Finds: Thoroughly Munted

Guillaume Apollinaire. Alcools. 1913. Trans. Anne Hyde Greet.
Foreword by Warren Ramsey. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.

It's funny when you go snooping around in the ripped old paperbacks in the back of a bookshop (in this case, Jason Books on High Street, long before it came up in the world and went boutique). You see something there which hardly even seems to merit picking up - in this case a backless wodge of papers with a pasted spine and no title-page - which turns out to be one of the finds of your life.

I see from the inscription above that it was on the 5th September, 1979, some 30-odd years ago, and the book in question was Apollinaire's Alcools - or, rather, a complete dual-text translation of the same, which some iconoclast had ripped apart and then deposited among the other trash to be pulped. A price of 15 cents hardly seemed exorbitant even at the time, especially when I think of the amount of time I've spent leafing through those pages, reading and rereading those amazing poems: "Zone", "Le Pont Mirabeau" - above all, "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé":

Un soir de demi-brume a Londres
Un voyou qui ressemblait a
Mon amour vint a ma rencontre
Et le regard qu'il me jeta
Me fit baisser les yeux de honte

More than a half-century has passed since the manuscript beginning with these lines was fished out of limbo, read and read again, and a dazzled magazine editor called across the room that here, at last, was a first-rate poem. A reader of the sixties might find other terms in which to express his approval, though some of Paul Léautaud's are still serviceable: "I read, read twice, three times, was carried away, dazed, delighted, deeply moved. Such melancholy, such evocative tone, such bohemianism, such rangings of the mind, and that faintly gypsy air and the total absence of that abomination of ordinary verse, la rime riche ... "

- Warren Ramsay, "Foreword"

I'm glad that that front page of the foreword hadn't gone the way of the title-page and all the other prelims (including the copyright page). That idea of an editor picking up the poem for the first time, reading it, and immediately recognising genius was, I suspect, the main reason I persevered through all the strange pages of Apollinaire's book. I'd never read poetry like this, had no frame of reference to set it in - for a while, it seemed to me as if I'd never read poetry at all before this, my discovery of the Modern.

Even as first published in that distant spring of 1909 (when it lacked two stanzas of the Zaparogian Cossacks' horrendous letter and, unlike the more characteristic final version, was punctuated), "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" has the authority of the more mature Apollinaire, the vibrancy of a modern poet speaking in his own voice ...

I don't quite know why anyone would take what must have been a fairly new book (Anne Hyde Greet's version of Alcools was published in 1966, a mere ten years before I found it in those back shelves in Auckland) and dismember it like that. Had the poet displeased them somehow? Perhaps that word scrawled on the back cover holds some clue, like the "CROATOAN" found carved on a tree by the lost settlers of Roanoke Island: "scenarios", it appears to read. But what scenarios, when and where?

I doubt I'll ever know.

•

Arthur Koestler. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937.
Abridged ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY ARTHUR KOESTLER
TRANSLATED BY TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

On February 8th, 1937, six months after the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, the troops of General Franco entered Malaga. The author, then a war correspondent for an English Liberal newspaper, had remained in the besieged town after its evacuation by the Republican army. On the day after the entry of the conquering troops, he was arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death. For four months he was kept in solitary confinement, witnessing the executions of his fellow prisoners and awaiting his own. He kept a diary in his cell, which he succeeded in smuggling out when released; this diary forms the main part of Dialogue with Death.

Under pressure of world-wide protests General Franco agreed that Koestler should be exchanged for a prisoner of the Republican Government. He was released in May 1937. Dialogue with Death was first published in January 1938, as the second part of Spanish Testament. The original edition, with an introduction by the Duchess of Atholl, contained a number of chapters dealing with political and military aspects of the Civil War, which was then still in progress. Since then it has become, in the words of the New Statesman and Nation, a book "which should rank among British classics."

This rather scruffy looking Penguin I found in the shelves of an old second-hand furniture shop which used to nestle in the heart of the Mairangi Bay CBD, between Max Paterson's stationers and the greengrocer's shop. It was run by a lady called Ruth Thorne, who maintained a couple of bays full of battered books at bargain prices.

This one probably set me back ten or twenty cents, in July 1979, a couple of months before I bought the Apollinaire. It had an almost equally great influence on me, though.

Those 1940s Penguins seem so strange and exotic to us now, but it's worth remembering that they just looked junky at the time. It was the content of the book that interested me, the strange intense account that Koestler gave of his experiences in a death-cell during the Spanish Civil War. I'd already read his classic novel about the Stalinist purges, Darkness at Noon, at the recommendation of our Russian teacher, Eddie Meijers, but it was this coverless paperback which had the stronger effect on me, I think. Something about the way he wrote was so vivid and immediate - I guess I've been trying to find something like it ever since.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Translated by
TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

PENGUIN BOOKS
HARMONDSWORTH MIDDLESEX ENGLAND
300 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK U.S.A.

Published in 1938 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Abridged edition published in Penguin Books Feb. 1942
Reprinted in Penguin Books March 1943

FOREWORD

NONE of the characters in this book is fictitious; most of them are dead by now.

To die - even in the service of an impersonal cause - is always a personal and intimate affair. Thus it was almost inevitable that these pages, written for the most part, in the actual expectancy and fear of death, should bear a private character. There are, in the author's opinion, two reasons which justify their publication.

In the first place, the things which go on inside a condemned man's head have a certain psychological interest. Professional writers have rarely had an opportunity of studying these processes in the first person singular. I have tried to present them as frankly and concisely as I could. The main difficulty was the temptation to cut a good figure; I hope that the reader will agree that I have succeeded in overcoming this.

In the second place, I believe that wars, in particular civil wars, consist of only ten per cent action and of ninety per cent passive suffering. Thus this account of the hermetically sealed Andalusian mortuaries may perhaps bring closer to the reader the nature of Civil War than descriptions of battles.

I dedicate it to my friend Nicolas, an obscure little soldier of the Spanish Republic, who on April 14th, 1937, on the sixth birthday of that Republic, was shot dead in the prison of Seville.

A.K.

THE AUTHOR

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905, a Hungarian subject, and studied engineering and psychology respectively at the Technische Hoschschule and the University of Vienna. He became a journalist at the age of 21,lived as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Paris and Moscow, travelled in Soviet Central Asia and in the Arctic on board the Graf Zeppelin. While correspondent of the News Chronicle during the Spanish Civil War, he was captured by General Franco's troops and was imprisoned for having denounced, in the British Press, German and Italian intervention on the Nationalist side.

In 1938 he abandoned journalism to take up novel-writing. His works include The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon (fiction), Scum of the Earth, which relates the author's experiences during the French collapse, and Spanish Testament, of which Dialogue with Death is an improved version. Koestler is now serving as a private in the British Army.

Of course the word "abridged" always acts on me like a red rag on a bull. I always want the book, the whole book and nothing but the book.

As I read more about Koestler, though, I began to understand the curious politics behind these various versions of his Spanish civil war memoir, the strange fusion of communists propaganda and personal testimony in the original version (which I found some years later in a pile of old Gollancz Left Book Club editions:

Koestler, Arthur. Spanish Testament. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. Left Book Club Edition. London: Gollancz, 1937.

Eventually I even discovered a third version of the book, from the "Danube Edition" of his collected works, which began to appear in the 1960s. There's something about that battered old Penguin that seems almost to embody history for me, though.

The fact that it had been printed a mere six years after the events described in it gave me a powerful sense of their reality, their tangible weight and gravity.

I've never been able to ignore those ripped and munted books at the backs of bookshops ever since. How can you know what treasures might be sitting there, glowing radioactive in the dark?

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937. Abridged ed., 1942. Rev. Danube ed., 1966. London: Papermac, 1983.

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 ...

Finds: Tree Worship

INFORMATION PLEASE ...

Does anyone out there know anything about this book, Tree Worship? It appears to have been privately published in Auckland in 1965, but it would be interesting to know more about its author, Charles Alldritt, in particular ...

Charles Alldritt, Tree Worship (1965)

Alldritt, Charles. Tree Worship: With Incidental Myths and Legends. Auckland: Printed for the Author by Strong and Ready Ltd., 1965. [No ISBN]. xiv + 122 pp.

back cover

TREES, those majestic natural monuments, have in silence watched men and cities rise and fall. They have been adored and have witnessed many peculiar, and sometimes cruel, rites. FROM THE RUINS of dead civilisations we learn just how much cruelty was the direct result of bigotry, self-righteousness and the apparent inability to examine or question beliefs. FEAR OF RIDICULE by their fellows and of reprisal by gods and rulers, have made people obedient to many ridiculous precepts. We may pity their credulous acceptance of the dictates of those who presumed to speak for the gods, and this is a reminder that we too could perhaps improve our methods. Though many may remain timid, there will always be those who dare to question the orthodox, and who are inquisitive and adventurous enough to explore. UNDER THE STONES we raise there may be all sorts of crawling horrors, but there may also be a diamond.

He appears to have been someone with strong, but possibly rather heterodox views on religion. Beyond this publication (and one or two other pamphlets conserved in libraries), I haven't been able to find out any more about him. Why was he so anxious to publish this information in book form, for instance? Was it his own idea, or someone else's? The copy I've been examining is dedicated to "Merle and Jim Burns", with an added little note at the bottom of the page:

Jim, Thank you for all your help. Chas.

halftitle

Here are the titlepage and frontispiece (presumably painted by the author, who must have had some artistic talent):

TREE WORSHIP WITH INCIDENTAL MYTHS AND LEGENDS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHARLES ALLDRITT PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR BY STRONG AND READY LTD. AUCKLAND 1965

SCANDINAVIAN CREATION LEGEND

Odin and his brothers created the first human beings from two logs of wood. One log was ash and the other elm; from the ash they made the first man and called his name Ask, and from the elm they made the first woman and they named her Embla.

(see page 81)

The book is dedicated:

TO JANICE (on her twenty-first birthday)

Perhaps the author's daughter? The preface is also interesting. There are quite a few underlinings and pencil corrections in the text of this copy, presumably added by the author himself. The words "don't apologise", written next to the dedication, seem to refer not so much to Janice as to the words "Early critics have suggested that the purpose of the book is not clear. Perhaps there is no purpose" [my italics].

PREFACE

The subject matter is the work of a collector rather than a scholar. Part I is a collection of opinions and theories which could possibly have some bearing upon the practices, beliefs and legends contained in Part II. Early critics have suggested that the purpose of the book is not clear. Perhaps there is no purpose. An attempt has been made to avoid bias and prejudice and it is sincerely hoped that it can be similarly read. There is always the tendency to believe a postulate to be true simply because it would be contrary to our accepted beliefs if it were not. Fortunately we now live in a more tolerant age, and those who differ are not. necessarily branded as heretics. As this goes to press it is interesting to find that last year (1964) the Church of Rome has been pleased to suggest that the "Holy Spirit” is also present "in other faiths." This is a big step away from the bigotry of ancient times but we still need to travel further. Unfortunately we still have with us those who expect the rest of the world to conform to their particular "civilized ritual," and expect others to remember their places. " If the rich man's schoolboy son asks a question he is taking an intelligent interest, but if the street Arab asks the same question he is being insolent and too familiar. There is a very human tendency to look upon those of other faiths as street Arabs, whereas we would he better advised to accept their questions regarding our beliefs as attempts to understand, rather than insults. Sometimes we are so quick to defend those things which we ourselves do not fully understand. Surely the obvious needs no defence, and our differences in secondary matters is of little importance. This book was written for enjoyment, and the necessary research has been exciting and rewarding. Lengthy explanations have been avoided as it is felt that readers prefer to arrive at their own conclusions.

CHARLES ALLDRITT Auckland, January, 1965

Something of the rather eclectic nature of the book can be deduced from the Table of Contents reproduced above. There's another page of it, as well as two pages listing the illustrations (four plates as well as numerous line drawings).

PART I Trees Before Men Ethics Faith The Oracle Adjustment Priest Kings Prayers to Powers – Intercession Magic and Holy Relics John Evelyn Beliefs in Magical Powers Pagan Rites in Christian Worship Changing Colour Criticism of Ancient Philosophy PART II Ritual and Dedication of Trees Paradise Treasures of Heaven Giants Pillars Egypt-Osiris Egypt-Sky-Goddess Tree as an Altar-•Sacred Sites Sacred Sites Groves Horns The Bull was the Symbol of Light Moses Yahweh Yahweh-Baal Moloch-Human Sacrifice Moloch Human Sacrifice-Indian Judge Ritual Killing

The first page of the text attempts to give some rationale for the author's choice of subject matter, but it does all sound somewhat post facto. Perhaps, as he remarks above, "there is no purpose."

PART I TREES BEFORE MEN

The title of this book is really a misnomer as trees were seldom worshipped by themselves or for themselves. but they have played an important. part in practically every faith. Examples in Part. II will serve to show just. how widespread these connections are. Exactly how trees came to have such pride of place will never be known, but certainly awe, inspired by their grandeur and age, was a contributing factor. It has been affirmed (Botticher) that "the worship of the tree was not only the earliest form of divine ritual, but was the last to disappear before the rise of Christianity." Our planet was covered with lush growth and impenetrable forests long before man made his appearance. In these difficult conditions his travel was restricted by trees, but these also afforded him protection. He looked upon trees as his parents and general providers. His kinship was even closer than to his brothers of the animal world; and as animals differed, so did trees; some were beneficient [sic.] while others were cruel. With the incessant play of natural forces they also had beauty, sound and movement. [p.1]

The page below looks, at first sight, rather sinister. That is, until one reads the text surrounding it:

1. German Nazi Emblem. 2. Swastika (top arm points right). 3. Sauvaskita (negative swastika, top arm points left). 4. Jain Swastika. 5. Tibetan Lunar Swastika. 6. & 7. Indian Swastikas. 8. Azazel (The Devil) with inverted star. 9. Staff of Typhon (Egyptian evil genius). 10. A 'positive' V symbol-Egyptian Hathor, the sky-cow, with the four sky-supports, also V-staves. For confirmation of figure 2 being the positive swastika refer to: Ward (Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods), Blavatsky (Theosophical, The Secret Doctrine), Mackenzie (The Migration of Symbols), O'Neill (The Night of the Gods). Pentacle used in Black Magic, copied from a drawing in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Eliphas Levi).

CHANGING COLOUR

A most perplexing aspect of symbolism is the discovery that it does in fact often undergo a change of meaning and colour. Magical properties - either real or supposed change from positive to negative according to the manner in which they are used or viewed. An example of this can be illustrated by the two signs familiar to us during World War II – the Swastika and the "V" sign. In regard to the first of them, attempts have been made to show that there are two kinds, and that Hitler’s symbol was the negative one. Reference to books written before the war show that more writers favoured the belief that the opposite was the case. Swastikas on doors of temples - both in the east and in the west - show the symbol as good, that is if it is read from the same side as the lettering on both doors. … [pp.18-19]

There's also some interesting material on pp.99-100, in the section entitled "NEW ZEALAND." The author admits that "A New Zealand book should include reference to Maori folklore", and goes on to recommend A. W. Reed's Myths and Legends of Maoriland (Wellington: A. H and A. W. Reed, 1954) "for easy reading." Among others, he records the following legend:

There is still another story of Rata the Wanderer who "chanted an incantation to protect himself against the spirits before taking an axe and cutting down a tree." He required the tree to make himself a canoe; but in the night the "children of Tane" put the tree together again, and after this had been repeated several times Rata became ashamed and asked forgiveness, whereupon the spirits made a canoe for him. For, according to the legend, "to those who love the Garden of Tane, the Children of Tane are kind." When trees are cut down then the Sky-father's tears wash away the soil and the earth is then unable to nourish any living thing. Thus it would seem that our concern for conservation of the soil today is not by any means a new thought in New Zealand. [p.100]

The only other real clue to the work's genesis comes at the beginning of the Bibliography:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(A few references are missing as the work was commenced from notes gathered for a short lecture some fifteen years ago, precise records were not then kept, but those we have been able to trace are given.)

"Some fifteen years ago" would put the lecture back around 1950. On p.101 the author remarks: "Nothing appears to have been written on the subject of sacred trees since the two world wars," which gives us a clue as to just how long he had been collecting material on this theme. Two last clues to ponder:

In conclusion it is suggested that, if the reader has any doubt regarding the possible power of trees, perhaps he has never tried the experiment of contemplation in some quiet grove or forest where trees are large and old. [p.103]

It sounds a little like Tolkien's semi-sentient trees, or (more to the point) the dark reaches of Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood. The rather pagan tone of this passage also gives some point to his remark that earlier writers on tree worship "were biased in favour of the narrower Christian viewpoint, and over emphasised the wickedness of those practices which were not of Christian origin."[p.101] Also, on the back of the frontispiece in this copy, the following words have been hastily scribbled in pencil:

Does it read "Some Trees", or "Come Trees"? The latter could be some kind of invocation, perhaps. Just how far did this author take his fascination with "the possible power of trees"? I'd really love to know ... Please, if you do have any knowledge of the book or its author, leave it as a comment on this blog entry (if you wish it to remain confidential, just leave me an email address, and I'll reply without posting your comment online).

Ask & Embla

Finds: Titus & Ross

Art Titus & Jack Ross. Titus & Ross. 1970. Fallout, n.d.

In one of Ezra Pound’s first published poems, ‘Famam Librosque cano’ ['Fame and the Book I sing' - an adaptation of the first line of the Aeneid] (A Lume Spento, 1908), he already imagines his future ‘audience’ as a ‘Scrawny, be-spectacled, out at heels’ scholar with a ‘three days’ beard’, who:

picking a ragged Backless copy from the stall, Too cheap for cataloguing, Loquitur, ‘Ah-eh! the strange rare name ... Ah-eh! He must be rare if even I have not ...’ And lost mid-page ... He analyses form and thought to see How I ‘scaped immortality.

- Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, ed. T. S. Eliot. 1928 (London: Faber, 1971): 42-43.

Hard to say if fiction is imitating life here. It was, of course, ‘In the year of grace 1906, 1908, or 1910’ that Pound made his own famous find on a Parisian bookstall:

I picked from the Paris quais a Latin version of the Odyssey by Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus (Parisiis, In officina Christiani Wecheli, MDXXXVIII) ... I lost a Latin Iliad for the economy of four francs, these coins being at the time scarcer with me than they ever should be with any man of my tastes and abilities.

- Ezra Pound, “Early Translators of Homer,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot. 1954 (London: Faber, 1974): 259.

As Pound goes on to mention, Divus’ Latin version of the ‘Nekuia’ (Odyssey, XI), served as the inspiration for Canto I (at the time his essay was written, c.1916, the ‘Third Canto’). Other examples of this trope – "beautiful, neglected book, sometimes mislabelled or badly damaged, picked up for next-to-nothing on an open-air bookstall, often at the sacrifice of other treasures" – can easily be compiled. Robert Browning’s ‘old yellow book’, bought in the Piazza San Lorenzo on a June day in 1860, was (according to Charles W. Hodell's introduction to The Old Yellow Book: Source Book of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Everyman’s Library 503. 1911. (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1927): ix) found ‘crammed between insignificant neighbours’.

... Five compeers in flank Stood left to right of it as tempting more – ... With this, one glance at the lettered back of which, And ‘Stall!’ cried I: a lira made it mine.

- Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick. 1971. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) 24-25 [1.75-76, 82-83].

FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published ‘as a small quarto, without the author’s name ... gained no notice, and most of the two hundred copies found their way into a remainder box, and were sold at a penny each’ (according to Ernest Rhys' introduction to The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Six Plays of Calderon, trans. Edward FitzGerald. Everyman’s Library 819. 1928. (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1948): xii). That is, until both Rossetti and Swinburne picked up odd copies independently, and the latter took it to show to George Meredith (Pound, too, refers to this incident. See The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 4th Collected ed. (London: Faber, 1987) 510 [80. 593]: ‘Rossetti found it remaindered ...’). Similarly, in his introduction to the Thousand and One Days, a group of Persian tales translated by him from the French, Justin McCarthy tells us that:

It was on a second-hand bookstall – the very bookstall, I believe, that has been made famous by Mr. Andrew Lang in his ‘Book Lover’s Purgatory’ – that I, rummaging, discovered some little French volumes, French volumes of the last century, lettered ‘Mille et un Jours.’ The title captivated me at once. I had loved ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ all my life, but I had never heard of ‘The Thousand and One Days.’ ... They were imperfect, unfortunately, only four out of a proper five, but I bought them, and read their stories, as far as they went.

- Justin Huntly McCarthy, ed., The Thousand and One Days: Persian Tales, 2 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1892) 1: vii.

McCarthy goes on to tell us that he soon discovered that the Persian stories ‘were easily obtainable in modern French editions’, but it is the original (though ‘imperfect’) find which remained in his imagination. Without even bothering to follow up Andrew Lang's remarks on the subject, I think it best to move on immediately to the principal subject of this post: Scott Hamilton's recent discovery of a very interesting old CD from the 1970s:

It was the age of the folk-rock duo. That Sundance Kid-looking dude on the left is (I think) Art Titus - a little reminiscent of Art Garfunkle, perhaps? - whereas his shorter, swarthier buddy is Jack Ross: clearly the brains of the outfit, if you look at their list of song credits:

I must confess to a certain indifference towards their style of music, despite Fallout Records' [home of the best rare music] exhortation on the CD cover: 'PREPARE TO BE BLOWN AWAY!' In fact, it's a little difficult at first sight to see why anyone would want to reissue this first and only album by the 'enigmatic duo from Marion, Indiana,' whose 'origins and subsequent history remains unknown.'

Given my own long and fruitful association with the almost equally enigmatic art-publisher Titus Books, which I'd hitherto assumed to be named after the eponymous hero of Mervyn Peake's Titus trilogy, new vistas of prophetic insight seem to be opened up by this otherwise innocuous coincidence. I ask you, why would Titus have published four books - Trouble in Mind (2005), The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006), EMO (2008) and Kingdom of Alt (2010) - by this Jack Ross (you'll find a list of various others in the sidebar opposite under the generic title "Jack Rosses of the World Unite!') over the past five years, if there weren't some ulterior motive? I leave you to ponder that, my friends.

Scott Hamilton: "The Ross Clique" (12/12/10) l to r: Hamish Dewe, Jack Ross, Ted Jenner & Brett Cross

Finds: R. A. K. Mason on Rewi Alley - 1955

[Rewi Alley, Fragments of Living Peking (1955)]

Alley, Rewi. Fragments of Living Peking and Other Poems. Ed. H. Winston Rhodes. Christchurch: New Zealand Peace Council, 1955.

Since there was so much response to my post on Duggan's copy of Hopkins, here are some pictures of another, not dissimilar, find I made a couple of years ago in a second-hand shop in Devonport:

Once again, it was the book itself that attracted me initially, but then, looking inside, oh ho!

Could that really be R. A. K. Mason's signature? I knew he was pretty keen on China, but surely he would have had rather more flowing calligraphy than that?

If it is him, then his annotations seem more bibliographical than interpretive in nature. He marks poems which can also be found in Rewi Alley's previous book Leaves from a Sandan Notebook (1950).

He does put a little mark by the passage in H. Winston Rhodes' preface recording "the impact that a People's China has made on one [i.e. Alley] who has spent his life in the effort to prepare for what he has called 'the new day'." This is Mason the committed Communist, remember, the author of "Sonnet to MacArthur's Eyes" ...

Besides that, most of the notes and marginal scribbles record pieces of factual information to be found in Alley's text, together with hints about places to visit. Mason did, after all, visit China "as first president of the New Zealand–China Society in 1957", according to his entry in the Oxford Companion to NZ Literature (quoted on the Book Council site), two years after the publication of this book, and so he was probably looking to Alley more as a source of information than of poetic inspiration.

This isn't the place to go in to my views on all those pat judgments about the (alleged) "failure" of Mason's poetic gift - I put my opinion on record in a review of Rachel Barrowman and John Caselberg's twin, competing biographies in WLWE: World Literature Written in English (UK) 40 (2): (2004) [144-47]. Suffice it to say that merely keeping on churning out verses into old age can scarcely be regarded (necessarily) as being true to one's muse ... Mason chose a different path, but only a fool (or a dyed-in-the-wool social conservative) should feel him or herself qualified to write him off as some kind of failure.

I guess what I like most about the book is the sense of Mason carefully preparing himself for his upcoming trip to China, eager to see the "new day" for himself, and probably equally keen to meet Rewi Alley, too.

By now Alley had been forced to 'closet' himself again, after living pretty openly as a homosexual in his early years in China: the puritan new government of the People's Republic made this a necessity - as Simon Winchester records in his fascinating new biography of that other great friend of China, Joseph Needham (Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China. 2008. Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin Group (Australia), 2009).

A wandering Lama from Kumbum looks in, sees the boiler, puts hands together. Says 'Om mane padme um.' and scuttles head down. [p.43]

Mason's note at the top of the page seems to read "ambivalent attitude born of practical acquaintance."

So do we start anew, with new wine in old bottles, as we have been taught not to do. Yet, is the wine so new? Perhaps it has just been mellowing these thousands of years, now is ripe for using ... [p.44]

There's something rather moving about these carefully marked passages, written long before the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four, and all the other great disillusionments really started to take their toll. As with Mason's career as a whole, I feel, it's best to listen patiently than commit oneself to hasty, pat judgments - "ambivalent attitude born of practical acquaintance", in fact.

Finds: Maurice Duggan' s Copy of G. M. Hopkins

[Bridges, Robert, ed. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 1918. Second Edition. With an Appendix of Additional Notes, and a Critical Introduction by Charles Williams. 1930. The Oxford Bookshelf. 1937. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.]

Actually it was the book itself that attracted me most to begin with. I'm a bit of a Charles Williams fan, for one thing, and then again it was interesting to see Robert Bridge's original arrangement of the poems (Hopkins died in 1889, but - famously and notoriously - it wasn't till 1918 that his friend and executor Bridges finally published them, after thirty odd years of dithering). It had a rather dark and soiled binding, so it wasn't surprising that it was priced so cheaply, at $8.

But then I took a closer look at the flyleaf:

Ériger en lois sans impressions personnelles, c’est le grand effort d’un homme s’il est sincère [Formulating laws without personal bias, this is the supreme achievement of a serious man] – Rémy de Gourmont

Maurice Duggan (1922-1974) is - of course - far better known as a short story writer than a poet, though a short book of his poems, A Voice for the Minotaur, was published posthumously by the Holloway Press in 2002. It's therefore quite interesting to see him purchasing (and annotating) a copy of Hopkins in 1944, at the age of 22. There's a certain schoolboy earnestness in the way he notes down important facts: he's careful to write in the date of Hopkins' death on the halftitle, for instance:

Duggan's author page on the Book Council site (copied from the 1998 Oxford Companion to NZ Literature) specifies that it was "early in 1944 [that] he made contact with Frank Sargeson at Sargeson’s Takapuna bach, and the older man quickly became his mentor." Perhaps it was at Frank's suggestion that he decided to bone up on Hopkins, buying this book on the 8th of July of that year. Duggan wrote notes on a number of the poems - mostly the famous ones: "The Windhover", "Pied Beauty" etc., and marked them on the list of contents:

Most of his efforts seem to have been directed at understanding Hopkins' fiendishly difficult classification system for English metre, though. He marks some passages in the famous preface which explain the differences between conventional "running" metre and his own new "sprung rhythm".

Overall, the notes are more technical than interpretive (how many similarly annotated copies of Hopkins are to be found in the second-hand bookshops of the world, each with its sets of extra stresses and "outrides" marked in from the notes at the back of the book?). There is one interesting feature about them, though: a curious little pencil mark which looks almost like a set of parted lips - or a little heart.

For the most part, though, he contents himself with metrical stresses and comments on whether or not that particular poem is in "running" (i.e. conventional) or "sprung" (Hopkinsian - though he claimed it was prefigured in medieval alliterative verse, as well as Milton's late metrics in Samson Agonistes) rhythm:

At the end of the book, there's a little index of particularly significant lines and expressions. There's a certain taste for the florid on display here, perhaps more appropriate to the future author of "Along Rideout Road That Summer", with its insistent echoes of "Kubla Khan", than to the Sargesonian realist of Immanuel's Land (1956).

I find the fact that he singled out "yields tender as a pushed peach" for particular notice rather amusing, given his later close friendship with Kendrick Smithyman, who abhorred Hopkins with a passion. [And how do you know that, Dr Ross? I hear you ask. Well, it's funny you should ask me that. I recall one day mentioning to Kendrick that I'd been attempting to explaining Hopkins to some Stage One students, only to hear from him in reply what overwritten slop he considered it to be. This very line, "tender as a pushed peach," with its obvious homoerotic overtones, came up in the discussion (as I recall) as a kind of final demonstration of Hopkins' lack of restraint or subtlety ...] Sargeson, though himself far less closeted as a homosexual, regarded Hopkins' difficulties in expressing the true nature of his emotions with considerable interest and respect, and it was - paradoxically - more Sargeson's taste in poetry than his insistence on laconic hardbitten prose which would be dominant in the heterosexual Duggan's later, more baroque prose works ("The Magsman's Miscellany", for instance). It's not suprising, I suppose, that the name "Hopkins" does not appear in the index of Ian Richards' otherwise magisterial To Bed at Noon: The Life and Art of Maurice Duggan (AUP, 1997). It would be difficult to justify a claim that he was an important influence on Duggan at any time. He clearly did read him, though - and with considerable care - and it's rather nice to be able to examine these neat and meticulous annotations at this distance in time, more than six decades later. The back flyleaf of the book contains the following set of lines:

tears Are in his eyes, and in his ears The murmur of a thousand years; Before him he sees Life unroll, A placid and continuous whole

These turn out to be from a poem by Matthew Arnold, "Resignation". The precise connection with Hopkins isn't clear, but perhaps it denotes Duggan's determination, even at this early stage, to carry out Arnold's instructions "to see life steadily and see it whole" - to savour the eccentricities and felicities of so ambitious and complex (yet also so personally and professionally thwarted) a predecessor as Gerard Manley Hopkins.