John Bunyan, Chief of Sinners

Thomas Sadler: John Bunyan (1684)

WHEN at the first I took my Pen in hand
Thus for to write; I did not understand
That I at all should make a little Book
In such a mode; Nay, I had undertook
To make another, which when almost done,
Before I was aware I this begun.

For quite some time after it came out, a number of informed judges were of the opinion that John Bunyan could not possibly have been the author of such works as The Pilgrim's Progress, written while he was in prison for daring to preach without a licence, though not published until 1678, six years after his release.

Their difficulty lay in conceiving how an ill-educated tinker could have conceived so compelling and vivid a work of the imagination: not to mention demonstrated so consummate a command of English prose. That kind of thing was allowable to established wits such as Dryden and Congreve, not to mention erudite eccentrics such as the regicide Milton, but surely not to a member of the working classes!

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

If you've never read it, rest assured that The Pilgrim's Progress is anything but a piece of dry-as-dust soul-searching. The story, with its fascinating echoes of the seventeenth century everyday of Bunyan's own experience, is absorbing enough, but the precise vernacular bite of the language he created to tell it lies behind virtually everything in the plain style which has been achieved since, from Swift to Cobbett to Orwell (not to mention, albeit at somewhat of a remove, Huckleberry Finn).

"The Author's Apology for His Book" is sometimes quoted as an example of the flatness of Bunyan's verse. I can assure you, though (as one who has tried it), that writing with such simplicity and directness as this is not an easy proposition: it is, in fact, much harder than the so-many-couplets-by-the-yard stuff, full of Classical allusions and pompous periphrases, which poets such as Dryden could more or less produce at will:

Neither did I but vacant seasons spend
In this my Scribble; nor did I intend
But to divert myself in doing this
From worser thoughts which make me do amiss.

John Bunyan: Grace Abounding (1666)

What were these "worser thoughts"? The reason that Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), his spiritual autobiography, published while he was still in prison, is such a terrifying book to read is that it chronicles such excesses of paranoid self-scrutiny as to border, at times, on madness. There's one famous passage, in particular, where Bunyan is tempted to commit the sin against the Holy Ghost (what precisely this sin consists of has never been made quite clear, which is one reason it continues to terrify neurotic believers - such as myself as a child - to this day):

One day the temptation was hot upon me to try if I had faith by doing some miracle; which miracle was this, I must say to the puddles, Be dry, and to the dry places, Be you puddles.

This may sound a bit ridiculous, but it was anything but that to Bunyan. He persuaded himself that he had committed this sin, and was therefore damned to hell, and the sufferings he endured make grim (though also, at times, fascinating) reading. Eventually he escaped from this delusion. Prison was nothing beside it. By comparison, he endured twelve years of incarceration in Bedford Gaol with a light heart:

Thus I set Pen to Paper with delight,
And quickly had my thoughts in black and white.
For having now my Method by the end,
Still as I pull’d, it came; and so I penn’d
It down, until it came at last to be
For length and breadth the bigness which you see.

The idea of writing fiction was certainly an alien one to Bunyan. There were no English novels as yet, though prose tales had been told and published as far back as the Middle Ages. He therefore chose allegory as his vehicle.

Well, when I had thus put mine ends together,
I shew’d them others, that I might see whether
They would condemn them, or them justifie;
And some said, Let them live; some, Let them die;
Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so:
Some said, It might do good; others said, No.

Luckily he'd learnt by then to trust his own judgement - or, rather, God's:

At last I thought, Since you are thus divided,
I print it will, and so the case decided.

Admittedly there are one or two aspects of the work which cause a certain amount of consternation nowadays: the cave where the giants 'Pope' and 'Pagan' waylay and eat unwary travellers, for instance, but for the most part the descriptions of the corrupt magistrates of Vanity Fair and the prevarications of Mr. Worldly Wiseman still ring disconcertingly true.

There are many modern editions of his most famous book. I've listed the ones I myself own below. Funnily enough, the most interesting to read is the one which I've put second on the list, the nineteenth-century 'religious tracts' edition, which gives Biblical references and running commentary in little squares of text along the way. It has a real feel of the intensity with which this book was once read.

The Complete Works is a very strange book indeed, with a carved wooden cover and illustrations throughout. It's not terribly convenient to read, but is definitely a thing of beauty in itself:

John Bunyan: Complete Works (1881)

John Bunyan
(1628-1688)

1. Bunyan, John. The Complete Works. Introduction by John P. Gulliver. Illustrated Edition. Philadelphia; Brantford, Ont.: Bradley, Garretson & Co. / Chicago, Ills.; Columbus, Ohio; Nashville, Tenn.; St. Louis, Mo.; San Francisco, Cal.: Wm. Garretson & Co., 1881.


2. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is To Come: Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream. London: The Religious Tract Society, n.d. [1877].


3. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ed. Roger Sharrock. 1965. The Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


4. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come. 1666, 1678, & 1684. Ed. Roger Sharrock. 1962 & 1960. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.


5. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding & The Life and Death of Mr Badman. 1666 & 1680. Introduction by G. B. Harrison. An Everyman Paperback. Everyman’s Library, 1815. 1928. London: J. M. Dent & Sons / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969.


6. Bunyan, John. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. 1680. Introduction by Bonamy Dobrée. The Worlds’ Classics, 338. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1929.


7. Bunyan, John. The Holy War Made by King Shaddai upon Diabolus To regain the Metropolis of the World or, The Losing and Taking Again of the Town of Mansoul. 1682. Ed. Wilbur M. Smith. The Wycliffe Series of Christian Classics. Chicago: Moody Press, 1948.

I wrote this post at the suggestion of my good friend Richard Taylor, who seemed to feel that it might make a good follow-up to my posts on Spenser and Malory. I can't say that I regret having spent so much of my youth reading such ponderous tomes. Now, in my more frivolous middle age, I don't know that I'd have the energy to start on them from scratch (let alone such works as Piers Plowman or Beowulf, which I once had the application to plough through in the original).

Much of Bunyan's work is, however, extremely readable, and The Holy War and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (great title!) are well worth pursuing if you take a liking to The Pilgrim's Progress (both are better than part two of that work, to be honest).

I suppose my main interest in him nowadays is as a predecessor to such literary non-conformists as William Blake and John Clare, however. There's a fascinating tradition there, which I write about in more detail in one of my posts on contemporary English poet Peter Reading.

William Blake: Christian fights Apollyon (c. 1824-27)

Richard Taylor on Celanie

Richard Taylor (2011)

My friend Richard Taylor, author of three books of poems, most recently Conversation with a Stone (Auckland: Titus Books, 2007), who blogs at EYELIGHT and Richard, You MUST try to be more focused -, has sent me the following hitherto unpublished review of Celanie. It was originally intended to appear in Bill Direen's journal of international writing Percutio, but grew beyond the bounds of the issue.

I'm pleased to be able to print it here instead, although it contains some brickbats as well as bouquets. Anyone who's met him knows that Richard is better read in poetry than almost anyone one could name: he does suffer from that unfortunate (and unusual) condition called honesty, however. Anyway, here it is:

Paul Celan (1920-1970)

CELANIE: Poems and Drawings after Paul Celan

(Pania Press 2012)

Belated review of Celanie by Jack Ross and Emma Smith.

Richard Taylor: Michele Leggott speaks
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Celanie was published in December of 2012, so some time has elapsed. This book is a book of translations by Jack Ross from the German to English of many of Paul Celan’s poems sent to his wife at the time in the late 60s and 70s. She was a French artist, so it is perhaps appropriate that another woman artist has added a number of works, semi-abstract that attempt to ‘capture’ the essence of a number of the poems so translated.

After mulling over this book for some time, and wondering how I would approach a review or ‘appreciation’ of the book and some discussion of Celan himself (and losing my notes I made some time ago) I have broken my ‘block’ and am now launching into what will be only the first of some literary essays, reviews, and other aspects of EYELIGHT which I will ‘place’ in this Blog, which I call my ‘control Blog’.

I also want to consider, in time, books by writers I myself have read (not necessarily recent), or by such as Ted Jenner (‘Gold Leaves’) and comment on various events personal and other. I want to emphasise again that this, all of this is still really part of my larger ‘poem’ or art-lit text called EYELIGHT, but that is for the ‘technically minded’!

Richard Taylor: Isabel Michel, Mark Fryer et al.
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

So Celan. Firstly the launch. It was a hot day and Michele Leggott, one of NZ’s most outstanding poets, gave a speech endorsing the book. Her emphasis was on the intensity of Celan’s poetry [and I will ‘cheat’ here, as I have it from the NZEPC] that her, and perhaps Jack’s ‘take’ on these poems, which were sent with letters to Celan’s wife, was that that intensity derives not only from the well known factors of Celan’s life and poetics but that in fact they were essentially ‘love poems’.

His wife, to whom the letters (in French) and poems (in German) were sent, was Gisele Celan-Lestrange. Due to Celan’s deteriorating mental condition (or so it seems) and some violence, they were separated, but perhaps still in love and these were seen as poems of love. Also, if one agrees with J. M. Coetzee, they are poems to God, and they are poems to the Third Reich.

But Michele saw them as great poems to which she – and one would expect this of a poet of her genius – responded with great emotion and acuity. It took me a long time to come to any such appreciation or view of these poems but, and I will get to this later, I have always struggled to get, poetically or psychically one might say, as much from Celan as say, poets such as (for me) the great poet John Berryman (who also was tormented all his life by a family tragedy and also committed suicide by jumping off a bridge). I have also, of course, been deeply moved by works by Primo Levi (not a poet), and Anne Frank. The first survived Auschwitz but not the second, and it might be argued that Celan also failed to survive the deaths of his parents by the Nazis.

Richard Taylor: Karl Chitham, Therese Lloyd et al.
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Coetzee, in the essay "“Paul Celan and his Translators,” from his book of criticism Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000 – 2005 (2007), if we take him literally, might “disagree” with Leggott and others, but he has a point, for in many of these poems, and others I have seen (such as those in Breathturn by Pierre Joris) it seems always that Celan is struggling, not only to encapsulate, more and more complexly and riddlingly (and ingeniously if one can read German which unfortunately I cannot, but this has been reported by those who can): more and more desperately it seems his ‘messages in bottles’ (as Scott Hamilton, when he first ‘introduced me’ to Celan, said someone had said of his works) are complex cries for some kind of redeeming meaning in the world that, with the loss of his parents, and millions of fellow Jewish people, and the fact of his tragic love-hate of the language that, for him and his parents had been, not only their main spoken language, but a language of a great culture of Goethe, Rilke, Mann and such as Richard Strauss, and earlier, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven (and yes, Nietzsche and Wagner) and so much else (including maybe my own favourite pre-war German poet Georg Trakl).

These, or some of these artists and writers, were only some of those that Celan’s parents had loved. But they had been murdered by Germans.

This left Celan to reinvent himself and attempt to continue, alone, without parents, and unable for probably deep psychological reasons (and because of a gathering storm of conflict in his own mind as a creative writer, torn between his intense need to write), to avoid writing in German. It was the main language he had used already to write poetry prior to the horrors of WW2. And he was primarily a poet, but a man, aggrieved, and thus deeply conflicted. In my own opinion he thus began a long conversation with himself and God, or to whatever and whoever one feels is 'out there'. However, this is from a relatively limited study of Celan on my part, as well as the aforementioned view of Coetzee.

Celan’s early poem, the famous "Todesfuge" [Deathfuge], is hauntingly powerful and an indictment of Nazi Germany, and was a cry of protest to Germans and others. However it was perhaps so strange, or read too soon after the war (at poetry gatherings) that it wasn’t understood in many cases, and Celan was accused of ‘sounding like Goebbels’. But it is not. It is simply a great poem and goes for the jugular.

Richard Taylor: Jack reads
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

However, Celan was not only a ‘political poet’, he wanted to write poetry of language and meaning. He did so, and became one of the greatest modernist poets. His poetry (mostly in German) has been deeply analysed. Someone, reviewing Jack and Emma’s book, felt that there needed to be more explanation of the complexity inherent in that original German. That Ross could have pointed out that the word ‘Farben’ means colour but refers to the company that made the gas that killed the Jews.

Perhaps, and indeed a larger book may have had some such discussion and analysis, but that we have this translation here means that a reader, regardless of their knowledge of German, or what Celan was ‘about’ has the means to gain some (possibly further) insight into the (admittedly difficult and sometimes perhaps too prolix or ‘tortured’ – although that ‘tortured’ or ‘burnt’ nature tells us something about the poems and the poet, so perhaps not ‘too’) strange poetry of Celan. The critic might have mentioned the word ‘Mandel’ which means ‘almond’ and also refers (probably) to the Russian poet Mandelstam and to the scent of the gas, which was, apparently, like that of almonds.

And the gas killed at least 6 million Jews. Mandelstam and many other intellectuals faced a similar if stranger holocaust in Stalin's Dictatorship of the USSR.

Richard Taylor: Jack reads some more
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Celan’s parents and the Jewish people dig their grave in the air in the early "Todesfuge":

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master
from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then
as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one
lies unconfined

Emma Smith: Drawings from Celanie (2012)

However, Jack Ross and Emma Smith’s book has his later, more complex, but concentrated poems, and includes Smith's haunting images of what are abstracts or semi-abstracts modeled on a sheep’s skull. These make it seem almost as if we are looking into the soul of Celan: this book seems to me to do much.

Not all the poems are so good, and as far as I can tell, the German translations veer (as often with Jack Ross’s deceptive methods) to the quotidian. Yet the simplicity, or apparent simplicity that sometimes results, is not only an (possibly inevitable) effect of such a translation from the German. And, indeed, even in the earlier poems of Celan, there was an increasing move away and toward complexity and simplicity and an urge toward the almost knot-like seethe of language messages and codes which we see in Celanie. And these poems or 'messages in bottles' are speaking to the reader, as if the writer was talking to the reader but looking past into the distance.

And, as he said to his wife, who, it seemed, had great difficulty with his poems, these poems will become clear as time passes. The analogy is perhaps with Picasso’s statement about his portrait of Gertrude Stein (another great poet of some linguistic complexity and innovation), when she said it didn't look like her, that that was so: “But it will become to look like you”! Dorian Grayish! Indeed, will become. Celan insisted that his poems would come to be understood.

Richard Taylor: Jack keeps on reading
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

But many remain obscure, and perhaps can only be fully appreciated in the original German. In this respect I have far less trouble appreciating the poetry of Rilke (especially of the extraordinary superb Duino Elegies) or Georg Trakl, another tortured being who committed suicide, dismayed at the terrible suffering he witnessed as a doctor in WW1 (for which see further here).

Trakl is more ‘expressionist’ and perhaps slightly less inner driven (he was lumped with the so-called Hermetic school, although that perhaps oversimplifies his work, especially as it is not too clear if such a unified ‘movement’ or school ever existed.) Rilke too is more expansive.

But none of these writers benefited from reading Laforgue, great poet, but saved also by his clever satire, although influenced somewhat by Whitman. Thus many of the contemporaries of T. S. Eliot, who did discover Laforgue, as perhaps in his own way, Auden of The Orators was to use the writing of Stein. But neither of these was so close to blood: to war, to the Holocaust, the terrible Shoah.

Richard Taylor: Richard von Sturmer, Mark Fryer et al.
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Were Trakl and Celan too close to these events? The Italian poet Ungaretti, also like Trakl in WW1, wrote poems of great and moving intensity and beauty that are perhaps closer to those of Keith Douglas than Wilfred Owen or even David Jones. But each man or woman caught in the weave of these historic events experiences them in different ways and sees through different eyes.

Celan was not a ‘war poet’ but the effects of the Holocaust and the war are clear. His own reaction was to drive inwards into himself so that it seems to me that John Berryman, who also struggled for his own self’s survival through his art (and terrible alcoholism in his case), is a closer tragic parallel. Both writers, while stylistically rather different, but struggling in similar ways, were deeply read in literature. Celan knew of Rilke, Holderlin, Mandelstam and many of the other great poets. He had married and had a child, and there seemed some hope, but perhaps like Primo Levi, the trauma, the loss, were ultimately all too much.

It must be noted that Ross has included an excellent and revealing introduction showing how he came to translate these poems and the importance that these poems were to Celan, sent with letters to the woman he loved.

Richard Taylor: Winding down
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

Jack Ross and Emma Smith have created a singular book in Celanie which also refers to that area of Paris that Celan lived in, the places he moved to. Also working here is the concept of translating these poems that accompanied personal letters, that in fact were written at a time when Celan was struggling with a deep disorder in himself, and was to take his life not too long after the last of these were written, has brought another valuable addition to the culture. By culture I mean not only that of NZ, but the world, and to literature everywhere Celanie can reach.

That these are not always ‘great’ translations, is perhaps real, but, in reading Breathturn (by Pierrre Joris who is German-English speaking and spent some years working on that book), I didn’t find all those poems (or translations of poems) to move me in many cases (some did) is much the same as I find with Ross’s work. Perhaps one misses the German. It seems good to see the German (or the original language) beside the translated text even if one has little knowledge of that language. And perhaps more of the letters. Perhaps. But I feel the criticisms were a little too severe. I also find that perhaps only 20 of the 100 or so poems affected me strongly. But of Breathturn there was perhaps a similar ratio.

Richard Taylor: Michele Leggott, Kelly Malone et al.
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

What is the difficulty? Perhaps it is the ‘failure’ of translators. It is true that Ross combines an attempt to render the ‘urgency’ or Celan’s lines with an almost casual, almost idiomatic style that might upset purists, but there is merit in that, by this method, the reader’s attention is shifted from any fixation on autobiography. And many will see this as the central fact of Celan, which might move them too much from the poems themselves. His life and experiences count for a lot, that is obvious, but what we see here is a struggle, not only with the self and history, but for love and for art. Art was his legacy: a sometimes infuriatingly in-spiraling vortex of reforged suffering. But it was more than that. It was a unique art of language, and even of play, the play of light against shade.

But more likely than any supposed failure (all translations of any work will be different, so failure is not the term): it is perhaps simply the difficulty of translating a poet who, not in all cases, but many, uses a complex of double or triple meanings, obscure references, ambiguities and other Modernist devices, such as sound, and neologisms, often in the form of compound words. Such things can be nearly impossible to render into another language. It is at least a hard task. But this is the nature also of the writer, as his difficulty, his coding of complex linguistic references and sound puns etc, was that of an innovative poet, who, like Stein, was struggling to create something new. His brief was not only to record history or his own anguish (although that is there), but history and a unique art. The art of his poetry, some permanence. His way of surviving as a Jew and a human being.

It seems to me, that while I struggle with Celan, this is not a new thing, and Celanie is a book I am glad to possess.

Richard Taylor: Emma Smith
[Celanie launch (25/11/12)]

The art of Emma Smith is a great addition to it and the work is rightly the work of Emma Smith and Jack Ross together. Art and language interact.

Emma Smith (2011)

Copernicus & Mallock: Two Bizarre Books

[Owen Gingerich: The Book Nobody Read (2004)]

[Tom Phillips: A Humument (1980 / 2012)]

Sometime around noon on the 5th of November, 1966, the artist Tom Phillips was poking around an old warehouse in London, looking for bargain books:

When we arrived at the racks of cheap and dusty books left over from house clearances I boasted to Ron [Kitaj] that if I took the first one that cost threepence I could make it serve a serious long-term project. My eye quickly chanced on a yellow book with the tempting title A Human Document. Looking inside we found it had the fateful price. 'If it's a dime,' said Ron, 'then that's your book: and I'm your witness.' ['Notes on A Humument,' p.370]

45 years and five editions later, A Humument stands as a curious monument to human ingenuity. "Energy worthy of a better cause," as my father might say. Or energy very sensibly employed, perhaps? Who can say ...

Phillips does goes out of his way to mention the interesting fact that the warehouse stood on "Peckham Rye, where William Blake saw his first angels", and it was (of course) Blake who once reminded us that energy is "eternal delight."

•

Sometime in October 1970, Historians of Science Jerry Ravetz and Owen Gingerich asked themselves whether (at the time or since) anyone had actually read Nicolaus Copernicus's ground-breaking text De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex [Six books on the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres] (1543). The question was prompted by the rather bad review Arthur Koestler gave the book in his 1959 classic The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. Koestler referred to Copernicus's book as an "all time worst seller" and "the book that nobody read." But was he right?

How can you actually tell if anyone read a book or not? A simple name on the fly-leaf is insufficient. I have lots of books in my collection which I've never read. Some of them are reference books which it's useful to have but which I'll never read cover to cover - others I'm been meaning to get to but haven't yet done so.

Nor is quoting from the book any kind of irrefutable proof. Plenty of people read the summaries and advertising copy for Copernicus's book, but did the do more than dip into its somewhat forbidding contents?

The answer (according to Gingerich) is marginal annotations. His conversation in York that Saturday evening in 1970 prompted him to look up a copy of the first edition at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. It turned out to be annotated from beginning to end, and thus suggested the interesting counter-question:

If it was read so rarely, why was the very next copy I chanced upon so full of evidence of a most perceptive reader, who had marked innumerable errors and who had worked his way through to the very end, even past the obscure material on planetary latitudes that brought up the rear of the four hundred page volume? [The Book Nobody Read, p.422]

And so began on what the blurb to his book calls "a thirty-year odyssey to examine every one of the hundreds of surviving copies of the original in order to prove [Koestler] wrong."

Once again, it sounds a rather unlikely way of spending one's time - fantastically arduous and demanding an almost insane level of precision in recording every detail of every copy (labour which eventually resulted in An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), to which The Book Nobody Read is a rather more lighthearted companion volume).

Along the way, Gingerich discovered a huge amount about the sixteenth-century scholarly networks, transcending religion and politics, which united the astronomers and mathematicians of the age, and which enabled them to copy and supplement each other's notes in the margins of copy after copy of De revolutionibus. Koestler's rather flippant and dismissive remark was proved not only to be "dead wrong" (as Gingerich puts it), but to mask a whole complex of fascinating (and hitherto undreamt-of) connections.

•

[The Book Nobody Read]

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

1. Gingerich, Owen. The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. 2004. Arrow Books. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2005.
2. Rosen, Edward, trans. Three Copernican Treatises: The Commentariolus of Copernicus / The Letter against Werner / The Narratio Prima of Rheticus. Second Edition, Revised with an Annotated Copernicus Bibliography, 1939-1958. 1939. New York: Dover Publications, 1959.
3. Ptolemy. The Almagest / Copernicus. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres / Kepler. Epitome of Copernican Astronomy: IV & V; The Harmonies of the World: V. Trans. R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Charles Glenn Wallis. Great Books of the Western World, 16. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
4. Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. 1959. Introduction by Herbert Butterfield. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1972.

[A Humument]

Tom Phillips (1937- )

1. Phillips, Tom. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. 1980. Fifth Edition. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2012.

•

So what's my point in comparing these two projects? They both seem to have occupied roughly the same period of time: forty-odd years for Phillips, thirty-odd years for Gingerich. Both have as their central object the illumination / elucidation of a single book: in Gingerich's case a (famously unreadable) scientific classic, in Phillip's a (not very widely read) Victorian novel, W. H. Mallock's A Human Document (1892).

Of course in the one case Gingerich's labours could be said to have cast light on an obscure sector of intellectual history; whereas Phillips' indefatigable cutting and pasting and colouring casts light on nothing except the strange workings of his own mind.

Or do they? Surely the mere popularity of Phillips's book - in contradistinction to Mallock's, which failed miserably to equal the success of his earlier satirical novel The New Republic (1877) - tells us something about the spirit of our own age, our postmodern distrust of the sanctity of the text, our singular dedication to game-playing and chaos?

Both projects are equally crazy. I guess that's what I'd like to suggest to you. I know that Gingerich's comes accompanied with all the panoply of "hard" science - the graphs, the tables of analysis, the famous names of the past - but then Phillips doesn't lack those scholarly trappings either. The fascinating notes on his project reprinted at the back of his book refer to it as "'a Gesamtkunstwerk in small format'", though a "full Variorum Edition may remain a dream (or a posthumous project) since the wheel is still turning and the odd spark still flies off" [p.383].

Both books, Phillips' and Gingerich's, are in fact "Human Documents" of the most fascinating kind: they show the unexpected consequences of immersion in virtually any product of the human imagination. The fact that they're both consecrated to particular copies of a single book doe tend to endear them to bibliophiles such as myself, but one can easily see how the principle could be extended.

In his lifetime, as the caricature below suggests, Mallock had a hard time reconciling the conflicting claims of religion and science. it's hard to know if he would have been pleased to see one of his novels at the centre of so arbitrary an embellishment as A Humument, but I doubt that he would have failed to see the point. If we can have no clear idea in advance of the end results of our investigations, then it doesn't pay to reject any possible line of enquiry out-of-hand. This applies to Phillips' work every bit as much as Gingerich's.

['Spy': Is life worth living? (Vanity Fair, 1882)]

True, one might call Copernicus an intellectual giant, Mallock a dwarf, but it's salutary to remember that - during their respective lifetimes - the opposite was the case. Mallock was widely read and well regarded, while - to those very few who had heard of him - Copernicus was known only as an obscure cleric in a small town on Poland's Baltic coast, who exhibited the strange quirk of devoting his spare time to celestial mechanics.

One book I found lurking in the back of a second-hand shop in Whangarei; the other was lent to me by inveterate poet and text-experimenter Richard Taylor. I leave it to you to guess which was which.

[Nicolaus Copernicus (Toruń, 1580)]

Oh, and last but not least: a Happy New Year to you all ...

•

Haut 80s

[Fritz Lang, dir.: Metropolis (1927 / 1984)]

I recently bought myself a copy of Metropolis with the notorious "disco" soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder. I agree that this sounds a bit quixotic, given the fact that the "complete" restored version of 2002 has now been succeeded by an even more complete version based on the recent discovery of an uncut print of the original film (before it was edited down for American release) in an obscure film archive in Buenos Aires.

What can the Moroder version - with its garish tinting, subtitles substituting for captions, and stills standing in for certain scenes - have to offer to us now? Well, probably not all that much unless you remember sitting, breathless, in the Civic Theatre in 1984 as the opening titles appeared and that drum beat began! You had to be there, I guess.

[Brigitte Helm as Maria]

Isn't Brigitte sublime? Only nineteen, with the huge eyes and waif-like face of the silent era star, she really comes to life when she has to embody the "evil Maria" robot ... Click here and you can relive the moment for yourselves, courtesy of YouTube.

[Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang]

Incidentally, don't you think the Magus / Inventor Rotwang looks a bit like our own Panmure poet and visionary Richard Taylor? Especially in some of the more recent posts on his mind-bending blog Eyelight ...

[Richard Taylor]

Watching the movie again got me to thinking about that whole feel of the 1980s: its strange mixture of grunge and glam, the apocalyptic tone of its art. For me, I guess the style of the decade had been set once and for all a couple of years before, in 1982, when I staggered out into the daylight after having first experienced the sublime vistas of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The monstrous ziggurats dominating the skyline, the crowded Asian noodle-bars and ceaseless rain in the streets below ... On the one hand, it seemed like the landscape of a dream; on the other hand, I felt as if I'd literally seen the future. It was grimy, it was noir, it was retro, it was intensely melancholy - and I loved it.

[Blade Runner (1982)]

I couldn't believe it when the film promptly disappeared from the big screen, all the local reviewers prattling on about how "gloomy" it was, and awarding all their stars to whatever other vacuous space opera was uppermost at the time. What was it, in fact? E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial? How well that's stood the test of time!

For a while it was as if no-one understood that a new decade had begun, that a new sensibility had been announced by Scott's film. The seventies cast a long shadow. When I finally left for London in 1986, though, I saw that the revolution had indeed taken place. "Thatcher means Death" was the first piece of graffiti I saw shortly after landing: the monsters were real, the Tyrrell corporation really was in charge. The Cold War was still on, you must remember, and the most powerful country on earth was ruled by a zombie, controlled by his freeze-dried wife and her astrologers ...

I remember going to see a screening of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin at the filmhouse in Edinburgh in about 1987. The film itself had been too thoroughly assimilated by subsequent cineastes to excite me very much ("Life," as Marianne Moore once memorably remarked, "is not like that.") But they'd put another Russian short on before it, to fill out the programme.

Now that film, "Chess-Crazy", totally blew my mind. It was completely stupid. The plot consisted of everyone being so mad on chess that they'd start playing it at the drop of the hat: peasants, businessmen, soldiers and all. The hero, on his way, to see his girl, is constantly distracted by random chess matches wherever he goes.

[Chess-Crazy (1925)]

It was a silent film, from the mid-twenties, I suppose, and yet the costumes looked completely up to the minute. The hero was wearing baggy trousers, a blazer, a striped jumper - I saw him in bars in town every day. The heroine looked pretty fetching in her vintage dress. Even her hair was in haut 80s style ...

I know that people see the 80s now as all Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper: tight shirts and mullets or kooky fringes - but that's not how it looked at the time. Our revolution may have been betrayed ... what was it all for, in any case? Better fashion solutions? 1989, and the fall of the Berlin wall, the velvet revolution in Prague, did seem more like the end of something than a new beginning. It was bizarre to hear that the Americans seemed to be under the impression that they'd won something, that now they could really start ruling the world ...

Those of us who'd really assimilated Blade Runner knew better than that. If there was change coming, it was coming from the east: initially from Japan, but then from China itself, the sleeping giant.

What, after all, had the Americans won? Who were their enemies now? YOu can't have a military-industrial complex without a dastardly foe. For a while their movies seemed as if they were literally casting about for villains - no more commies, no more SMERSH, no more sinister commissars ... They tried "separatists," drug cartels, "terrorists" until they came up with the perfect solution: Islam. That's worked out really well for all of us, hasn't it?

Blade Runner had it right, once again. "I have seen the future and it works" - that silly remark by an American journalist about the Bolshevik revolution - had to be transformed, for my generation, into "I have seen the future and it's dark" ...

[Sean Young in Blade Runner (1982)]


•

Launching Leicester Kyle's Collected Poems

Leicester & his trademark fire-engine-red Land Rover
(Buller, 2000)

It's five years to the day since poet, priest and ecological activist Leicester Kyle (1937-2006) died in Christchurch hospital. I doubt that he'd recognise the city of his childhood if he could see it today. That former Christchurch is now a thing of the past ...

The main purpose of this post, though, is to advertise the Leicester Kyle website which has been set up by his literary executors (David Howard and myself) to make his writings more accessible in the future - both to those already familiar with his poetry, and those who've never heard of him or it. My model was Kendrick Smithyman's online Collected Poems 1943-1995 site, edited by Margaret Edcumbe and Peter Simpson, and designed expertly by Brian Flaherty.

There are eleven books (at present) listed under the name "Leicester Kyle" in the NZ National Library database, together with another earlier prose pamphlet indexed under "L. Kyle". My present intention is to put all of these up on the website. We'll be supplementing them with another eleven or so works which are not presently available in any public collection, though.

I certainly can't rival the snazzy production values and (very useful) search engine facilites on the Smithyman site. This will be another attempt on my part to make free space on the internet work for us as well as the corporate giants. What I've done, then, is to set up two linked websites:

• The first site - Leicester Kyle - is basically confined to bibliographies and indexes. It aspires to provide complete listings of all primary and secondary material by and about Leicester. It gives details of each of his works, together with notes, and a table of contents hyperlinked to:
• The second site - Leicester Kyle Texts - which will provide complete texts of each of the major books, together with a selection of the shorter poems.

The first site is as complete as I can make it at present, without further information and research. The second site is more of a foretaste at present, with only a few of his books up in full.

Basically, if you just want to read through one of them, you can go straight to Leicester Kyle Texts, and scroll down reading it page by page (I've also included a jpg illustration of each page, in order not to obscure any details of the original formatting. If you click on these pictures individually, they will enlarge).

If, on the other hand, you want to see the table of contents for a particular book, together with any notes or details from letters about it, you can go to the Leicester Kyle index site and click on the relevant link.

The list below will tell you which works are available already, and which ones will be going up over the next few months. I'll try to keep it continuously updated as each website grows:

•

Contents

[* = listed in the NZ National Library Network]

Accessible online:



1. Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World (1996-2001) [A4: iv + 96 pp.]

   This work, a kind of Zukofskyan verse epic about the life and times of William Colenso ("Koroneho" in Maori) has never before now been published in full, although four extracts from it appeared in Alan Loney's magazine A Brief Description of the Whole World between 1997 and 1998.




2. A Christmas Book (2000) [A5: 26 pp.]

   After moving to Millerton, an old mining town on the West Coast of the South Island, in 1998, Leicester developed the habit of producing a small book of poems every Christmas to send to his friends and family. This is the first of them, and one of the most charming and accessible of all of his works.




3. * The Great Buller Coal Plateaux: A Sequence of Poems (2001) [A5: 31 pp.]

   Despite its unpretentious packaging, this little chapbook is one of Leicester's most important publications. It was an attempt to harness deliberately the propaganda power of poetry and the Arts in general against a large-scale commercial mining company. Of course we're constantly being told by every authority in sight that this is wrong, that Art should not be "political", that it's concerned with "higher things" etc. etc. But are there any higher things than the systematic despoliation of an untouched environment? The destruction of any joy or profit that any of us or our descendants can ever take from it in the future? This is an important book, and I'm glad to be able to make it accessible here to more people than were ever able to read it in Leicester's lifetime.




4. Dun Huang Aesthetic Dance (2002) [A4: 10 pp.]

   One of Leicester's shorter poetry sequences. This was posted to me by him as a separate pamphlet, or else I might simply have included it in the "Shorter Poems" section of the site. It reflects his strong interest in syncretic religious traditions and in their bizarre and excessive linguistic registers.




5. * Things to Do with Kerosene (2002) [A5: 34 pp.]

   Another one of his Christmas books, this one compiled from Aunt Daisy's depression-era household hints. One of the most entertaining books he ever put out, its publication was partly funded by the Buller Community Arts Council. It was launched by the Mayor, and got a great reception from the West Coast locals (by all accounts).




6. * Panic Poems (2003) [A5: 39 pp.]

   Another Christmas book, this one concerned with the mechanics of his life in Millerton. His move there from Auckland was motivated (at least to some extent) by the death of his wife Miriel in 1998, so there must have been a lot of issues for him to work through. Others in similar circumstances may well find this book very helpful.




7. Living at a Bad Address (2004) [A5: 38 pp.]

   The last of the full-scale Christmas books. This one is an anthology of shorter poems with brief introductions. Some of them are very moving to read, particularly those concerned with his daughter Anna's funeral.




8. * Miller Creek (2004) [A5: 22 pp.]

   This is a beautiful gem-like little book of poems and pictures designed to draw attention to the ecological devastation caused by rivers poisoned by runoff from the mines. Joel Bolton's sketches are colourful and deft and the whole production deserves a wider audience, I think.




9. Pamphlets & Ephemera

   This section includes the first and last of his Christmas letters and pamphlets, sent to various correspondents - principally Richard Taylor - between 1996 and 2005.




10. Miscellaneous Prose

    A preliminary gathering of Leicester's reviews and critical introductions to the various publications he edited or contributed to in the last ten years of his life.




11. Secondary Literature

    Articles, poems, reviews and tributes by a variety of people, among them Stu Bagby, Tony Chad, Scott Hamilton, David Howard, James Norcliffe and Richard Taylor. Again, this is a preliminary collection which will undoubtedly grow in the future.




12. Bibliography

    As complete a listing as I can make at this point of his published works.

•

Not yet available:



1. * Options (1996-1997) [A4: 63 pp.]

   Leicester's first long narrative poem: "This set of four poems examines, with a wickedly satirical eye, a series of religious and mystical vocations. We have Evagrius, the fourth century ascetic; Jeremy Taylor, the seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholic Jeremiah ...; Fran, a thirteenth-century Franciscan mendicant transported to contemporary Northland; and finally Maria, the celebrated nineteenth-century dancing prophetess of Kaikohe." [Jack Ross, "Leicester H. Kyle: Prophet without Honour." Pander 6/7 (1999): 21 & 23.]
   
   [posted online Monday 19/12/11]




2. * State Houses (1997) [A4: 43 pp.]

   This is a more personal piece: "interweaving tragic family history with the history of the first state houses in the Christchurch suburb of Riccarton. Leicester's 'dream-like recollection' of childhood 'is set against the ideology of which the state houses were part' (hence the Bauhaus epigraph, and the various diagrams and maps), but that 'progress is provided by a ritual house-blessing, an alternative ideology, which moves the family group from room to room, part to part, of reality'.” [Pander 6/7 (1999)]
   
   [posted online Monday 12/12/11]




3. * A Voyge to New Zealand: The Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better (1997) [A4: 117 pp.]

   This is an actual nineteenth-century emigrant's journal, which has been "teased ... into strange shapes on the page and in the imagination. It reads as an affectionate tribute to the spirit of our pioneers, a fin-de-siècle version of Curnow’s 'Landfall in Unknown Seas'.” [Pander 6/7 (1999)]
   
   [posted online Tuesday 20/12/11]




4. Heteropholis (1998) [A4: 52 pp.]

   Some readers see this as Leicester's masterpiece. "It concerns a fallen angel, who has descended to earth in the form of a small green native gecko (species: Heteropholis gemmeus). This gecko has been caught by an apartment-dwelling Aucklander, and makes observations on his habits, on the weather (a subject of particular concern to angels, who are used to looking down), and on sundry other matters. ... It is, nevertheless, a profoundly serious and, indeed, partially autobiographical work." [Pander 6/7 (1999)]
   
   [posted online Friday 16/12/11]




5. * A Machinery for Pain (1999) [A4: 37 pp.]

   This is his first book written entirely at Millerton: "a ... sequence on pain management, prompted by close personal experience" - the death of his wife Miriel, in particular.
   
   [posted online Monday 14/11/11]




6. * A Safe House for a Man (2000) [A4: 86 pp.]

   The blurb copy I provided at the time read (in part) as follows: "The landscape of Leicester Kyle's long semi-narrative poem ... will be familiar to most of us: separation, self-analysis, acknowledgment of loss. There's little that's recondite or difficult about this poetry, and yet the craft and subtle intelligence of its author come through in every line. The title poem is accompanied by two others: The Araneidea - an oddly disturbing account of how to 'make good-looking, sightly cabinet objects' from live spiders; and Threnos - a moving elegy for the poet's wife Miriel."
   
   [posted online Saturday 10/12/11]




7. * Five Anzac Liturgies (2000) [A4: 45 pp.]

   Calum Gilmour, whose Polygraphia Press published both this and A Safe House for a Man, wrote of it at the time: "This set of poems contains five pieces addressed to the South Island towns of Hawarden, Waikari, Rotherham, Culverden and Waiau respectively. Each poem is based round the theme of Anzac Day and how it affects each place addressed. The focus is on Anzac, on the people involved, on the significance of the remembrance in each place."
   
   [posted online Tuesday 29/11/11]




8. King of Bliss (2002) [A4: 46 pp.]

   This book contains Leicester's thoughts on the subject of psychoanalysis, prompted by his experience of various therapies for clinical depression which he underwent while still living in Auckland in the 90s.
   
   [posted online Thursday 1/12/11]




9. A Wedding in Tintown (2002) [A4: 36 pp.]

   This is a portrait of a place, revealed through a blow-by-blow account of a wedding celebration. Leicester wrote to me about it: "The wedding is one I took here in Millerton, and this is a faithful account of its proceeding; I've set it in Tintown, a now vanished mining village on the Plateau ... My aim was to describe the events, with little overt interpretation, and by means of a low tone to - by contrast - heighten and clarify the colours of the day. ... My hope is that the peculiar culture of the occasion just might make it interesting enough to be a good read."
   
   [posted online Tuesday 15/11/11]




10. 8 Great O’s (2003) [A4: 46 pp.]

    This is a set of interlinked pieces connected by themes of religion and ritual. Leicester's preface specifies that the main text "is an adaptation of the last page of a pious biography, ‘The Life of St. Mary tbe Harlot’, written by her uncle, Ephraem, deacon of Edessa, around the year 370. ‘The Word' is a family story. 'The Great 0 's' is a term taken from the Advent liturgy."
    
    [posted online Friday 18/11/11]




11. Anogramma (2005) [A4: 64 pp.]

    An amusing and lighthearted piece of autobiography, which records Leicester's first job after leaving school: as a "horticultural apprentice at the Christchurch Botanical Gardens ... All apprentices were required to attend monthly meetings of the Christchurch Botanical Gardens Horticultural Apprentices Mutual Improvement Society" and much of the text is devoted to an account of these meetings, together with some details of the 50 year reunion of the apprentices.
    
    [posted online Saturday 10/12/11]




12. * Breaker: A Progress of the Sea (2005) [A5: 78 pp.]

    Leicester's last book, and one of his most ambitious, "suggested by the Catalogue of Armed Forces in the second book of the Iliad. I read it in Pope's translation, and was fascinated by the whole idea and the poetry of it. The fascination led to a desire to do something of the kind myself and, casting about for a local battle, I hit on the idea of our self-defence against our eroding coast." says Leicester in his preface. The illustrations, by John Crawford, are very fine.
    
    [posted online Sunday 20/11/11]




13. Collected Shorter Poems: 1 (1983-1998) [A4: 428 poems & sequences / 568 pp.]

    This is a list of all the poems and sequences included in the first of the the two large "Collected Poems" fileboxes which David and I inherited from Leicester's estate, and which contained (in approximate chronological order) all of the individual poems (outside published books) he wished to preserve. I'll be putting up a bare selection of these poems to start with - more over time, if demand warrants it.




14. Selected Shorter Poems: 2 (1998-2006) [A4: 318 poems & sequences / 387 pp.]

    This includes all of the poems written after Leicester's move to the West Coast, mostly contained in the second of the the two large "Collected Poems" fileboxes. I'll be putting up rather more of these poems than the ones in the first box, as befits their superior quality (in my opinion, at any rate).




15. Five Millerton Sequences [A5: viii + 48 pp.]

    This is a preliminary selection from the Millerton poems, chosen in consultation with David Howard, and intended both as an advertisement for this site and (hopefully) to revive some interest in Leicester in general. Few people have ever had the chance to read any of these poems before, after all. I hope you enjoy them. The book will be launched sometime next year - details to be announced on this blog (and hopefully elsewhere as well).
    
    [posted online Friday 16/12/11]




16. Prose Fiction
    • * I Got Me Flowers: Letters to a Psychiatrist [A5: 56 pp.]

    Leicester began as a prose writer, in the 1970s, and had some success with this and some of his other stories before switching to poetry in the early 1990s. This "excessively Jungian" (as Leicester himself described it) novella from the mid-70s is the finest of his extant works of fiction - or at any rate that was my impression when I read through them all while staying with Leicester at Millerton in 1998.
    
    [posted online Sunday 13/11/11]




17. Chronology

    As complete a listing as I can make of the known events and dates of Leicester's life.
    
    [posted online Saturday 12/11/11]

•

So there you go. I know it's a bit crazy to entrust all this material to the tender mercies of blogspot, but you can be sure that I'll be keeping sedulous backups and printouts of everything as well.

•


The view from Leicester's verandah at Millerton
[photographs: Jack Ross (2000)]