith Douglas, but I suspect that just shows that it took a bit of time for their merits to filter through.

Elinor Wylie (1922)

Rodman attempts some knotty questions - 'Is Modern Poetry Difficult?' - in his preface (as well as 'What Makes it Obscure?' and 'Does Propaganda cancel It?') All in all, there's a pleasing New Deal optimism about his view of the future:

Our younger poets have taken the first step. They are beginning, as I believe the last part of this anthology will indicate, to fuse the naturalistic and symbolic in a new synthesis. They know that neither science nor sociology can be rejected. (45)

Well, bully for them! He goes on to explain that:

Poetry is the greatest of the arts because everyone can - and does - practise it. The ad-man and the gag-man, the housewife and the corner-grocer are latent poets.

But then he goes and spoils it all by saying, in his next sentence: 'Especially is the poetry of Carl Sandburg great for this reason.' Hmmm. Dunno about that. Rodman's touching faith in this idea of recording 'the poetry in the common speech, attitudes and aspirations of the people' culminates in his claim that:

That is why we have the paradox of the most original and indigenous American art in the anonymous outpourings of the oppressed Negro. That is why I have included the words of some of their songs. (45-46)

I guess our alarm bells may be ringing at this point in his argument. There's something so smug and patronising about that use of the word "outpourings' rather than simply 'songs' (or 'poems', for that matter). For its time, though, I think this decision of Rodman's was a brave one. It certainly attracted a good deal of attention, and (as it turned out) was the beginning of a lifetime's interest in the folk art of the Caribbean and elsewhere.

The question of tone when one is exploring the polemical writing of the past is a tricky one. On the one hand he clearly distinguishes these 'outpourings' from the consciously crafted poems of the other authors - there is no Langston Hughes in either the 1938 or 1946 versions of his anthology, for instance.

On the other hand, there's little doubt that Rodman is sincerely moved, and sincerely admiring of these great songs - as indeed we are today - so perhaps we can cut him a bit of slack, and try and avoid what E. P. Thompson once called the 'enormous condescension of posterity.'

All in all, pretty good value for one buck, I'd say!

Selden Rodman: The Miracle of Haitian Art (1974)

Finds: Hone's Christmas Gift

Dick Scott: Inheritors of a Dream (1962)

I found a copy of this old coffee-table book by Dick Scott in Greg Brimblecombe's little boutique secondhand bookshop "Dustjackets" in Thames the other day. It's a 1969 Reed reprint of the original 1962 edition, published by a certain Ronald Riddell (any relation of Ron Riddell the poet, I wonder?)

Dick Scott bio-note (1969)

Since this blurb was first written in 1962, of course, Dick Scott has published quite a lot more. You can find a good discussion of his work here. The most famous one is, I suppose, Ask That Mountain (1975), about Parihaka. My personal favourite, though, is Seven Lives on Salt River (1979), about the Kaipara harbour and its curious highways and byways.

Inscription in Inheritors of a Dream

On getting home and looking through the book a bit more thoroughly, I found the above inscription written on the half-title.

But is this our Hone? Hone Tuwhare? And who's Lindsay? Lindsay Rabbitt, the poet? Someone else? None of my business, of course, but one does feel a bit curious.

My inscribed copy of Mihi (1987)

To check, I went to my own copy of Mihi, signed for me by Hone on a rainy day in 1998.

So let's compare them:

1972 signature (detail)

1998 signature (detail)

I don't think there's much doubt that the "Hone" in question is definitely Hone Tuwhare. The elaborate "H" is enough to give it away even if there weren't so many other similarities.

That's not all there is in the book, though. Here's Dick Scott's introduction:

But then, on turning to p.29, I found an old letter nestled in beside the image below (ignore the rubric on the left, which refers to another image on the same page which I haven't reproduced):

Fern Tree Cottage

Here's the letter:

letter (page 1)

letter (page 2)

Fern Tree Cottage (detail)

A bit of rummaging around on the internet an Otago Daily Times article about the fact that "Fern Tree Cottage," now renamed "Ferntree Lodge" and described as "Dunedin's oldest house," is not only still standing, but was sold a couple of years ago after having belonged to "convicted fraudster Michael Swann." Here's a picture of it now, more than fifty years after Dick Scott's book first appeared:

Ferntree Lodge

So there you go, a Christmas gift that keeps on giving, forty years down the track …

Ans Westra: Hone Tuwhare at the side of James K. Baxter's grave (Hiruharama, October 1972)