Novelists in their 80s

Francois-Joseph Sandmann: Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène (1820)

My brother Ken, one of various novelists in our extended family, once explained to us his intention to stop writing at the age of 60. After that there was a great risk of letting your senile lack of judgement falsify the true nature of your oeuvre, he claimed. He'll be hitting that mark next year, so it'll be interesting to see if he follows his own advice. My bet is he won't.

Nvertheless, I would have to admit that there's a certain amount to be said for this view. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), for instance, might have been well advised to hang up his spurs before perpetrating, in his sixties, such disappointing works as The Arrow of Gold (1819) or The Rover (1923). James Joyce (1882-1941) died at the age of 60, having finished his work on Finnegans Wake (1939), so we were spared that late epic about the sea he was allegedly intending to write next. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) stopped writing novels in his fifties and switched to poetry, claiming that he now preferred the conciseness attainable in verse as against the sheer heavy lifting required by novels. Herman Melville (1819-1891) stopped writing prose in his forties, though in that case there was the late flowering of Billy Budd, after nearly thirty years of verse writing.

Sixty might be a bit on the conservative side, but what of eighty? Life expectancies (in the developed world, at any rate) have vastly increased with the advent of modern medications against cholesterol, heart disease and a slew of other silent killers. Perhaps 80 is the new 60?

Over the summer I've been reading some novels - by some of my favourite authors - which nicely illustrate this dilemma. They are:

• Umberto Eco: Numero Zero (2013 / 2015)


• Tom Keneally: Napoleon's Last Island (2015)


• Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero (2013 / 2015)

(In the case of Eco and Vargas Llosa, the first date in brackets is the date of original publication, the second the date of publication of the English translation).

Umberto Eco was born in 1932, and died in 2016, at the age of 84. Tom Keneally was born in 1935, and is at present 82. Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936, and is now 81. Neither of the latter two show any signs of stopping writing: and writing novels, too. Both have published another one since the title listed above. So what are they like, these late works by an Italian polymath, an Australian jack-of-all-trades, and a Peruvian phenomenon? Surprisingly diverse, to be honest.

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Umberto Eco, b. 5 January, 1932-d. 19 February, 2016

I have to admit to being a bit blind to the merits of The Name of the Rose when it first burst upon the world in the early 80s. It seemed laboured and over-constructed. I did enjoy the movie, though.

It wasn't until I read Foucault's Pendulum that Eco's true distinction started to dawn on me. It could not be said to be a particularly well-constructed book, either - and it certainly drove away many of The Name of the Rose fans who expected him to continue in the same vein, like a kind of Brother Cadfael for Intellectuals. But the idea of the book was, I thought, brilliantly clever (and prescient, considering how much it predated Dan Brown and his ilk). I began to see how pointless it was to judge Eco by the standards of other writers: he demanded his own style of reading, as cerebral as he was himself, but with a strong streak of emotional vulnerability hidden away inside somewhere.

The Island of the Day Before is probably my favourite of all of his fictions. Again, it was very clever - but the various intermeshing plots seemed to spin more smoothly than Foucault's Pendulum. He was clearly learning on the job. Baudolino and The Prague Cemetery were less pleasing. While full of rich material, they seemed more predictable and linear than their predecessors.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana was an exception to this tendency, however. It's hard not to admire the portrait he paints there of a disintegrating mind - the suspicion that some of it might be autobiographical added particular poignancy to the novel.

Numero Zero has the makings of a brilliant book. The idea of painting a counter-history of post-war Italy based on the conceit that Mussolini did not in fact die, but went on hiding in the Vatican for many decades more, is an excellent (though disconcerting) one, and the portrait Eco provides of the world of petty journalism and jobbing writers that constitutes mid-century Italy's New Grub Street is similarly interesting. It is, nevertheless, a terrible piece of writing.

Why? Because it's too short to hold up the weight of its central conceit - because the conversations sound like lecture fragments, and the characters like stick figures in a powerpoint presentation - because he resorts to the most desperate mystery story cliches to finish off this albatross of a narrative. Because, in short, he lacked the energy and time to complete it, and yet somehow managed to persuade himself that it still merited publication.

It's a sad coda to the life work of a unique and brilliant writer. Should we have been allowed to read it? Curiosity was probably always going to commit it to some kind of publication. I suppose the real problem is that it appeared during his lifetime rather than posthumously. A preface apologising for its brevity and lack of finish would have ensured a much better reception, though, I would have thought.

Umberto Eco: Numero Zero (2015)

Umberto Eco (1932-2016)


1. The Name of the Rose. 1980. Trans. William Weaver. 1983. London: Picador, 1984.


2. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. 1983. Trans. William Weaver. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.


3. Foucault's Pendulum. 1988. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.


4. The Island of the Day Before. 1994. Trans. William Weaver. 1995. Minerva. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1996.


5. Baudolino. 2000. Trans. William Weaver. 2002. London: Vintage Books, 2003.


6. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. 2004. Trans. Geoffrey Brock. 2005. London: Vintage Books, 2006.


7. The Prague Cemetery. 2010. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2011.


8. Numero Zero. 2015. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Vintage, 2015.

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Eva Rinaldi: Thomas Keneally, b. 7 October, 1935 (aged 82)

So, if we take Umberto Eco's last novel as a vote against publishing such late fictions, what of Thomas (now 'Tom') Keneally's next-to-latest tome, Napoleon's Last Island?

I have to admit that, after a somewhat shaky start, I came to love this book. It seemed to me to combine all of Keneally's virtues, and very few of his faults. This despite that fact that the tale of Betsy Balcombe and her relationship with the ex-Emperor is a familiar one. I remember seeing a television play based on the story when I was a teenager, and it's come up for me in a number of other contexts since.

I think the first book I read by Keneally was his wonderful American Civil War epic Confederates. His command of the vernacular and incidental detail seemed to me superior to anything I'd read before about that war, even by bona fide American authors. It was his talent for ventriloquism which first impressed me about him, then.

After that I read desultorily in his work: the books which had been made into films (Schindler's Ark, Gossip from the Forest), and also the ones about Antarctica (The Survivor, A Victim of the Aurora). In all these cases I was struck by how much better they were than they had to be. That sounds a bit paradoxical, but what I mean is that there's a kind of middle style and general competence which many novelists evolve and which drags them through their day-today labours. It sounds terrible, but they don't really pull out the stops unless they absolutely have to.

Keneally was not at all like that. Each new challenge seemed to fill him with gusto. He clearly relished the difficulty of interpreting unlikely characters, and entering strange and alien environments. Reluctant to repeat himself, he remained on the lookout for fresh woods and pastures new.

In the case of Napoleon's Last Island, this has led him to concoct an excellent pastiche of Jane Austen's prose-style and psychological penetration, set in the strange landscape of the tiny mid-Atlantic island of St. Helena. Betsy Balcombe has a good deal in common with Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennett, with the Emperor as a kind of super Darcy, and even a long-suffering older sister to provide her with a foil.

The dramatic nature of the story leads one to expect a kind of costume drama potboiler, but Keneally's interests seem altogether elsewhere: in the oddities of human psychology as shown under stress, and in the paradox of the man of destiny reduced to an atom in the sea of humanity, but still somehow retaining his uncanny charisma and fascination. Like Foucault's Pendulum, Napoleon's Last Island appears to have disappointed a good many admirers of Keneally's Australian epics: but it's an admirably subtle piece of work for all that.

Chalk that up as a vote for keeping up with your craft even as you approach your ninth decade, then. (The list of his works below is only a selection, I should emphasise: the books by him that have ended up in my collection. A full listing would occupy many more pages).

Tom Keneally: Napoleon's Last Island (2015)

Thomas Keneally (1935- )


1. The Fear. 1965. London: Quartet Books, 1973.


2. Bring Larks and Heroes. 1967. London: Quartet Books, 1973.


3. Three Cheers for the Paraclete. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.


4. The Survivor. 1969. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.


5. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.


6. Blood Red, Sister Rose. 1974. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1976.


7. Gossip from the Forest. London: Collins, 1975.


8. Season in Purgatory. Sydney: Book Club Associates, 1976.


9. A Victim of the Aurora. London: Collins, 1977.


10. Passenger. London: Collins, 1979.


11. Confederates. 1979. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1981.


12. The Cut-Rate Kingdom. 1980. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 1984.


13. Schindler’s Ark. 1982. London: Coronet Books, 1983.


14. Searching for Schindler. 2007. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2008.


15. The Playmaker. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987.


16. A River Town. Port Melbourne, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1995.


17. Napoleon's Last Island. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2015.


18. Crimes of the Father. 2016. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2017.

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Mario Vargas Llosa, b. 28 March, 1936 (aged 81)

So what of that wondrous, protean genius Mario Vargas Llosa? He's not the best known of the great writers of the Latin American "boom" of the sixties and seventies (it took him until 2010 to win the Nobel Prize his near-contemporary Gabriel García Márquez was awarded as far back as 1982), but he is - to my mind, at least - the best of them.

Year after year, decade after decade, he's produced a dazzling series of works, constantly reinventing himself and experimenting with new style: after the majestic, quasi-Faulknerian gravitas of those first three socio-historical novels The City and the Dogs, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, he post-modernised himself into the prankster of Pantaleon and the Special Service and the autobiographical Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

How I pored over his works while working on my Doctoral thesis on European Images of South American in the late 1980s! The book I was writing about, The War of the End of the World seemed to combine the virtues of both his late and his early style: the trickster in bed with the sociologist at last.

It wasn't for a long long time that he attained similar heights, however. He stood (unsuccessfully) for President of Peru in the late 80s, and his work seemed to suffer somewhat from the increasingly public nature of his life. His politics, too, had gone far to the right to the point that he was hardly on speaking terms with many of his former literary comrades in arms.

None of the books he wrote during these years was unreadable or unchallenging in its way (even the quasi-soft porn of In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), but it wasn't really until his dictator-novel (almost the classic Latin American subgenre) The Feast of the Goat appeared in 2001 that he really amazed the world again.

The Way to Paradise and The Dream of the Celt are both good ficto-biographies in their own right, but they hardly seemed up to the standard of his earlier work. The Discreet Hero is not among his masterworks, either, but it's a fascinating read for the fans (in particular).

Those of you who've read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter will recall how the latter's scripts start to fold in on themselves, with characters appearing in the wrong contexts and contaminating the plotlines with unexpected interventions. So many of Vargas Llosa's own old characters - Lituma, Don Rigoberto, the 'Stepmother' herself - turn up in this novel that one has, at times, the odd feeling that the whole thing is set in Vargas-Llosa-land rather than any kind of recognisable Peru.

His obsession with the provincial Peru of the 1950s, its constant recurrence in its work, is supplanted here by an rather more 'contemporary' Lima and Piura. The characters all seem to live in the past, however: his past, Vargas Llosa's, rather more than their own.

The novel is neatly plotted and full of unexpected treats - though perhaps more for readers familiar with his work than any newcomers. The playfulness may seem a little forced at times, the virtuosity a bit tired, but there's no doubt that Vargas Llosa at his worst (and this book is a long way from his worst - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, say) is still superior to most other novelists at their best.

Would he, too, be wise to give up this strange compulsion to dream on paper and call the end-result art? I don't think so, no. The Feast of the Goat came after such a long dry spell that most critics had already written him off. I'm not expecting anything as good as that to come up again, but then, the essence of the unexpected is that you don't expect it. Who can say what the future holds for Mario Vargas Llosa? I hope not something as sad as Numero Zero, but it may well contain something as luminous and strange as Napoleon's Last Island.

Let's just say that as long as he's writing, I'll be reading (and buying). To hell with nay-sayers and agists! One can write a bad book at any age - and (I firmly believe) go on to redeem it with a good one. And always in the wings shimmers the alluring prospect of a Billy Budd, that late, redemptive masterpiece that comes out of left field - albeit often posthumously - to astonish the world ...

Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero (2015)

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (1936- )


1. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Cubs and Other Stories. 1965 & 1967. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1979.


2. The Time of the Hero. 1962. Trans. Lysander Kemp. 1966. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.


3. The Green House. 1965. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1968. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.


4. Conversation in the Cathedral. 1969. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1975. London: Faber, 1993.


5. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. 1973. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. 1978. London: Faber, 1987.


6. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. 1977. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1982. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1984.


7. The War of the End of the World. 1981. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1984. London: Faber, 1986.


8. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. 1984. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1986. London: Faber, 1987.


9. Who Killed Palomino Molero? 1986. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1987. London: Faber, 1989.


10. The Storyteller. 1987. Trans. Helen Lane. 1989. London: Faber, 1990.


11. In Praise of the Stepmother. 1988. Trans. Helen Lane. 1990. London: Faber, 1992.


12. Death in the Andes. 1993. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1996. London: Faber, 1997.


13. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. 1997. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1998. London: Faber, 1999.


14. The Feast of the Goat. 2001. Trans. Edith Grossman. 2002. London: Faber, 2003.


15. The Way to Paradise. 2003. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. London: Faber, 2003.


16. The Bad Girl: A Novel. 2006. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.


17. The Dream of the Celt. 2010. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2012.


18. The Discreet Hero. 2013. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2015.


19. The Neighbourhood. 2016. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Tad Williams and the Rise of Epic Fantasy

Tad Williams: The Dragonbone Chair (1988)

I suppose that one advantage of the TV series Game of Thrones is that you no longer have to bother to try to explain to people what epic fantasy is.

George R. R. Martin: Game of Thrones World Map

Before that, only J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy could be said to have really broken through into popular culture, and - certainly before Peter Jackson's films - he was more the prototype and progenitor of the form than simply an example of it.

William Morris: The Roots of the Mountains (1890)

Of course, Tolkien himself would probably have pointed out how varied his sources actually were. William Morris is the principal one. Such prose romances as The House of the Wolfings (1889) and its sequel, The Roots of the Mountains (1890), gave Tolkien a good deal of his method and tone.

E. R. Eddison: The Worm Ouroboros (1926)

Then there was E. R. Eddison - The Worm Ouroboros (1926), above all. And, in a more relaxed and satirical vein, Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell.

Lord Dunsany: The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924)

There was a time in the late 80s and 90s when I read a great many such books (and found some unexpected fellow-fans, too: Prof. D. I. B. Smith of Auckland University's English Department, my erstwhile MA supervisor among them - my PhD supervisor Colin Manlove, too).

Colin Manlove: The Fantasy Literature of England (1999)

I never read much of Terry Pratchett or Stephen Donaldson, who were both loudly proclaimed - rather unfairly, in retrospect - as Tolkien's heirs in the 1970s (the former has enjoyed a bit of a revival of late with the very entertaining TV miniseries The Shannara Chronicles).

The Shannara Chronicles (2016)

So who did I read back then? Here are a few of their names:

• Louise Cooper (The Time Master Trilogy, 1986-1987.)




Louise Cooper: The Initiate (1986)



• Cecilia Dart-Thornton (The Bitterbynde Trilogy, 2001-2002)




Cecilia Dart-Thornton: The Ill-Made Mute (2001)



• Raymond E. Feist (The Riftworld Saga)




Raymond E. Feist: Magician (1982)



• Robert Holdstock (The Mythago Cycle, 4 vols: 1984-1998)




Robert Holdstock: Mythago Wood (1984)



• Guy Gavriel Kay (The Fionavar Tapestry, 3 vols: 1986-1988. )




Guy Gavriel Kay: The Summer Tree (1986)



• Patricia A. McKillip (The Riddle-Master Trilogy, 1976-1979)




Patricia A. McKillip: The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976)



• George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire, 5 vols: 1996-2011)




George R. R. Martin: A Game of Thrones (1996)



• Graham Dunstan Martin (The Soul Master, Time-Slip & The Dream Wall, 1984, 1986 & 1987)




Graham Dunstan Martin: The Soul Master (1984)



• Michael Scott Rohan (The Winter of the World Trilogy: 1986-1988)




Michael Scott Rohan: The Forge in the Forest (1987)



• Tad Williams (The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Trilogy: 1988-1993)




Tad Williams: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (1988-93)

Some of the examples in the list below include all of the principal, Tolkien-inherited ingredients: division into a trilogy; the presence of elves, dragons, and/or otherworldly creatures; a threat from some source of 'darkness' - generally in the North; a lost heir or 'chosen one' who has to set all to rights, possibly with the help of some ring, sword, or other talisman.

So far so banal. But then there are the exceptions: the genuinely original takes on the fantasy genre. Take Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, for example. His basic notion of a wood that resists visitors is an excellent one, but combined with the discovery that (like the Tardis) this wood is bigger on the inside than the outside, and - in fact - has no effective limit in time or space, since it constitutes a kind of repository for the collective mythological memory of mankind, as far back as the last Ice Age, the working out of his story has a peculiar resonance and even symbolic truth to it.

Michael Scott Rohan takes the idea of the Ice Age more literally, and tries to recreate the vanished kingdoms of an era before the Mediterranean flooded, and when vast areas of land were laid bare by the glaciers.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton relies more on traditional ballads and folklore to shape her own narrative, while Patricia McKillip contributes a beautiful, Ursula Le Guin-like clarity to her storytelling. So, while some of the authors may be a bit perfunctory in their prose-style, it's hard to fault them for richness of invention.

Of course, any fan of the genre will immediately point out how outmoded the above list is. So many new series have appeared since the late 1990s, when I stopped even trying to keep on top of them, that I couldn't begin to discuss them even if I had the knowledge. Rest assured that the presses of the world have been busy adding to the total through all the intervening years.

So why concentrate on Tad Williams in particular, then? Not because he's so much better than the others - though he's probably the most long-winded among them (the cover of The Dragonbone Chair describes it as "the fantasy equivalent of War and Peace", and I think it's as much its length as its narrative ambition the reviewer must have had in mind).

I guess I've chosen to feature him:

1. because (pragmatically) he's one of the few fantasy writers I've actually made an effort to keep up with since I first starting reading him in the early 90s.
2. because (theoretically) I believe him to be the author who's tried hardest and most consistently to experiment with different levels and concepts of reality: from the celestial cyberpunk of the "Bobby Dollar" books to the copyrighted virtual reality domains of the "Otherworld" tetralogy.

The fact that, after all that, he's come back round to his starting-place, and is beginning yet another trilogy set in his Tolkien-esque kingdom of 'Osten Ard' also says something telling about the epic fantasy genre, however. Its fans are loyal and supportive - but they also tend to be resistant to change.

Unlike SF fans, who've got used to having all their expectations upset within the first few lines of each new story, Fantasy afficionados like to have horses, staffs, goblins, and elves - or some reasonable variant on same - crowd in to greet them pretty early on, regardless of how each author has chosen to account for their presence (creatures of a remote, post-nuclear-apocalypse future in Terry Pratchett; remnants of the ancient Germanic world in J. R. R. Tolkien).

Anyway, here's a reasonably comprehensive list of his thirty years of publications to date. By Tolkien's standards (at least), his protagonists do have a tendency to whine and demand instant attention to their peevish demands at inopportune moments (whether or not this represents a divergent Old World / New World set of cultural expectations I leave others to ponder). For the most part, though, he does have the ability to immerse his readers fully in a strangely believeable set of very particular fantasy worlds, and I suppose that's all one can really expect of a writer in this rather inflexible genre.

For myself, I'm a little sorry that he hasn't persevered with his virtual reality world Otherland, or even his Edwardian themed fairyland in The War of the Flowers, but with such a rate of production, it's fair to say that there are probably plenty of such departures from type to be expected from him yet!

The Shadowmarch series was a bit of a disappointment, it must be said: adding little to his earlier work on Osten Ard. The fact that he's now resumed that series - with what success it's a little early to say, though one has to salute his determination to make his evil adversaries as full of complex motivations as his "goodies". There's clearly life in the old genre yet, though of course I fully expect to be deluged by a set of suggestions for new such works and authors who have emerged over the past twenty years or so, whom I really must read in order to claim any currency at all. Bring it on!

•


Tad Williams (2007)

Robert Paul Williams (1957- )

1. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn:
   1. The Dragonbone Chair. 1988. Legend Books. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1990.
   2. Stone of Farewell. 1990. Legend Books. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1991.
   3. To Green Angel Tower. Legend Books. London: Random House Group, 1993.


2. Tailchaser's Song. 1985. Legend Books. London: Random Century Group, 1991.


3. [with Nina Kiriki Hoffman]: Child of an Ancient City. Legend Books. London: Century, 1992.


4. Caliban's Hour (1994)


5. Otherland:
   1. City of Golden Shadow. Legend Books. London: Random House UK Limited, 1996.
   2. River of Blue Fire. An Orbit Book. London: Little, Brown & Company (UK), 1998.
   3. Mountain of Black Glass. 1999. An Orbit Book. London: Little, Brown & Company (UK), 2000.
   4. Sea of Silver Light. 2001. An Orbit Book. London: Time Warner Books UK, 2002.


6. The War of the Flowers. An Orbit Book. London: Time Warner Books UK, 2003.


7. Shadowmarch:
   1. Shadowmarch. An Orbit Book. London: Time Warner Book Group UK, 2004.
   2. Shadowplay. Orbit Book. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2007.
   3. Shadowrise. DAW Book Collectors No. 1500. New York: DAW Books, Inc., 2010.
   4. Shadowheart. An Orbit Book. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2010.


8. Bobby Dollar:
   1. The Dirty Streets of Heaven. London: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 2012.
   2. Happy Hour in Hell. London: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 2013.
   3. Sleeping Late on Judgement Day. London: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 2014.


9. Rite: Short Work. 2006. Burton, MI: Far Territories, 2008.


10. A Stark and Wormy Knight: Tales of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Suspense. Ed. Deborah Beale. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2012.


11. The Very Best of Tad Williams (2014)


12. The Last King of Osten Ard:
    1. The Heart of What Was Lost: A Novel of Osten Ard. London: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 2017.
    2. The Witchwood Crown. London: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 2017.

John Clare / Charles Baudelaire

William Hilton: John Clare (1820)

It's not really that I'm trying to be particularly original or provocative in comparing these two poets (perish the thought). They belong to completely different phases of the Romantic era, for a start: John Clare, the peasant poet, born in poverty in 1793 - a contemporary of Keats and Byron; Charles Baudelaire, the original poète maudit, born in the stifling heart of the bourgeoisie in 1821, and dead of alcoholism and self-abuse at the age of 46.

Étienne Carjat: Charles Baudelaire (1863)

Clare was (and remains) the patron saint of pastoral poets everywhere: a soul so pure he seemed to have come from another sphere, the pre-enclosure, peasant world of organic village life, free of the affectations of civilisation.

Baudelaire, by contrast, is the poet of drugs, sex, industrialism, city life, and the principal inspiration for the figure of the flâneur, the idle (but preternaturally observant) dandy - what the Russian critics called 'the superfluous man.' He was impecunious, self-destructive, vindictive, and relentlessly critical: of himself more than anything.

And yet, and yet. They didn't do anything quite as convenient as die in the same year, but they weren't far from it. John Clare died at 70 in 1864, Baudelaire three years later, in 1867. But then Clare spent the last 25 years of his life locked up in an asylum (from which he briefly escaped in 1841). Baudelaire, by contrast, suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and spent the last two years of his life in a succession of hospital wards.

In other words, neither of them could last in the world much beyond their mid-forties. The difference is, of course, that Clare experienced an extraordinary burst of creativity in his madhouse years - some poems written under his own name, others under that of Lord Byron, whom (some of the time) he believed himself to be.

So far so unconvincing. I agree that I haven't made a strong case, as yet, for considering them together. It's just that the other day I was reading The Wood is Sweet, a little selection of John Clare's poems made for children, and ran across one of his most famous poems, 'The Skylark':

Thomas Bewick: The Skylark (1797)

The Skylark (1835)

The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.
Opening their golden caskets to the sun,
The buttercups make schoolboys eager run,
To see who shall be first to pluck the prize —
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o'er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed — not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop agen
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy. Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!
As free from danger as the heavens are free
From pain and toil, there would they build and be,
And sail about the world to scenes unheard
Of and unseen — Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.

This is a fairly typical Clare poem. He tends to write in standard metres - in this case heroic couplets, at other times ballad measure. His rhythms and versification tend to the traditional and unadventurous also: no sudden breaks in the iambic line, no startling rhymes (unlike his hero, Lord Byron).

So why do we love him so much? It's the detail of the lines, the sudden flashes of careful insight and genuine knowledge that one glimpses from time to time in his choice of phrases or adjectives that gives his verse its peculiar distinction.

On the one hand, it sounds a bit like a setpiece description by another of his models, James Thomson's The Seasons (1730), but the moment one goes below the surface, strange moments of vision start to appear:

Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.

Clare, the 'whopstraw man,' a labourer whose job it was to harrow the harvested corn, is yet intensely aware of that 'squatting' hare - nor is it the beauty of the creature he chooses to emphasise, but its terror.

The schoolboys running to catch buttercups seem pretty conventional figures, too, until we realise that Clare is using them to construct the intense metaphor which governs the last half of his poem:

Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!

They imagine themselves like the skylark, but see it solely in terms of the clouds its flight encompasses. They cannot imagine the truth that it, too, is ruled by fear and the constant threat of destruction of what it holds dearest: its nest.

So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.

Well, clearly the obvious comparison here is with Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark", whose first five or so lines virtually everyone who's ever read a poem in English can quote by heart:

P. B. Shelley: To a Skylark (1820)

The "schoolboy" comparison seems fairly apt, also. Shelley was 29 when he died, 27 when he published 'Ode to a Skylark.' Clare, in his mid-forties and at the heart of his powers, must have felt that he knew a good many things about birds which the younger poet had never had the chance - or possibly the desire - to learn. Even his strongest defenders would have to admit to a certain tendency towards abstraction in Shelley's verse. Clare's may be far less accomplished technically, but the precise and concrete was - in the end - all that interested him.

Let's take another tack on this poem of his, then. Here's Baudelaire's "The Albatross": :

Catherine Réault-Crosnier: L'Albatros

L'Albatros (1861)

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

If you click on this link, you can find a selection of English verse translations of this immortal poem by the likes of Roy Campbell, George Dillon, and various others. Rather than add to them, I thought it might be best to provide a simple prose crib. There's a reason why many regard Baudelaire as the greatest European poet since Dante, and it isn't because he dyed his hair green and contracted syphilis: it's the sheer beauty and ease of his writing. Many of the translations on the site are very skillful, but they're still not Baudelaire.

The Albatross (1861)

Often, to amuse themselves, the crewmen
catch albatrosses, vast sea birds
who follow, indolent travelling companions,
the ship as it glides across the bitter gulfs.

Hardly have they dumped them on the deck,
than these kings of the blue, clumsy and ashamed,
let their great white wings trail pitifully
beside them like oars.

This winged traveller, how weak and foolish he is!
He, lately so beautiful, how comic and ugly!
One teases his beak with the stub of a pipe,
another mimes, limping, this invalid who once flew!

The Poet resembles this prince of the clouds
who haunts the storm and laughs at archers;
exiled on earth in the midst of catcries,
His giants' wings impede him from walking.

Just as one can hear, faintly, at the back of Clare's poem, an echo of Percy Shelley's, similarly, here, one senses the presence of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Baudelaire was pretty well-read in English literature, a pioneering translator of Poe and De Quincey (among others), and he could hardly have been ignorant of the most famous albatross in poetic history:

'God save thee, ancient Mariner,
from the fiends that plague thee thus! —
Why look'st thou so?' - With my crossbow
I shot the albatross.

Gustave Doré: Illustrations to the Ancient Mariner (1876)

That comment about how Baudelaire's ideal poet resembles the bird "qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer" [who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer] is surely a reference to the crossbow-wielding mariner himself. But where exactly is Clare in this equation?

I guess it's in the reversal of expectations which dominates each poem. In Clare's case, the marauding schoolboys imagine that the skylark must nest in the clouds, since that's what they would do. Actually, though, it hides its nest as low down as it can, below eye level, in the corn with the rabbit and the other creeping creatures.

In Baudelaire's, the albatross is mocked because of its inability to master such simple, everyday arts as walking without stumbling across a deck. In fact it is because of its other great gifts, its giants' wings, that it cannot fit easily into a crowd, but the desire to simplify, to drag everything down to the level of the lowest common denominator is what leaves it so cruelly exposed.

Baudelaire's albatross was born to fly, and lacks the gifts for anything else. Clare's skylark is similarly gifted, but uses its flight to distract its enemies from what it most longs to protect. Both poets write out of an aching sense of loss and unbelonging. In Baudelaire's case this is expressed in loud outrage, in Clare's by the desire to hide and to escape.

If you want to understand John Clare, the first thing is to stop thinking of him as some simple, instinctive personality, lacking the art of his more self-conscious and educated contemporaries. His academy was every bit as rigorous as theirs, and his poetry - vast and uneven a bulk as there is of it - repays the same pains.

Similarly, reading Baudelaire for the cheap thrills of his iconoclasm and diablerie is mostly a waste of time. Those things are there, but it's the penetrating intensity of his intelligence and insight that gives his work its enduring power.

In both cases, paradoxically, it's sometimes best to approach these poets through their own prose. John Clare's "Journey out of Essex" - his heartbreaking account of his 1841 escape from the asylum to find his lost love, Mary Joyce (already dead for three years) - is fascinating enough. But his autobiographical and other prose notes on his life and the countryside he grew up in also have an indescribable charm of their own.

Baudelaire's prose is more multifaceted and complex, but his analyses of the paintings in successive salons show the concentrated critical intelligence which enabled him to revolutionise French - and, eventually, world - poetry. He was never really the idle druggie of legend, but rather a disciplined mind modelled on, but eventually surpassing, his hero, Edgar Allan Poe.

Both are poets not so much to read, as to reread. As soon as you've reached the end of each poem or journal entry, it's time to turn back to the beginning and start again. Only then does the peculiar light of their insight begin to communicate. These are not bodies of work one could ever exhaust.

I conclude, as usual, with a brief list of the books by each I've managed to accumulate in the last thirty-odd years of reading both:

Iain Sinclair: Edge of the Orison (2005)

John Clare
(1793-1864)

1. Geoffrey Grigson, ed. Poems of John Clare’s Madness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.


2. J. W. & Anne Tibble, ed. John Clare: The Prose. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.


3. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield, ed. John Clare: The Shepherd’s Calendar. Wood Engravings by David Gentleman. 1964. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.


4. Eric Robinson & Geoffrey Summerfield, ed. John Clare: The Later Poems. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964.


5. J. W. & Anne Tibble, ed. John Clare: Selected Poems. Ed. J. W. & Anne Tibble. Everyman’s Library, 563. London: J. M. Dent, 1965.


6. David Powell, ed. John Clare: The Wood is Sweet. Introduction by Edmund Blunden. Illustrated by John O'Connor. Poems for Young Readers. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966.


7. Eric Robinson & Richard Fitter, ed. John Clare’s Birds. Illustrated by Robert Gillmor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.


8. Eric Robinson & David Powell, ed. John Clare: The Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.


9. Eric Robinson, ed. John Clare: The Parish, A Satire. Notes by David Powell. 1985. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.


10. Geoffrey Summerfield, ed. John Clare: Selected Poems. 1990. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2000.


11. Robinson, Eric, & David Powell, ed. John Clare By Himself. Wood Engravings by Jon Lawrence. 1996. Fyfield Books. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002.


12. J. W. & Anne Tibble, ed. John Clare: The Letters. 1951. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.


13. Mark Storey, ed. John Clare: Selected Letters. 1985. Oxford Letters & Memoirs. 1988. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.


14. J. W. & Anne Tibble. John Clare: A Life. 1932. Rev. Anne Tibble. London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1972.


15. Edward Storey. A Right to Song: The Life of John Clare. London: Methuen, 1982.

•

Édouard Manet: Jeanne Duval (1862)

Charles Pierre Baudelaire
(1821-1867)

1. Y.-G. Le Dantec, ed. Baudelaire: Oeuvres. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1. 1934. Paris: Gallimard, 1944.


2. P. Schneider, ed. Baudelaire: L’Oeuvre. Les Portiques, 16. Paris: Le Club Français du Livre, 1955.


3. Antoine Adam, ed. Baudelaire: Les fleurs du mal: Les Épaves / Bribes / Poèmes divers / Amoenitates Beligicae. Édition illustrée. 1961. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1970.


4. Yves Florenne, ed. Baudelaire: Les fleurs du mal: Édition établie selon un ordre nouveau. 1857. Préface de Marie-Jeanne Durry. Le Livre de Poche, 677. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1972.


5. Melvin Zimmerman, ed. Baudelaire: Petits Poèmes en Prose. 1869. French Classics. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968.


6. George Dillon & Edna St. Vincent Millay, trans. Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du Mal: Translated and Presented on Pages Facing the Original French Text as Flowers of Evil. With an Introduction and an Unusual Bibliographical Note by Miss Millay. 1936. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1962.


7. Louise Varèse, trans. Baudelaire: Paris Spleen. 1869. A New Directions PaperBook, NDP294. 1947. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1970.


8. Francis Scarfe, trans. Baudelaire: Selected Poems. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.


9. Clark, Carol, & Robert Sykes, ed. Baudelaire in English. Penguin Classics: Poets in Translation. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.


10. P. E. Charvet, trans. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. 1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.


11. Edgar Allan Poe. Histoires Extraordinaires. Trans. Charles Baudelaire. Préface de Julio Cortázár. Collection Folio, 310. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1973.


12. Enid Starkie. Baudelaire. 1957. Pelican Biographies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.


13. Claude Pichois. Baudelaire. Additional Research by Jean Ziegler. 1987. Trans. Graham Robb. 1989. London: Vintage, 1991.

Charles Baudelaire: "Spleen: I am like the king of a rainy country ..." (1861)

John Clare: "Lines: I Am" (1848)