The True Story of the Novel

Margaret Anne Doody: The True Story of the Novel (1996)]

The other day I was looking around a second-hand bookshop in Takapuna when I chanced upon a copy of this book, The True Story of the Novel, by Margaret Anne Doody. It cost me $16.

[Professor Margaret Anne Doody (University of Notre Dame)]

I guess I picked it up with a certain frisson, because it suddenly occurred to me that someone else might have finally written the book I'd been secretly planning myself for years: an alternative history of the novel, written in opposition to Ian Watt's classic (but somewhat reductionist) The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957). For years I'd been irritated by Watt's implication, codified into dogma by generations of lazy critics, that Samuel Richardson was somehow the "first novelist", and Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded(1740-41) thus the "first true novel."

Ian Watt: The Rise of the Novel (1957)

What of Daniel Defoe, you may ask? Surely he (at least) predates Richardson? After all, Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719. More to the point, what of earlier long prose fictions such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688)?

Thomas Southerne: Oroonoko (1776)

Well, the received wisdom appears to be that works such as Defoe's and Behn's (and all the other novel-length narratives, going back all the way to the Latin and Greek writers of the early Christian era) were simply romances, rather than actual novels.

And what, you may ask, is the precise distinction between a "romance" and a "novel"? A novel - we're told - is basically realistic in focus, preoccupied with the psychology of its characters, and (as a form) is associated with the growth of individuality and self-consciousness in the early bourgeois era (roughly: from the late seventeenth, early eighteenth century onwards).

Unfortunately this doctrine makes little sense of works such as Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605 / 1615) which was written as a basically realist parody of chivalric romances, but which has nothing in paricular to do with any kind of bourgeois revolution, and is - in fact - contemporary with Shakespeare's experiments with psychology and self-consciousness (Hamlet (c.1603), for instance).

Nor does the distinction between "romance" and "novel" really work in languages other than English. In French, for example, the word roman means "novel" as well as "romance." In Spanish novela can means "short story", "novel" or "romance" (though the word romanza also exists, but stands basically for a "romance novel" - in the Mills & Boon sense - or else a libro de caballerías: romance of chivalry).

Don Quixote, mind you, however influential it is and continues to be on world literature, is not exactly a psychological novel in the modern sense. But psychology and self-consciousness certainly figure in prose fiction long before that. What of Lady Murasaki's masterpiece The Tale of Genji (c.1000), for instance?

Margaret Anne Doody: The True Story of the Novel (1996)]

Given my fascination for the subject, how did I avoid coming across Professor Doody's pioneering work before? It was, after all, published in 1996. And, leafing through its pages, I saw that she was far more well-informed than I on the fallacies in the existing model of the "rise of the novel." Not only was she a specialist on Richardson, having written and edited various critical books about him and his contemporaries, but she'd also taught herself Greek for the purpose of better understanding the classical novels which are the main focus of her study.

What's more, a brief glance at her index disclosed references to the Chinese and Japanese novels which I consider indispensable to any real discussion of the growth of the "novel" genre over the past two thousand years.

There isn't much about the Tale of Genji or the Red Chamber Dream (c. 1750) in her book, though, beyond the mere invocation of their names. A true scholar, Doody tries to avoid discussing in detail any work she is unable to read in the original.

Sun Wen: Scenes from The Red Chamber Dream

Which brings me to the main point of this post. Was I disappointed to discover that I'd been gazumped? That this book had been sitting there on the shelves all the time I was gathering materials towards my own "true history" of the novel? Not really, no.

Actually, in a sense, it was more of a relief. What had put me off getting to work seriously on the project was precisely this question of linguistic competence. I can read a few European languages with reasonable fluency, but not Greek or even Latin. Nor do I speak any Oriental languages. I lack the Persian and Arabic (and even, possibly, Sanskrit) which would be required to chart that part of the novel's journey to world dominance. I did study Old Icelandic once, and could probably work my way through some of the sagas with a bit of help, but not with any real facility.

Professor Doody would know what I'm talking about. I'm sure that she's aware that her own alternative genealogy of the novel - from Greek and Latin novels, through medieval romances, to the eighteenth-century novel of sentiment - leaves out vast tracts of the story: the Indian and Persian frame-story, transplanted into Arabic in the form of the 1001 Nights; the late medieval Icelandic family sagas; the glorious tradition of the classic Chinese novel; and - last but not least - the sublime Genji and its successors in Japanese literature.

Learning Greek

As she herself puts it, though: "Endeavouring to learn Greek took a while; I cannot say I have mastered it, I do not 'have' Greek, but I am no longer reliant on translators" [p.xviii]. Let those who have never tried to learn another language scoff at this statement. The idea of having to learn six or seven more difficult languages as a mere preliminary to a closer study even of the acknowledged prose masterpieces in these very separate (and complex) traditions would be enough to daunt a Burton, let alone an indifferent scholar such as myself! I salute Professor Doody for the immensity of the labour hidden behind this sentence, but I can't follow her example - not in any feasible universe known to me, at any rate.

Doody goes on to comment: "It is to be hoped that Chinese and Japanese writers will tell their own 'Story of the Novel' and explain the traditions and tropes of their own fiction. After all, there have been contacts between East and West through the millennia; if there had not, the West would have no novel, or a different one" [p.xix].

In any case, even the partial revisionism of Doody's own book, seeking to reinscribe the so-called "Classic Romance" into the mainstream of the history of the Western Novel, appears to have met with a good deal of resistance. In the notes to her final chapter, she outlines some of the more extreme reactions:

J. Paul Hunter in Before Novels [1990] expresses a sense that getting rid of the categories "Novel" and "Romance" would be "dangerous." He expresses a fear of a "new literary history built thoughtlessly on the rubble of the old" (4: my italics). A change in the categories would be a kind of bomb, reducing structures to leveled rubble and encouraging the mushrooming of jerry-built hutments. ...

When I gave a talk on the early novels and their influence on eighteenth-century literature at a meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies in Providence, R.I., in April 1993, I was asked during the question period "why I wanted to bash everything down to one level?" I had not hitherto thought of my thesis in that way, but I could see that, to anyone used to the Rise of the Novel as a story of hierarchy and spatial erection, my narrative could seem like a loss of attributed eminence. I tried to reply that my own spatial metaphor was different - I saw it in terms of leaping over a paddock fence and escaping into a larger space. [p.529]

I think that that gives some idea of what Doody was up against when she published her book in the mid-nineties. Most professors have already written their "Rise of the Novel" lectures and course-notes, and few want to dust them off and reconsider them unless they absolutely have to.

I myself have noticed a glazing-over of the eyes among some of my colleagues when I suggest to them that any true understanding of the novel must take not simply Pamela, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote into account, but also the four classic Chinese novels (The Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, Journey to the West and the Red Chamber Dream), as well as the Genji - not to mention the Arabian Nights and the Sanskrit Ocean of the Streams of Story (both of which have a number of novel-length stories incorporated within them).

I can therefore sympathise with how Doody felt when she informed her scholarly audience that they couldn't really begin to comprehend the "bourgeois novel" they'd all devoted so much time to without a much more intimate knowledge of Apuleius, Chariton, Heliodorus, Longus, Lucian and Petronius. Goethe and Fielding knew these texts well - can their latter-day interpreters really afford not to?

Abraham Bloemaert: Charikleia and Theagenes (1625)

It's interesting, in this respect, to observe that the wikipedia article on the Genji remarks that it is "sometimes called the world's first novel, the first modern novel, the first psychological novel or the first novel still to be considered a classic." But even the Genji is long predated by Apuleius's Golden Ass - surely just as much of "a classic"? And, if you dispute Apuleius' status as a psychological novelist, what of Heliodorus? If you haven't ever read him, you really should.

There are various reasons for the neglect of Margaret Anne Doody's book, mind you. The explicitly feminist colouring of her analysis, useful though it is as a focus for her argument, gives other, more partisan critics an excuse to ignore or disprize it. What's more, the book is not of uniform merit throughout. Her clear and cogent account of the Ancient Novel in Part One, is followed by an equally persuasive historical section charting its influence up to (and including) the Eighteenth Century. After that, however, comes an 150-page attempt to identify the common tropes inherent in all novels, ancient and modern, which is inevitably more speculative, and which goes off at times into religiose musings which completely lack the persuasive solidity of the first two sections.

Part Three: Tropes of the Novel is extremely interesting, mind you. She breaks them down into seven basic clusters of event / description / plot construction:

1. Breaking and Entering: "Novels often begin with a 'break' or a 'cut.' These, or analogous words - 'pierce,' 'sunder,' 'shatter,' etc. - are likely to be found in the first paragraphs." [p.309]


Trajan's Column



2. Marshes, Shores and Muddy Margins: "Beaches and marshy margins are omnipresent in fiction ... The place between water and land functions most obviously and overtly as a threshold. Its presence signifies the necessity of passing from one state to another. It is liminality made visible and palpable." [p.321]


The Water Margin (1973)



3. Tomb, Cave and Labyrinth: "Taphos or taphros - tomb or trench, sepulchre or grave. The place of sepulture can be envisaged as miniature house of the dead ... or as the pit, the ditch. The place of sepulture gapes for novel characters, and they not uncommonly find themselves in the hole. The matter may be treated any number of ways by novelists: it may indeed form the stuff of comedy ..." [p.338]


Jim Henson: Labyrinth (1986)



4. Eros: "Eros (or Cupid) as a trope of fiction is a multiple and subtle signifier, even when introduced in apparently incidental embellishment. He stands, usually, outside the story proper, yet to come upon him is to encounter him, an experience always important for the reader, whether the character is conscious of Eros or not. The encounter itself fulfills the trope." [p.359]


Marta Dahlig: Eros & Psyche



5. Ekphrasis: Looking at the Picture: "Although other kinds of creative and created things may be invoked over and over again within any given novel, the visual image has a special place and a peculiar status ... It reminds us of the visible world, and thus of the sensible universe, but it also speaks of stasis, and artifice - of things out of nature. It transforms us into powerful gazers ..." [p.387]


Nicolas Poussin: Et in Arcadia Ego (c.1637)



6. Ekphrasis: Dreams and Food: "A novel customarily contain both tropic Moment (or Stations): the Art-work in ekphrasis, and the Dream. Both are tropes of contemplation. The Artwork helps us with recognition of our familiar cultural world, our public images, historically valuable modes of imaginative apprehension ... The Dream is not only a greater challenge to our powers of interpretation, but also a disturber of all sorts of systems of separation, or taxonomies. In the Dream .. we make contact with imagination, and with the imaginative element in all consciousness." [pp.406-7]
   ... "Whereas dreams issue (supposedly) from the deep 'interior' of the character, enabling us to posit a vivid and complex psychic life, and hence a human reality 'within' the character, food disappears 'into' the supposed physical interior of the character, persuading us that a character has a solid physical life." [p.421]


Alice Rutherford: My Boyfriend Dreams of Food (2012)



7. The Goddess: "The Novel as a genre ... has an innate desire to allude to the female deity, or rather, to allude to Divinity as Feminine. The multitude of references to goddesses in the ancient novels represents no peculiar aberration. Nor does the emphatic appearance of a goddess in any individual work of fiction indicate a peculiar swerve from Novel into "Romance." [p.439]


Milo Manara: The Golden Ass (2007)

For myself, I find this kind of thing almost entirely unpersuasive. There's really no way in which so sweeping a hypothesis - a set of tropes which seems to include virtually everything in the heavens above and the earth below - could ever be subjected to empirical testing. For every piece of evidence adduced, another contradictory one could easily be supplied.

It's rather a nice poetic notion to encapsulate the totality of the "novel" over the ages in such a way, but it would probably have been better to publish this section separately - it lacks the authority of Doody's assault on the "received wisdom" about the novel, and therefore has the effect of opening her up to attack as just another universalising crank.

My own ideas on the subject are rather simpler. It seems to me that long prose fictions have, in each of the novel traditions I've looked into myself, have developed out of other, prior genres: Historiography, above all; Biography; Autobiography (particularly in the form of "Confessions" of various types); and from the extension of the folktale into the form of the Frame narrative (as evidenced by the Arabian Nights or Boccaccio's Decameron).

The lines inevitably become a bit blurred in places, but it's possible to distinguish at least seven distinct traditions of extended prose fiction (which I would call "novels", though not everyone would agree with me) within world literature:

Panchatantra Relief (Java)



1. The Eastern Frame-story [c.1st millennium BCE to 18th century CE]:
   • The Jātaka Tales (c.4th century BCE)
   • The Panchatantra (c.3rd century BCE)
   • The Book of Sindibad [Syntipas] (c.1st century BCE)
   • Alf Layla wa Layla [1001 Nights] (c.8th-14th century)
   • Śivadāsa: Vetala Panchavimshati [25 Tales of the Vampire] (c.11th century)
   • Somadeva: Kathā-sarit-sāgara [Ocean of the Streams of Story] (c.11th century)
   • Narayan: Hitopadesha (c.12th century)


Alexander Romance (c.17th century)



2. The Greek and Roman Novel [c.1st century BCE to 4th century CE]:
   • Pseudo-Callisthenes: The Alexander Romance (c.360-328 BCE)
   • Petronius: Satyricon (c.27–66)
   • Chariton: Callirhoe (mid-1st century)
   • Achilles Tatius: Leucippe and Clitophon (early 2nd century)
   • Apuleius: The Golden Ass (c.125–c.180)
   • Longus: Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century)
   • Heliodorus of Emesa: Aethiopica (3rd century)


Lady Murasaki (c.978 – c.1014/1025)



3. The Japanese Monogatari [c.9th-18th century CE]:
   • Konjaku Monogatarishū [Anthology of Tales from the Past] (c.9th-12th century)
   • Taketori Monogatari [The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter] (10th century)
   • Ochikubo Monogatari [The Tale of the Lady Ochikubo] (late 10th century)
   • Murasaki Shikibu: Genji Monogatari [The Tale of Genji] (c.1000)
   • Heike Monogatari [The Tale of the Heike] (12th century)
   • Ihara Saikaku: Kōshoku Ichidai Onna [The Life of an Amorous Woman] (1686)
   • Ueda Akinari: Ugetsu Monogatari [Tales of Moonlight and Rain] (1776)


Ramon Llull (c.1232-1315)



4. The Medieval and Renaissance Romance [c.12th-16th century CE]:
   • Ramon Llull: Blanquerna (1283)
   • Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo: Amadis de Gaula (1304 / 1508)
   • Giovanni Boccaccio: Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1343-44)
   • Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d'Arthur (1485)
   • Joanot Martorell: Tirant lo Blanch (1490)
   • Francesco Colonna: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili [Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream] (1499)
   • François Rabelais: La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (1532-64)


Íslendingasögur (13th century)



5. The Sagas of Icelanders [c.13th-14th century CE]:
   • Snorri Sturluson (attrib.): Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar [Egil's Saga] (c.1240)
   • Brennu-Njáls saga [Njal's Saga] (late 13th century)
   • Eyrbyggja saga [Saga of the People of Eyri] (c.13th century)
   • Gísla saga Súrssonar [Gisli's Saga] (c.13th century)
   • Grettis saga [Grettir's Saga] (c.13th-14th century)
   • Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða [Hranfnkel's Saga] (c.13th-14th century)
   • Laxdæla saga [Saga of the People of Laxárdalr] (c.13th century)


The Three Kingdoms: The Peach Garden Oath (1591)



6. The Chinese Novel [c.14th-18th century CE]:
   • Luo Guanzhong: Sānguó Yǎnyì [The Three Kingdoms] (c.1400)
   • Shi Nai'an: Shuǐhǔ Zhuàn [The Water Margin] (late 14th century)
   • Xu Zhonglin: Fengshen Yanyi [Creation of the Gods] (c.1550s)
   • Wu Cheng'en: Xī Yóu Jì [Journey to the West] (1592)
   • Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng: Jīn Píng Méi [The Golden Lotus] (1618)
   • Wu Jingzi: Rúlínwàishǐ [The Scholars] (1750)
   • Cao Xue Qin: Hóng Lóu Mèng [The Red Chamber Dream] (late 18th century)


Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote (1605)



7. The Modern Novel [c.17th century CE to the present]:
   • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605 & 1615)
   • Madame de La Fayette: La Princesse de Clèves (1678)
   • Aphra Behn: Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87)
   • Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719)
   • L'Abbé Prévost: Manon Lescaut (1731)
   • Samuel Richardson: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740)
   • Henry Fielding: An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741)

All in all, I think it's time to forget about mercantile capitalism and bourgeois individualism leading to the rise of the novel as we know it. If you want to read Pamela, do so for its own sake, not because it's the first anything. We may have only a fraction of the novels which were actually written during antiquity, but even so it's pretty obvious that Petronius and Apuleius were writing at the end of a long process of development, not the beginning ...

Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)

Miss Herbert:

or, Some Thoughts on the
Art of Fiction

[Adam Thirlwell, Miss Herbert (2007)]

I bought a book the other day called Miss Herbert, by Adam Thirlwell, an up-and-coming young English novelist. It purports to be a part-novelistic / part-critical study of the phenomenon of style in fiction, as revealed (principally) through the medium of translation.

Those are all positive terms in my book, so I was happy to pay the twelve dollars odd it cost (fortunately I found it second-hand). There were lots of pretty facsimile pages from Madame Bovary and Tristram Shandy and Ulysses and other classics of the smart-arse canon scattered about the text. What's more, it had another book soldered onto the back, like one of those old pulp science-fiction doubles - only in this case it was Thirlwell's new translation of the original French version of an early short story / autobiographical vignette by Vladimir Nabokov, "Mademoiselle O".

How strange I haven't heard of this delightful book before, I thought. Surely so ingenious and amusing a volume would have come up somewhere?

Thirlwell, Adam. Miss Herbert: An Essay in Five Parts. 2007. Vintage Books. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2009.

So I went online to check it out. The American edition was apparently entitled Miss Herbert aka The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, ... & a Variety of Helpful Indexes, which sounded ominously reminiscent of some of the books which used to be sent out by the Readers' Digest. Even more disturbing, though, was the nature of some of the reviews it had received (linked to from Thirlwell's own Wikipedia page):

The design department at Cape has gone into overdrive to produce some lovely layouts, with headings in red ink and the enlarged title pages of famous books - Madame Bovary, Ulysses, War and Peace - reproduced at pleasing intervals. Only a major charmer could secure this level of collaboration for such a monumentally annoying book.

- Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer (4/11/07)

Ouch! So what's so "monumentally annoying" about it, then? Mars-Jones (incidentally, what a great name!) goes on to explain:

His conceit (the word is the right one) is that his book is a sort of inside-out novel, whose characters are famous writers. Miss Herbert ["Flaubert's niece had a governess, apparently, called Miss Herbert, who worked with him on a translation of Madame Bovary, now lost"] is full of affected references to itself ('according to the logic of Miss Herbert' and so on) ... This may be baby talk suited to high table rather than high chair, but baby talk it is. When an academic intellectual writes that he'd like to think that Chekhov read Diderot, but it doesn't really matter if he didn't, since 'through Miss Herbert, they're friends', the only response must be a curling of the lip or the toes.

Cringe-makingly coy, appears to be the verdict. Which is in itself a little disconcerting in a book ostensibly about style. Thirlwell's own style doesn't come out of a cornflakes packet, exactly, but it does bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the annoyingly trite repetitions which bedevilled poor old Kurt Vonnegut's last, weakest novels ("so it goes," repeated at regular intervals, was the principal offender).

You can tell that Mars-Jones has conceived a real dislike to Thirlwell:

Thirlwell mentions more than once his similarity in shortness of stature to Pushkin, and emphasises at one point (as if to quiet frantic fans) that he is a less important person than Gombrowicz or Flaubert.

More to the point, though, he sees the basic problem is that Thirlwell is trying to write in a pretentiously simple, would-be epigrammatic style, when what he has to say is not original enough to warrant it:

Thirlwell's version of literary history is pretty standard, underneath the preening and the straining for effect. He leads us down virgin trails littered with crisp packets and undergraduate essays. Cervantes prefigured the modern novel. Austen does irony. Kafka's fictions are structured as dreams ... Early drafts tend to be inferior to final versions, but illuminating for that reason. All this is painfully mainstream.

It's tempting to keep on quoting, as Mars-Jones's is an extremely thorough-going and devastating hatchet job, the kind which should at least make you toy with the idea of simply sticking with the day job. He concludes by mocking Thirlwell's own attempts to "improve" on various standard translations of sentences in French and Russian (the only two languages Thirlwell can read with facility, it appears):

Thirlwell quotes a single sentence from Eleanor Marx-Aveling's translation of [Madame Bovary], and offers his own improvement. Her sentence is: 'Emma leant forward to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails.' His goes: 'Emma leaned forward to see him, scrunching with her nails the plushness of her box.' He adds, 'It isn't perfect; but it's a start.'

Sorry, that won't do. You can't claim, in a 500-page book, that you haven't had the time to produce even a single finished sentence of Madame Bovary in English. And is Thirlwell's version even an improvement? The neutrality of Marx-Aveling's sentence has been sacrificed, without much gain in terms of reproducing the assonances of the original ... The slight awkwardness of Thirlwell's version even hints at an obscene double meaning.

His re-translation of Nabokov from French to English isn't much cop, either, I'd add on my own behalf. Too obviously and self-consciously attentive to banal details of French word order.

Was there a chorus of dissent at the time, I wondered? After all, the book jacket of the paperback is peppered with high-culture endorsements from the likes of Tom Stoppard ("an interesting fact on every page") and A. S. Byatt (" a work of art, a new form") - it's even "the year's most richly pleasurable reading experience" claims the middle-brow Sunday Telegraph. Alas, no, it would appear not. The Times reviewer had this to say:

Thirlwell compares himself to Proust, declares that he is “going to take over” from Tristram Shandy, generously allows that “Joyce was right” and that “sometimes I agree with Eugenio Montale”. Such proprietorial presumption is perhaps meant to be comic but sounds ominously owlish.

- Tom Deveson, The Sunday Times (11/11/07)

He's a bit too up himself, is the conclusion, and over what?

At one point, we are told that the rhymes in Eugene Onegin “are not a side of fries. They are part of the Big Mac” ... We hear about “the grand French critic Paul Valéry”, “the Russian novelist and poet Alexander Pushkin” and “the famously stylish poet Stéphane Mallarmé”. It seems that Thirlwell can’t decide whether he is writing “an inside-out novel”, producing a look-at-me-mum firework display or instructing those less fortunate than himself in how to appear well read.

I guess that's the risk of publishing books like this in the UK. The reviewers have an annoying tendency to have read all those terrifyingly obscure and knotty texts one flourishes like war-scars.

Strangely enough, these swinging reviews didn't put me off (after all, I did invest $12 in the book - enough to make me want it to have been a good buy). I therefore set out to write a post disputing these uncharitable attempts at character-assassination. And it all seemed to be chugging along nicely enough for the first few chapters (or "books", as they're called in context - kind of like Tristram Shandy with its multiple volumes, you see). Stoppard is right. There is "an interesting fact" on (almost) every page, and Thirlwell does have some quite useful things to say about the characteristics of French and Russian, at least - if he can't read German or Czech or Portuguese or (I guess) Spanish there's no great shame in that. It does make it a bit difficult when he's making fairly precise points about texts in those languages, though.

Then I came across a couple of warning signs:

First was his chapter on "The Problem of the Small Language." His case in point being the (great) Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis:

The history of Machado de Assis's translations ["he translated the writing which the public in Rio de Janeiro wanted to read. They wanted romance, so he gave them romance, He translated the poetry of French romantic poets, like Lamartine. He also translated the bad libretti of bad romantic operas'] ... demonstrates the problems of provincial taste: they show what he was up against. [223]

There are a lot of interesting assumptions embedded in this passage. I guess that comment about the "problems of provincial taste" makes me see red because I am, myself, such a provincial. How can we delude ourselves, living in so obviously provincial a backwater as New Zealand, that such a sentence isn't meant to apply directly to us? Give the public whatever romantic tosh they want, that's the rule of life in the provinces ...

To do him justice, that isn't quite what Thirwlell means. He goes on to explain, of Machado de Assis: "Like every novelist, he had to cope with his own provinciality, and learn an international technique." The stricture is meant to apply to everyone (though when one thinks of the kind of slop that was being churned out in the great cosmopolitan centres of London and New York in the 1880s, it hardly seems necessary to be so elaborately condescending to the poor inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro). His basic message is clear, though: "provincial bad, international good" - it's a bit like Animal Farm: "four legs good, two legs bad."

What's so wrong with being provincial? (Take careful note, fellow provincials):

As with every value, there is a flipside, a shadow, a secret twin to his value called cosmopolitanism. the opposite of cosmopolitanism is provincialism. And provincialism is emptiness. It is an absence of subject matter; a lack of local ephemera. [378]

Hmmm. Kind of like the dark side of the force, is it, then, Adam? The opposite of goodness and niceness and the international (or, here, "cosmopolitan") way? This seems a bit of a stretch from Borges's claim, in his famous essay on "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", which Thirwell quotes approvingly, that the less self-conscious "local colour" writers include, the more truly "local" they will become.

"A lack of local ephemera." I suppose that's one way to understand the idea of being "provincial." Another way to see it would be to note how obvious it is to Thirlwell that he himself could never be accused of being "provincial". He was, after all, born with advantages. He lives (and publishes his books) in London, and is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. How much closer to the centre can you get? No wonder it's so obvious to him that he should be the one lecturing the rest of us on Pushkin, Sterne, Nabokov, and Flaubert. Who knows if provincials will even have heard of such figures? We're probably still reading Warwick Deeping and Hall Caine. The great movements of history might otherwise completely pass us by.

The main problem with the kinds of authors people wanted to read in Rio de Janeiro in the 1880s (and which Machado de Assis was therefore forced to translate), though, was their sentimentality. These two words, "provincial" and "sentimental", make up Thirwell's axis of evil:

As he grew older he continued to translate - more of the French romantics, Baudelaire's translation of Poe's romantic poem 'the Raven', more romantic sentimental poetry.

Everything came via French and everything was romantic. It was just like Socialist Realism. [223]

I can't quite work out from this if Baudelaire is another one of those "romantic sentimental" poets or not. The basic problem with this kind of "sentimental" work is, I gather, that it aspires to be heartfelt. It lacks that fundamental international technique which Thirlwell revealed with a flourish in his previous chapter, "On Collage": irony.

So against these two negative values ("a flipside, a shadow, a secret twin") provincial and sentimental, we should set the shining lights of internationalism and irony. How fascinating! How original! How ... every stage one literature course since roughly 1955 ... How, fundamentally, boring and shop-soiled. Welcome to 1912, Adam! You've finally caught up with Messrs Joyce and Pound (if not yet with M. Proust).

Don't get me wrong. Thirlwell is not an idiot. He knows - he must know - how much of a cliché this is. Just because it's a cliché, though, does that make it untrue? Well, yes, I'm afraid it does. Even in Thirlwell's own terms. Later in the book he quotes approvingly from Nabokov's defence of Dickens's Bleak House "against the charge of sentimentality":

Nabokov deftly asked his students to distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality. 'I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is.'

People like Thirlwell, you mean? After all, he's just been denouncing sentimentality as a kind of cloying, ubiquitous stylistic imposition, "like Socialist Realism." Now, however, he's back in the camp of the angels:

... this is a crucial distinction for Nabokov. It's a crucial distinction for anyone, bit is is especially an important distinction for Nabokov - whose style, with its harsh elegance, its fierce nostalgia, is based on an often overwhelming sensitivity to pain. It is based on sentiment. That is why, simultaneously, it denounces the sentimental. [414-15]

Another term occurs to me here: one of Nabokov's favourites, one he hoped to transfer bodily into English: "poshlost." And what is poshlost (Naobokov preferred to spell it "poshlust") when it's at home (it unfortunately doesn't figure in Thirlwell's very full "index of themes and motifs" let alone his slightly slimmer "index of real life")?

Poshlust is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol. 1944: 70.

Actually a running definition might just involve quoting those phrases of Thirlwell's attempting to characterise Nabokov's style: "its harsh elegance, its fierce nostalgia, is based on an often overwhelming sensitivity to pain. It is based on sentiment. That is why, simultaneously, it denounces the sentimental."

"Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature" — this is Nabokov's list of definitions, remember, not mine: "harsh elegance / fierce nostalgia / overwhelming sensitivity to pain" ... Give us a break! Cut the crap. We get the (obvious) point about the difference between sentimentality and sentiment (or feeling), but where does it leave your earlier trite distinctions? Isn't it all this a bit hashed-up, unclear, self-contradictory as a set of critical distinctions? Well, yes:

At this point, I think I need to contradict myself, ever so slightly.

You don't say!

As soon as the aesthetic is taken as seriously as Nabokov takes it, then something odd occurs. The aesthetic becomes something else as well: it becomes its opposite. As soon as the aesthetic is taken seriously, then it becomes an ethics, also. [417]

You can see why Adam Mars-Jones got quite so mad over this kind of patronizing babytalk. "The pace of the book is artificially slow, in a way that seems to be asking, 'Am I going too fast for you?' Many readers will find themselves gritting their teeth and saying, 'Not at all. Rather the reverse.'"

And yet it's rather an interesting point that Thirlwell is making, despite his irritating way of expressing it:

The effects of an absolute aesthetics - a concern for detail, for ironic particularity, for the suspension of immediate or conventional moral judgement, for the restoration to objects of their correct and small size - are ethical. They constitute a small, amateur but sincere ethical system - which teaches respect for the minor, the overlooked, the unsure.

For me, that passage is worth the whole rest of the book. It's interesting to notice that he suddenly forgot the babytalk and just started writing ordinary grown-up prose instead once he'd launched into it. This small (provincial?), amateur but sincere (sentimental?) ethical system which is the inevitable by-product of an "absolute aesthetics" is the reason why it's worth having these kinds of discussions in the first place. It's also the point of writing the kinds of novels that constantly interrogate - and accordingly undermine - their own aesthetic (or theoretical) assumptions.

Throughout this book I have been arguing for a separation of ethics and aesthetics. But I am not sure how easy this is to maintain. Unfortunately, irrevocably, the two turn into each other. The desire for an absolute aesthetic ... is itself a form of romanticism. It is absolute as well. It is a wish not to acknowledge the imperfect, haphazard truth about real life.

Quite so. Thirlwell has learnt on the job, while making his series of - finally bogus - distinctions between 'irony' and 'sentimentality', 'artifice' and 'real life', 'provincialism' and 'internationalism', but he has, finally, learnt. "Unfortunately, irrevocably, the two turn into each other."

One of the authors he quotes from most often and most approvingly, Witold Gombrowicz, specialized in the dissection of immaturity. Ferdydurke (1937), his first and still most influential novel, drags its hero back to school and the horrors of young idealism and puppy love in a kind of paroxysm of shameful and embarrassing detail. I fear that Thirlwell may look back on his own book (he was only 28 when he published it, after all) rather similarly - like an awful aberration of youthful arrogance and over-enthusiasm.

I can't bring myself to regret having persevered with it to the end, though. Something was definitely achieved. True, it's hardly Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, but then Nabokov had had more than twenty years to think about the art of fiction before he wrote those, and they did have a more straightforward function than Thirlwell's book. Nabokov's notes were directed to undergraduates in a university course, which entails a lot of contextual explanation and also has the advantage of demanding intense attention to detail and to pedagogical clarity.

The audience for Thirlwell's book is harder to define: people who've already read Proust and Joyce (if not Hrabal and Gombrowicz) and already know a good deal about literature? People who haven't read anything much, to whom all this is news? The tone of the book really has to accommodate both groups, with all the gradations in between, and that's not an easy balance to achieve.

It may have been a dumb idea to take on so ambitious a scheme at so early a stage of his own career as a novelist, but perhaps if he'd waited he'd never have written anything at all. I think that would have been a shame. There are a lot of good things in this book, a lot to be learnt from it - one of the main lessons, however, is how careful you have to be not to patronise and irritate your readers when all you really wanted was to have a conversation with them.

[Eamonn McCabe: Adam Thirlwell's room (2008)]

Why John Masefield?

[Masefield as a youngster]

It's always been a bit difficult to explain (let alone justify) my choice of topics for a Masters thesis. "The Early Novels of John Masefield, 1908-1911" -- it sounds like one of those candidates for world's dullest books (Worms and Their Ways, by a "grub"; or Lesser-Known Aspects of Pre-Kantian Metaphysics, by J. M. Snotwood, MA, D Phil, &c. &c.) ...

I remember running into Terry Sturm in the corridors of the Auckland English Department shortly after I'd received permission to undertake this daring piece of original research - "So you're the Masefield man!" he boomed. When I admitted to Sebastian Black that I owned copies (mostly first editions - not that many of them actually went into second editions) of all 23 of Masefield's novels, he remarked that not many people could make that boast ("Perhaps nobody in the world," he added, with a sepulchral chuckle).

So why John Masefield? I guess the real reason is that I grew up on him. The first of his books I really read was The Midnight Folk (1927), a madly-eccentric children's book about pirates, hidden treasure, country houses, talking animals, fox-hunting - oh, and witches. Its hero, Kay Harker, went on to star in a later book for slightly older children, The Box of Delights (1935), which added the delights of time travel and Ramon Lull's philosophy to the heady mixture. There's a particularly good scene where Kay joins a circle of stone-age Britons keeping off wolves with their spears. Wolves are indeed one of the dominant motifs in the book - it's actually subtitled "When the Wolves were Running". What is it really about? I'm still not sure, but it had the effect of waking me up to the heady attractions of folklore, mythology and the past.

As time went by I started to read his poetry (he was, after all, the British Poet Laureate from 1930 to 1967, so that was really his speciality). Old-fashioned, yes, but dedicated to story-telling above all. Before the First World War he was considered one of England's most controversial and hard-hitting poets, mostly because of the runaway success of his 1911 poem The Everlasting Mercy, which first introduced the poetry-reading public to the delights of truly extravagant bad language:

[John Masefield: The English Review (1911)

You closhy put!
You bloody liar! etc. etc.

"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read" (Hilaire Belloc).

As time went by, I started to accumulate more and more books by Masefield, and became more and more attuned to the paradox of an author whom so many people had vaguely heard of, so celebrated and widely-read in his day (judging by the relative ease with which one could collect his work from second-hand bookshops), and yet whom nobody now seemed to rate or even feel curious about.

And yet he was good! Or so he seemed to me. Perhaps not good in a conventional, card-carrying sense (by now I'd picked up all the standard Modernist shibboleths about the sinfulness of adjectives and the intrinsic unreliability of narrators), but so intensely idiosyncratic and strange that his work really couldn't be said to to resemble anything else I'd ever read or even heard about.

I was looking through an anthology on the writing of the sea one day when I stumbled on an extraordinary passage from one of Masefield's novels (Sard Harker (1924))which described the hero first fighting his way through an almost animate swamp, then reaching the beach only to promptly stand on a stingray's tail. It was nearly ten pages long, and so bizarrely circumstantial that I almost felt my own foot curl up in sympathy. Pain, frustration, futility - these were Masefield's principal novelistic stock-in-trade. He would devote fifty pages of a book to the attempt to find someone's address at the drop of a hat. It seemed to be axiomatic with him that committees were set up to frustrate enquiry, that all officials were stupidly obstructive, if not actively malevolent, and that if anything could go wrong, it would - only far worse than you'd anticipated.

Actually his world sounded rather like a heightened version of the tormented wasteland that I myself inhabited (at the time), so you needn't think I took to him because I like sweeping descriptions of ships at sea ...

[John Masefield: Sea-fever: Selected Poems. ed. Phlip W. Errington (2005)]

Masefield hated the sea. That's one point that's pretty much beyond dispute. It's true he wrote "Sea-fever" (the one Masefield poem everyone can quote from):

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by ...

He was compulsorily apprenticed in the Merchant Navy as a very young boy after the death of both his parents, and his painful experiences on the training ship Conway (as recorded in his 1944 autobiographical volume New Chum) were only surpassed by the sheer horror of going round Cape Horn as a sailor before the mast (as recounted in the 1913 narrative poem Dauber).

He fell ill in Chile (luckily for him) - it was probably a nervous breakdown - and was invalided home. Although he didn't officially leave the Merchant Navy until after he'd travelled to New York to join the next ship he'd been assigned to, the attractions of the city were far too much for him, and he never made another voyage except as a passenger. Masefield, then, was no Joseph Conrad - his first book might have been called Salt-Water Ballads (1902), and he might have continued to mine his early life on the bounding wave as material for the rest of his life (in classic novels such as The Bird of Dawning (1933) or Victorious Troy (1935)), but that's all it was to him - material. He was actualy far happier writing about the English countryside or the wilds of South America (the latter particularly - that time in the hosital in Valparaiso clearly left its mark).

Masefield's first book came out in 1902, and his last, In Glad Thanksgiving in 1967. Over that immensely-long career he published poems, plays, novels, war reportage, and literary criticism with pretty consistent success. When one genre ran dry, he shifted his energies to another. His first two plays The Campden Wonder and The Tragedy of Nan enjoyed immense acclaim when Granville-Barker put them on in 1908. Subsequent dramas failed to repeat the precedent, however, so he shifted his energies to fiction: first grown-up "problem novels" in the style of the day, then (somewhat more successfully, as they were more congenial to him) boys' books. The unheard-of acclaim garnered by the first publication of The Everlasting Mercy in The English Review in 1911 diverted him into writing narrative poems. The War, when it came, saw him working as an ambulance orderly in France, then a writer of patriotic "histories" (including the still-celebrated Gallipoli (1916)).

And so it went on. He came back to novels in the 1920s, when the public's interest in long narrative poems was starting to flag. The last novel he published came out in 1947, after which he stopped writing much except poetry (and letters - the five or six volumes of these which have appeared since his death contain some of his liveliest and most engaging writing).

It's easy to patronise Masefield for his lack of self-conscious intellectualism. He's no no proto-Modernist, no unsung precursor of Joyce or Pound. And yet he was taken pretty seriously by his contemporaries: Hardy, Conrad and Yeats. They read him and saw him as one of themselves. At the very least his career seems to offer an interesting parable in the pitfalls of literary celebrity.

I set out to write about all of his novels, but found the task too vast for a standard-length thesis. By the time one had summarised their plots, there would have hardly have been room for any analysis. Instead my supervisor, Prof D. I. B. Smith agreed to my proposal simply to look at his pre-war career, by turning it into a kind of case-study of a young writer on the make in the Edwardian era. So that's the thesis I wrote. It's awfully long. Two or three times the length one would get away with today, I suspect. But things weren't so strict in 1985.

I suppose then (to paraphrase my friend Scott Hamilton) that Masefield offered me a kind of keyhole on the literary conditions of the early to mid-twentieth century which I could hardly have got by looking at a more conventionally celebrated writer.

I still like his work, though I haven't read any for quite some time. The Box of Delights is well worth a look, though - unless it's one of those books that you have to have read when you were a kid for it still to exert any charm later on.

[John Masefield: Selected Poems. Ed. John Betjeman (1978)]

The Kindness of Reviewers

The latest brief (#36 - The NZ Music Issue (2008): 111-13) includes what seems to me a fantastically generous review of my poetry chapbook Papyri from renowned poet, classical scholar and verse translator Ted Jenner. I guess I was a little afraid what he might say, since he knows Greek and I don't. Also because John Denny's Puriri Press published some of Ted's own Sappho versions in a beautiful little book called Sappho Triptych late last year.

Certainly he finds some things to criticise. Who wouldn't? But the overwhelming impression is of someone who's really taken the trouble to think through the various choices and decisions that go into making a book of poems, however slight the end result may seem. It's clearly a process Ted's familiar with, and he's interested in debating the pros and cons for interested readers.

You can check out some of the main points of his review here. It got me to thinking, though, about my various experiences with reviews and reviewers in the past.

Basically, while I've had a few stinging notices in my time, the really important point is that virtually every time I've put out a book, I've received at least one fascinating, complex, and thorough review from someone who's really devoted a good deal of time and energy to trying to understand what I'm up to.

And I really appreciate it. It's far more than one dares to expect - even once - and to have been so lucky repeatedly argues for a lot more generosity and selflessness out there in the literary world than we're accustomed to expect. Once before on this blog I had occasion to remonstrate with a reviewer (of an anthology which I'd appeared in, not edited), and that gave rise to quite an interesting conversation between the two of us. Generally speaking, though, I tend to think that it's a mistake to react too publicly to notices: good, bad or indifferent. It tends to amuse onlookers far more than it benefits oneself.

I feel I should make an exception for those thorough, generous and scholarly reviewers I've mentioned above, though - so here's (unfortunately very truncated) honour roll of particularly shining examples:

• City of Strange Brunettes (Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 1998):

John O’Connor, “Pound’s Fascist Cantos, by Jack Ross, Perdrix Press & City of Strange Brunettes, by Jack Ross, Pohutukawa Press.” JAAM 12 (1999): 126-28:

… Ross’s versions are alive with Pound’s energy and convictions; they spark and jar ...

• Nights with Giordano Bruno (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000):

Richard Taylor, “Review of Nights with Giordano Bruno.” brief 19 (2001): 14-17:

… transpierced throughout with sex, suffering, and a burning joy and queerness.

• Chantal’s Book (Wellington: HeadworX, 2002):

Olivia Macassey, “Jack’s Book.” brief 27 (2003): 101-2:

He skilfully – and with almost an appearance of accident – lays bare the twitching nerves of the genre.

Tracey Slaughter, “Points on a graph of Chantal.” Poetry NZ 26 (2003): 100-07:

… diagrams of dead sciences encrust the page with the algebraic mystery of cells …

• Monkey Miss Her Now (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004):

Scott Hamilton, “After the Golden Weather: Jack Ross and the New New Zealand.” brief 32 (2005) 115-19:

As postmodern as it is parochial, Monkey Miss Her Now drags a venerable tradition into the strange new worlds of twenty-first century New Zealand.

• [editor] Kendrick Smithyman. Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian (Auckland: The Writers Group, 2004):

Paula Green, “Review of Kendrick Smithyman, Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian.” brief 32 (2005) 108-12:

Smithyman’s versions represent a tender conversation with the Italian poems …

• Trouble in Mind (Auckland: Titus Books, 2005):

Katherine Liddy, “Something Strange: Reviews of Coma by William Direen, Trouble in Mind by Jack Ross & Curriculum Vitae by Olwyn Stewart.” Landfall 212 (November 2006):

Underneath the eye of the sun, in the murky territory between Life and Death, the story unfolds like a papyrus emitting the spores of an ancient curse.

• The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Auckland: Titus Books, 2006):

Gabriel White, “Planet Atlantis – The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis: A Novel by Jack Ross.” [24/11/06]:

The Da Vinci Code gets geometric cum stain on it.

• [editor, with Jan Kemp] Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland: AUP, 2006):

Peter Wells, “In Praise of the Poetic Voice.” Weekend Herald: Canvas (July 15, 2006) 31:

The book, and the CDs, are taonga. The result of a mission by poets Jan Kemp and Jack Ross, they reproduce the poetic voices of our past. …
But what is the bigger story of this collection? It is a treasure of voice and poem. I am hoping it is the beginning of a longer series. Every school should have one. There is much to ponder on, to celebrate here. And people searching for poems for significant occasions could do well to buy this book. It is of our people.

• [co-editor, with Jan Kemp] Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland: AUP, 2007):

Graham Brazier, “Ferries at the bottom of my garden.” Weekend Herald: Canvas (11 August 2007) 29:

I will, in my twilight years, press the leaves of the puka puka tree (book) until dried to a parchment and write what I hope may be a slight but heartfelt tribute to what appears in this collection.

• [editor, with Jan Kemp] New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland: AUP, 2008):

Pat White, “A Delight for Poetry Lovers: Review of New New Zealand Poets in Performance.” Wairarapa Times (20/8/08): 15:

Without a doubt the monumental task Kemp and Ross set themselves must have grown to something more than they imagined possible. Now however, the results speak for themselves ... As editors Kemp and Ross deserve the nation's thanks for a task completed well.

• To Terezín (Auckland: Massey, 2007):

Scott Hamilton. “To Terezin and Back.” Reading the Maps (June 14, 2007):

"I think you may look back on it in twenty years and not feel dissatisfied with it."

Jennifer Little, “Visit to Czech Nazi Camp inspires Massey Author.” Massey News 9 (16 Hongongoi, July 2007) 9:

To Terezín is an entrancing model of how travel writing can encompass a range of genres – essay, verse, images – as well as wider themes of ethics, philosophy, literature, art and history ...

• E M O (Auckland: Titus, 2008):

Jen Crawford, “Launch Speech: E M O, by Jack Ross.” Titus Books launch, Alleluya Café, St. Kevin’s Arcade, K Rd, Auckland (19/6/08):

EMO reminds us – shocks us – into a new consciousness that we are not without means, not without tools, not without a language for understanding and engaging with the full substance of our world, if we choose to acknowledge it. Because we have our stories, and our stories are talking to us.

So is this long list designed purely as a device for skiting about how many good reviews I've got from my friends? Partly, I suppose. I mean, wouldn't you feel a bit proud - both of the reviews and the friends?

But that's not entirely it. Some of these writers I've never even met. Mainly it's meant as a heartfelt thank-you to a group of people who took the - not inconsiderable at times - trouble to try and work out what an almost wilfully obscure-looking text was trying to tell them. Above all, to encourage them to keep up the good work.

They certainly serve as an inspiration to me to go the extra mile when I'm given someone's work to review. I only hope that I sometimes live up to their example.

bad appendix

[cover image: LynneMaree Patterson, "Twice as Good" (detail)]

Well, a good time seems to have been had by all at the big Titus booklaunch in K Rd last night. It was wonderful to see so many old friends, and to meet some new ones, too.

My novel EMO was introduced eloquently and insightfully (in my humble opinion, at any rate) by Jen Crawford. Then it was my turn to introduce her book bad appendix. This is what I had to say about Jen's poetry:

I guess there might once have been a time when one could say that so-and-so was predominantly a “love poet” or a “landscape poet” – or , for that matter, a “metaphysical poet.” There's a lot of evocation of places (both in Australia and New Zealand) in Jen Crawford's poems, yet the more distinctly they're delineated, the more obvious it is that she's referencing the landscape of the soul.

Take, for example, “primary school, port kembla” [45]

I walked along electrolytic street
and beyond the shadow of the stack
found broken cricks and patchy light,
mottled-leaf roses
and the stumps of old walls.
I lay down and gravel
pressed into my cheek.
beetles ran over my arms.

There’s a kind of directness about that which seems reminiscent of Blake’s “London”:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe

Or, perhaps more to the point, his “The Garden of Love”:

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love
That many so sweet flowers bore
And I saw it was filled with graves
And tomb-stones where flowers should be

That word “electrolytic” is particularly interesting – it sounds a bit like “epileptic” to me – as if it’s a very hot day and people are jittery, about to jump out of their skins. Here, though, it’s the street which is electrolytic, “capable of conducting an electric current” (as one dictionary definition has it), or, alternatively, conducive to electrolysis, that process of using electric currents to promote a chemical reaction. In this case (presumably), the electricity of human feeling and emotion transforming the solid landscape the poet sees: the stack, the cricks, the roses, the stumps of old walls, into the stuff of life.

I lay down and gravel
pressed into my cheek.

That’s a somewhat childish pose, perhaps – appropriate for the site of a primary school, that arena where emotions can run truly unrestrained. We can imagine the bitter tears, or (possibly) the ache of their absence, without their even having to be mentioned.

“Beetles ran over my arms” is, again, in this context, appropriate to the pettifogging, mind-numbing rituals of a primary school” “binding with briars my joys and desires.”

The poem continues with description of what is really no more than a walk through a landscape:

from here roads lead
out to the station, to the dunes,
the ankle-deep pool,
the mild veneer lake

But even that simple list of destinations sounds somehow ominous – as if each choice of direction were an existential decision. “The station:” getting the hell out of here, perhaps; “the mild veneer lake:” a more complete solution.

The journey actually culminates, though, in:

… the doorway of a pub
where in the beery cool a sparrow hunches,
watching not moving,
& when I step too close
doesn’t fly

It would sound cheesy, Wordsworthian, to talk about this as the “poet receiving comfort from natural phenomena” – the little bird which doesn’t fly away from her – but isn’t that what it is? Isn’t that what really happens sometimes? Maybe the pathetic fallacy isn’t such a fallacy after all? If, that is, one is honest about what it actually means – not that nature really does “sorrow for the son [or daughter] she bore,” (as A. E. Housman put it) but that our minds are naturally geared to interpret things that way.

There’s nothing cheesy about the expression of this poem, that’s the point. and one has to work pretty hard to get much detail from it. What is apparent at once (I’d say) to any reader is the mood of the poem – I doubt that anyone could follow Jen Crawford through this “electrolytic” landscape without getting a sense of anticipation, almost of dread.

The tone of Jen Crawford’s poetry is not polite and detached, not wryly observant and full of witty instances – nor is it loose and sloppy, unrestrained and “emotional” (in the worst sense). She’s not a beat, but neither is she a LANGUAGE poet. She has a lot to say about the substance and texture of experience, and she expresses herself with deftness and restraint.

The more I read her poems, the more I see in them. I don’t think it’s any accident that she quotes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ (so-called) “Terrible Sonnets” in her own poem called “terrible sonnet” [59]:

oh put me out of my fucken misery.

It’s a note which hasn’t been heard in our poetry for far too long.

I'd like to repeat a few thank yous here, at the end of this post:

• to Brett Cross, for licking the three books into shape, and putting this whole launch party together. Titus Books has now issued 16 titles, I hear - a pretty amazing achievement off the back of a few enthusiasts with no grants funding whatsoever;
• to Bronwyn Lloyd, my lovely wife, for agreeing to collaborate with me on possible the oddest reading heard at a booklaunch so far this year;
• to Jen Crawford, for her kind and perceptive words about my book;
• to Emma Smith, for the most kick-ass cover image I think I've ever seen in my life (she's now admitted that the picture does indeed have a title: "have I been / pardoned / yet?");
• to Scott Hamilton, for his expert MC'ing of the event;
• to Cerian Wagstaff, for looking after the booktable and the wine, and also for taking so many excellent photos (a selection can be seen over at Reading the Maps) of the event;
• to Bill Direen, for his beautiful music and reading, and for so generously agreeing to share this launch with Jen and myself;
• to Peter at Alleluya cafe, for lending us his wonderful venue, high above Auckland city;
• and finally to all the people who came along to support us and to buy a book: for a while there it almost seemed to me as if everyone I'd ever met was moving in and out of the flickering lamplight.

[cover image: Emma Smith, "have I been pardoned yet?" (detail)]

[Additional: 3/7/08]:

Check out Scott Hamilton's write-up of the occasion at Scoop Review of Books.

20 Favourite 20th-Century Novels

[Craig Thompson, Blankets (2003)]

I guess this is a recipe for disaster, really. Once you get going it's very difficult to confine yourself to just twenty. The idea was prompted by looking at the line-up in the Auckland University English course "Novels since 1900," formerly convened and taught by the late David Wright. His list of eight - or nine, depending on whether you count John Barth as one or two books - was as follows:

• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
• John Barth, The Floating Opera / The End of the Road (1957/1958)
• Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
• Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
• Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
• Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

It sure got me thinking, though. I've had to settle on a couple of lists (I'm sorry to say, since the point was supposed to be conciseness): one of English-language novels, one of foreign-language novels I've only read in translation. It's a desperately subjective list. See what additions (and subtractions) you'd like to make yourself:

1. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904)
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
4. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
5. Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy (1946-59)
6. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
7. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
8. Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry (1957)
9. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60)
10. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)
11. Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)
12. Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann (1972)
13. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)
14. Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
15. Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (1978)
16. David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (1978)
17. Troy Kennedy Martin, Edge of Darkness (1985)
18. Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective (1986)
19. Alan Moore, Watchmen (1986-87)
20. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

I've cheated by putting in some trilogies and quartets of novels, but I guess I could settle on just one from each series if you want to get really purist about it. Obviously I had the advantage of being able to leave out all of David Wright's authors, also.

There are other features which some might find unusual: two TV-series, each of which seems to me every bit as complex and "written" as a great novel; two Sci-Fi novels; two Fantasy novels; one graphic novel; Australian and NZ authors jostling with the Americans and Brits ... Anyway, there it is.

If I could have, I'd have liked to fit in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954); Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962); Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966); William Golding's Pincher Martin (1956); Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter (1947); C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (1943); Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947); Gerald Murnane's The Plains (1982); John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance (1932); Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958); Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1994) -- something by Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms (1929) is probably my favourite), Kerouac (of course On the Road (1957)); D. H. Lawrence (perhaps Women in Love (1920)?); Wyndham Lewis (The Childermass (1928)); Norman Mailer (Ancient Evenings (1983)?); Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (1934)?); Steinbeck (I guess it would have to be The Grapes of Wrath (1939)); Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)?); Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited (1945)?); and lots more graphic novels (including Blankets (2003), pictured above) but everything you put in means that something else has to come out. That's how I understand the rules of the game, at any rate.

Here's my companion list of foreign language novels (equally contentious, I hope):

1. Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk (1912-23)
2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27)
3. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
4. Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926)
5. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1928-40)
6. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943)
7. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1943-48)
8. Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (1952-59)
9. Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy (1956-57)
10. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1957)
11. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
12. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Green House (1965)
13. Milan Kundera, The Joke (1967)
14. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
15. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (1968)
16. Augusto Roa Bastos, I, the Supreme (1974)
17. Gunter Grass, The Flounder (1978)
18. Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual (1978)
19. Marguerite Duras, La Douleur (1985)
20. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1992-95)

No Brazilian writers there, I'm afraid: Jorge Amado or Clarice Lispector. No Chinese novelists either: I simply don't know their work well enough.