Strange Coincidences

[Jan Potocki: The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. 1989.
Trans. Ian Maclean. 1995 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1996)]

Yesterday I went into town to return a few library books and meet up with some literary cronies. The bus was a bit late, though, so I had time to duck into the local Opportunity Shop. If you've read the post below, you'll understand how surprised I was to find this book, which cost me all of two dollars.

Yes, there it is, Goya's Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (though I notice that the translation on the back cover gives it as the "dream" of reason - an equally valid translation).

But there was something else waiting for me in that op shop - this:

[Jack Ross: Requiem. Hutchinson (London: Random House, 2008)]

I know I've made rather a song and dance in the past about doubles and doppelgängers and other such appurtenances of the Gothic (in fact, you may not have noticed, but in the sidebar to this blog I've got a little collection of "Jack Rosses": the Aboriginal Artist, the Alabama Treasurer, the Bearded Muser, the Brooklyn Copperhead, the Chartered Accountant, the Footballer, the Spoonerist, the Thriller Writer, and the Australian WW1 Veteran ...). This one was the Scottish thriller-writer.

So far so good. That's not the end of it, though. You see, I have a bit of a history with this Manuscript found at Saragossa novel. The reason I didn't already have a copy of this - very handsome - Penguin edition was that I bought the book in French when it first appeared in 1989, on the strength of a long and laudatory review in the TLS, which made it sound like the literary discovery of the decade.

[Jean Potocki: Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse. Ed. René Radrizzani (Paris: José Corti, 1989)]

It's hard to separate fact from legend where this bizarre book is concerned, but it appears to have been written in French by the Polish Nobleman Count Jan Potocki sometime between the years 1805 and 1815 (when he committed suicide, allegedly with a silver bullet which he'd had blessed by his parish priest in advance). He published a few extracts from it in his lifetime - first in Saint Petersburg, in Russian, and then in Paris, in the original French. The complete manuscript is, however, lost, and while four-fifths of the text survives in something approaching Potocki's final text, the other portions had to be retranslated into French from a Polish translation made in 1847). This is probably what delayed the first complete edition of his book until 1989.

I bought my copy in Brussels, hot off the press, and promptly started to read it (I guess what attracted me was the pattern of nested stories within a complex frame, so like the Oulipo-ian fictions of Georges Perec, whose Life, A User's Manual (1978) I'd also recently discovered). There was, however, an error in my copy - a missing line (or lines) on p.403.

I had to wait till the second edition of the French text, in 1991, before I was able to fill it in. It turned out to consist of just one word: "parts".

[Potocki: Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (1989): 403]

The passage (spoken by the Wandering Jew, one of the innumerable storytellers in the book) translates more or less as follows:

At this time, the Essenes had already formed their bizarre association. They had no wives, and their goods were held in common: on all sides, one could see nothing but new religions, mixtures of Judaism and Zoroastrianism, mixtures of Sabianism and Platonism, and above all lots of astrology. The ancient religions built themselves up with pieces from everywhere.

The missing word comes on p.403 of a book written almost two centuries before the appearance of its first edition. Four and three make seven (just that weekend I'd been discussing the mystic associations of the number seven with a group of students, à propos of the seven gates of the Underworld traversed by the goddess Ishtar).

The passage comes from the 36th day of a story which extends over 66 days (allegedly written down by its narrator, Alphonse van Worden, in 1769, thirty years after the events described, and then sealed in an iron box form which it is extracted by a French soldier at the siege of Saragossa in 1809). 3 and 6 make nine, another number of mystic efficacy (three trinities, etc. etc.)

Hard to say what it all means (if anything), but suffice it to say that mysteries are all around us ... I hope all these omens promise good fortune and not bad. Not for nothing did I put down my religion as "irrational superstition" in the last census!

The Sleep of Reason

Francisco Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799)

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. … The rest is the madness of art.

– Henry James, “The Middle Years,”
Complete Stories 1892-1898, ed. David Bromwich and John Hollander (New York: Library of America, 1996) 354.

In 1781, Francisco Goya was asked to provide a group of frescoes for the refurbishment of the cathedral in Saragossa, his home town. The commission, which came to him through his father-in-law, the then far better-known painter Francisco Bayeu, proved to be a bit of a headache from the first.

At 35, Goya had already earned himself a solid reputation in the capital, Madrid. Discovering just how much of a nobody he still was to the folks at home can hardly have been a comfortable experience, and when the "licentiousness" of his designs for the four cardinal virtues (Faith, Fortitude, Charity and Patience) was criticized by the cathedral authorities, he responded with an immense document detailing his intentions as an artist and his disdain for their ill-informed views (most cutting of all, perhaps, was the suggestion that his father-in-law "correct" his anatomy and choice of colours).

This letter could be seen as the birth-cry of the Romantic Artist, at odds with his time and convinced that his only duty was to listen to the promptings of a higher voice. It's the threat to his own livelihood that Goya begins with, though:

a master's reputation is a thing of great delicacy: his very subsistence depends upon it, and once darkened by some cloud his whole fortune may be destroyed ...

- Goya: A Life in Letters. Ed. Sarah Symmons.
Trans. Philip Troutman (London: Pimlico, 2004): 103.

He goes on to denounce the general frivolity and ignorance of those making the complaints:

after his professional work was presented for public examination at the unveiling of the paintings in the Cathedral of Our Lady of El Pilar, his attention was drawn to a certain group of people whom he overhead seeking to criticise his work and whose intention was clearly not inspired by any impartial criticism, or at least had nothing to do with the art of painting, which alone is relevant to just criticism of his work.

The points that Goya makes in his letter have a continuing relevance for any criticism of the arts. It's easy to feel that subjective irrelevances constitute the main criteria of judgment for those uninformed in the technicalities of one's metier; also (alas) that professional jealousy and feuding colours the assessment of those who are.

And yet, one can't help feeling that Goya's paintings, then and now, can be quite difficult to assimilate. Their blurred outlines and exaggerated figures make them far less sensuously appealing than his immediate predecessors (Velázquez, in particular). The fact that Goya's titanic genius would come to tower over his contemporaries can hardly have been apparent to those shocked and horrified by his brutally uncompromising series of engravings The Disasters of War, or the nightmarish intensity of Saturn Devouring His Chidren.

Goya, in short, had a lot to say. But his continued success as a professional painter at the Spanish Court depended more on his technical dexterity as a portrait painter than on his self-appointed task as chronicler of the abuses of the age.

You're all (I presume) familiar with Goya's print "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (1799). A man resting with his head on a pen and piece of paper on top of a desk is besieged by bats and creatures of the night. The design is generally seen as a comment on the French Revolution, or the Age of Reason generally – the return of the repressed unconscious forces of nightmare the moment one is distracted from the pursuit of Enlightenment.

Francisco Goya: Preliminary Sketch for The Sleep of Reason (1797)

Goya himself wrote an interesting caption for an earlier state of this engraving:

The author dreaming. His only purpose is to banish harmful, commonly-held beliefs and to perpetuate in this work of caprices the solid testimony of truth. Universal language drawn and engraved by Francisco de Goya in the year 1797. [52]

The sleeping figure is intended to be the author, then. And the "universal language" he refers to is, presumably, the language of art. Any suggestion of satire on the pretensions of Enlightenment savants seems entirely absent here. And yet, when Goya's print was actually published two years later, Robespierre's reign of terror was what it appeared to be commenting on.

Perhaps that's the lesson to be drawn from this little artistic parable. When we're most sure of what we're trying to express, we're most liable to be misinterpreted - or, rather, even more disconcertingly, to find out that we were really talking about something else all along.

Diego Velázquez: Las Meniñas (1656)

What is the "meaning" of "Las Meniñas", for instance? The observer being observed is clearly part of it - Velázquez can be seen painting the actual picture that we're looking at, overlooked by the Spanish King, who's standing by the back door. Is it the claustrophobia of court he means to comment on? The maids ("meniñas") tending to the famous troop of royal dwarfs? Or is it some larger mise-en-abime of self-reflexive consciousness he wants to set up in our minds? Nobody knows. One doubts that the painter himself could provide much elucidation on such complex and teasing subject-matter. Quite apart from the instinct for survival which led him to cloak his meaning in airy allegories.

I quoted, above, from Henry James, never the easiest of authors to fathom. The Sacred Fount (1901) is not popular even with his greatest admirers. Rebecca West denounced it as a “small, mean story” in which:

a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant … in an unsuccessful attempt to discover if there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows.

I could never quite see where the sparrows came in, but (leaving that aside for the moment), we can say that it is the story of an unnamed – and almost certainly unreliable – narrator, who is attempting to find the source of a strange influence on two acquaintances of his. One, a woman, looks much younger than before, and the narrator equates this with the fact that her youthful husband now looks much older. The second, a man, has grown far wittier, and most of the book is occupied with an increasingly frustrated (and finally futile) search for the “fount” of this enrichment.

Edmund Wilson decided that the point of the book was that it contained “two separate stories to be kept distinct: a romance which the narrator is spinning and a reality which we are supposed to divine from what he tells us about what actually happened.” The strange story of sympathetic vampirism is therefore the narrator’s invention, which is meant to mask a more sordid – but still deducible – reality. It is, in essentials, the method of "The Turn of the Screw," but Wilson sees it as working well in the latter context and falling flat in the former: “Henry James was not clear about the book in his own mind.”

It's difficult not to value the strident courage of a Goya above the sinuous emblematic subtleties of a Velázquez or a James. Were either of them ever really "clear about" their work even (especially) in "their own minds"? Yet the burden of bolshie Goya's greatest works seems to be precisely these forces of irrationality that redirect us when we feel most clear.

Perhaps the best model for the artist, then, remains the Haruspex, that Roman priest, trying to divine the future from the entrails of a bird?

Francisco Goya: Saturn Devouring His Children (c.1819-21)

"The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name"

[William-Adolphe Bouguereau: Love on the Look Out (1890)]

I imagine you're all pretty familiar with the phrase above. It actually comes from a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's friend, better known by his nickname "Bosie". The poem, "Two Loves", first appeared in a short-lived student magazine called The Chameleon in 1896:

'What is thy name?' He said, 'My name is Love.'
Then straight the first did turn himself to me
And cried, 'He lieth, for his name is Shame,
But I am Love, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.'
Then sighing, said the other, 'Have thy will,
I am the love that dare not speak its name.'

But actually that aspect of the matter doesn't interest me too much. I certainly don't want to go back over the twice-told tale of the Oscar Wilde trial. What would be the point? What fascinates me is the idea of the power of something - person or concept - which dares not speak its name.

[J. L. Borges]

Jorge Luis Borges expresses it interestingly in his story "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" [The Garden of Forking Paths], from his 1941 book of the same name:

– En una adivinanza cuyo tema es el ajedrez, ¿cuál es la única palabra prohibida? Reflexioné un momento y repuse:

– La palabra ajedrez.

– Precisamente – dijo Albert –. El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan es una enorme adivinanza, o parábola, cuyo tema es el tiempo ; esa causa recóndita le prohíbe la mención de su nombre. Omitir siempre una palabra, recurrir a metáforas ineptas y a perífrasis evidentes, es quizá el modo más enfático de indicarla. Es el modo tortuoso que prefirió, en cada uno de los meandros de su infatigable novela, el oblicuo Ts’ui Pên.

- Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones: El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan / Artificios. 1941, & 1944 (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987): 114.

["In a puzzle whose solution is the game of chess, what is the one prohibited word?"

I reflected for a moment and replied: "The word chess."

"Precisely," said Albert. "The Garden of Forking Paths is an immense puzzle, or parable, whose subject is time; that hidden motive prohibits the mention of its name. Always to omit a word, to resort to awkward metaphors and obvious periphrases instead, is perhaps the most emphatic way to signal it. It is the tortuous way which the ingenious Ts’ui Pên followed, through every meander of his interminable novel." (my translation)]

So if The Garden of Forking Paths, the imaginary novel by the equally imaginary Ts’ui Pên, turns out to be an expression of his theory of time - indicated by the fact that of all the philosophical problems that preoccupied him, this is only one which is not discussed in its pages, what might "The Garden of Forking Paths," a short story by a certain Jorge Luis Borges, actually turn out to be about?

Like Nabokov's Lolita (1955), Borges's story takes the form of a murderer's first-person confession, with occasional editorial notes and interventions. This editor, presumably a patriotic Englishman, takes issue with some of the statements in the story (the "hipótesis odiosa y estrafalaria" [bizarre and despicable assumption] that an officer in British Intelligence might shoot a spy in cold blood under the pretext of "arresting" him, for instance {102}). What's more, the first two pages of the statement are "missing" - for reasons which we may be able to conjecture later.

The story concerns a crucial meeting between a Chinese spy, Yu Tsun, working for the Germans during the First World War, who just happens to be descended from a celebrated Chinese man of letters called Ts'ui Pên, and a British scholar named Stephen Albert, who just happens to have devoted his life to translating the fragmentary manuscripts of a novel left behind by Ts'ui Pên on his death centuries before ("la mano de un forastero lo asesinó" [the hand of a foreigner assassinated him] {106}). An outrageous coincidence? Of course.

When it turns out that the real reason for their meeting is that the spy has to kill someone with the surname "Albert" in order to get this crucial word into the newspapers on the eve of a planned British attack on the French town of Albert, we begin to see the coincidence as more of a cruel irony.

When it turns out that the British scholar has solved the mystery of Ts'ui Pen's allegedly-fragmentary novel (entitled The Garden of Forking Paths), and demonstrated that it is a huge puzzle whose answer is "time" ("He confrontado centenares de manuscritos, he corregido los errores que la negligencia de los copistas ha introducido, he conjeturado el plan de ese caos, he creído restablecer el orden primordial, he traducido la obra entera; me consta que no emplea una sola vez la palabra tiempo" [I have collated hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the errors that the negligence of copyists have introduced, I have constructed a map of this chaos, I have attempted to re-establish the original order, I have translated the entire work; and I can state that not once is the word time used in it] {114}), then we begin to suspect that there is more to this series of coincidences even than that.

Rather than just being an elegant puzzle, the novel (according to Albert, at any rate) embodies Ts'ui Pen's theory of cyclic time, his belief in "infinitas series de tiempos, en una red creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos divergentes, convergentes y paralelos" [an infinite series of times, a growing, vertiginous net of divergent, convergent and parallel times] {114}:

No existimos en la mayoría de esas tiempos; en algunos existe usted y no yo; en otros yo, no usted; en otros, los dos. En éste, que en favorable azar me depara, usted ha llegado a mi casa; en otro, usted, al atravesar el jardín, me ha encontrado muerto; en otro, yo digo estas mismos palabras, pero soy un error, un fantasma. {114-15}

[In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I don't; in others, I do and you don't; in still others, both of us do. In this one, which a favourable chance has dealt me, you have come to my house; in another, when you came through the garden, you found me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a phantasm.]

There's clearly far more than chance behind the meeting of these two. Nor can it be seen as purely accidental when, in this particular time-continuum, our narrator picks up his pistol and shoots Albert dead, immediately after declaring his gratitude and veneration for him.

The story, then, is a meditation on the subject of time, but also on the fickleness of human emotions - our propensity to be driven to monstrous acts by essentially frivolous and self-created motives. What is the missing word from Borges' own story? Such a question can obviously not be answered through the medium of a translation, so, like Stephen Albert, I have had to return to the original Spanish for an answer.

First, though, another sidelight on the question (rather like Borges' narrator's invocation - at a crucial stage in his own progress - of the Thousand and One Nights, and the unforgettable night when "la reina Shahrazad (por una mágica distracción del copista) se pone a referir textualmente le historia de las 1001 Noches, con riesgo de llegar otra vez a la noche en que la refiere, y así hasta lo infinito" [Queen Scheherazade (through a magical slip of the copyist) begins to retell word-for-word the story of the 1001 Nights, at risk of again reaching the night she is in, and so on into infinity] {111}).

One of the most controversial aspects of Hans Walter Gabler's (alleged) "corrected text" of Joyce's Ulysses, unveiled with so much hoopla in the mid-eighties, only to sink almost immediately under the weight of scholarly disapproval, was Gabler's claim to know substantially better than the author himself. Gabler not only believed that a scientific editor, armed with knowledge of every manuscript, proof and printed textual variant, and all the sets of corrections to each, could navigate among them with more certainty than poor purblind sottish Jimmy Joyce, he proceeded to act on this belief in compiling his edition.

The most famous (or notorious) instance is discussed approvingly by Richard Ellmann (at that time the undoubted doyen of Joyce scholarship) in his preface to Gabler's edition - perhaps on the principle of putting the biggest mouthful to swallow first:

For purposes of interpretation, the most significant of the many small changes in Mr. Gabler's text has to do with the question that Stephen puts to his mother at the climax of the brothel scene, itself the climax of the novel. Stephen is appalled by his mother's ghost, but like Ulysses he seeks information from her. His mother says, "You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery." Stephen responds "eagerly," as the stage direction says, "Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men." She fails to provide it. This passage has been much interpreted. Most readers have supposed that the word known to all men must be love, though one critic maintains that it is death, and another that it is synteresis; the latter sounds like the one word unknown to all men.

You begin to see the relevance of this discursus to our discussion of a problem whose answer is "chess", and where the word chess cannot appear? of a novel about time where time is never mentioned? of a story about ... whatever Borges' story (or book of stories) might ultimately be thought to be about? Ellmann continues:

Mr. Gabler has been able to settle this matter by recovering a passage left out of the scene that takes place in the National Library. Whether Joyce omitted it deliberately or not is still a matter of conjecture and debate. Mr. Gabler postulates the skip of an eye from one ellipsis to another, leading to the omission of several lines - the longest omission in the book. The principal lines read in manuscript: "Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus ..."

The Latin conjoins two phrases in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles. Aquinas is distinguishing between love, which, as he says in the first six words, "genuinely wishes another's good," and, in the next five, a selfish desire to secure our own pleasure "on account of which we desire these things," meaning lovelessly and for our own good, not another's. In Joyce's play Exiles, Richard explains love to the skeptical Robert as meaning "to wish someone well."

Now that the word known to all men is established as love, Stephen's question to his mother's ghost can be seen to connect with the hope his living mother expressed at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that outside Ireland he will learn what the heart is and what it feels.

Even at the time Ellmann must have known he was on shaky ground. There's something very shocking in the notion that that supreme craftsmen among twentieth-century novelists, the precise, painstaking Joyce, might simply have skipped "from one ellipsis to another", and thus not noticed that he'd actually been intending to answer Stephen's mysterious question to his mother all along.

THE MOTHER

(A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth.) You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery.

STEPHEN

(Eagerly.) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.

THE MOTHER

Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual, and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.

STEPHEN

The ghoul! Hyena!

I'm sorry. I just can't swallow that he somehow "forgot" to answer the question, or that it would have been "better" to settle the question once and for all by providing a nice quick answer with a bit of Latin thrown in as a bonus ...

In any case, you can easily take a look for yourself, if you like. The passage can be found in Episode 15 [Circe], the famous "Nighttown" sequence of Ulysses. If you wish to see how it looked in its original printing, you can find it on page 540 of Jeri Johnson's edition of Ulysses: The 1922 Text [The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.]. Gabler's emended version can be found either in his original 1984 three-volume critical edition, or else in the diplomatic text published as Ulysses: The Corrected Text [Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe & Claus Melchior. 1984. Preface by Richard Ellmann. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986].

So how does all that help us with "The Garden of Forking Paths"? To put you out of your misery, I can now reveal: that I have checked the Spanish text of the story, and have found a series of "awkward metaphors and obvious periphrases" for the Spanish word "amor" [love] or "amar" [to love]. I find "querer" [desire]; I also find a suggested motivation for the narrator's determination to succeed in his quest in his desire to overcome the arrogant European colour-prejudice of his German paymaster against the "yellow" [amarillo] races: "Yo quería probarle que un amarillo podía salvar a sus ejércitos" [I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies] {104}.

This essentially perverse desire, which inspires him to waste his own life and that of another man, a modest man, yet "que para mí no es menos que Goethe" [who for me is as great as Goethe] {104}, inspires him to set aside all other natural emotions: veneration for his ancestors, respect for this noble-minded student of Chinese culture, and, yes, love for his fellow man.

And yet the equation is not quite so neat as that. "In a puzzle whose answer is the chess, what is the one prohibited word?" As Borges' story reaches its climax, with Stephen Albert's explanation of Ts’ui Pên's novel (or labyrinth) complete, and the English spycatcher Richard Madden (another significant name?) advancing on our narrator from the garden, he concludes his account of their conversation thus:

En todos – articulé no sin un temblor – yo agradezco y venero su recreación del jardín de Ts’ui Pên.

– No en todos – murmuró con una sonrisa -. El tiempo se bifurca perpetuamente hacía innumerables futuros. En uno de ellos soy su enemigo.
...
– El provenir ya existe – respondí –, pero yo soy su amigo. {115}

["In all futures," I said not without trembling, "I appreciate and venerate your reconstruction of the garden of Ts’ui Pên."

"Not in all," he murmured with a smile. "Time bifurcates perpetually into innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."
...
"That future already exists," I replied, "But I am your friend."

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend," as Wilfred Owen put it in his own great First World War poem "Strange Meeting". More to the point, though, the word our narrator Yu Tsun uses here, "amigo", is clearly derived from "amor". Does that invalidate my point? Is it the equivalent of a partial, shaded reference to the word "chess" (checkmate, say?), or to "time" (temporary, timely?)

It isn't enough simply to say (or not say) the word "love", apparently. The essential thing is to know what it means, to feel it as one speaks the word, to break out of the cycle of destruction which is Yu Tsun's unwilling murder, and the whole immense madness of the Western Front. In that sense I am forced to agree with Ellmann's analysis, and the way he connects the word with:

Leopold Bloom, who in an equally tense moment in Barney Kiernan's pub declares, "But it's no use. ... Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life." "What?" he is asked. "Love," Bloom is forced to say, and adds in embarrassment, "I mean the opposite of hatred." He drops the subject and leaves. That simple statement of his is immediately mocked by those left behind.

Of course it is. "Love - the opposite of hatred." Its very banality and predictability makes it increasingly difficult to articulate with a straight face.

Borges has found a perversely ingenious way to signal it without ever overtly mentioning it; so (in his own way - in the brothel scene, at least) has Joyce. Gabler and his nemeis John Kidd no doubt take their place in the picture too (as do Oscar and Bosie) - the "monje taoísta o budista" [Taoist or Buddhist monk] {109} who insisted on publishing Ts’ui Pên's manuscript against his family's wishes, and (more equivocally) the "forastero" [foreigner] {106}, who killed him - for whatever reason - before he could finish it.

But which of them is which? In this time, or any other ...

[Joyce's Garden of Forking Paths]

In Flanders Fields

[Passchendaele (1917)]

It seems like ages since I last posted anything on this blog. What can I say? Summer intervened.

I feel like I spent most of it moling through stacks of books and typing up long lists of them for my bibliography blog (still, alas, a long way from completion - though sometimes I delude myself that the end might be in sight).

Bronwyn and I did have a nice little break by the banks of Lake Rotorua, though, during which I managed to read the whole of Anthony Beevor's horrifying account of the Battle of Stalingrad. I found it in the shelves of the friend's house we were staying in.

Which brings me to the subject of history books - more specifically books of military history. I seem to have read an awful lot of them lately. First there were the First World War books:

• Liddell-Hart, Basil H. History of The First World War. 1930. Rev. ed. 1934. London: Pan Books, 1972.
• Middlebrook, Martin. The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916. 1971. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
• Middlebrook, Martin. The Kaiser’s Battle. 21 March 1918: The First Day of the German Spring Offensive. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
• Prior, Robin, & Trevor Wilson. The Somme. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.
• Taylor, A. J. P. The First World War: An Illustrated History. 1963. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
• Tuchman, Barbara W. The Guns of August. 1962. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1963.
• Wolff, Ian. In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign. 1958. London: Pan Books, 1961.

Some of them I found in my own shelves, others I borrowed from the library. After that I found myself moving on to the Second World War:

• Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
• Lord, Walter. The Miracle of Dunkirk. New York : Viking Press, 1982.
• Shirer, William L. The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940. 1969. London: Pan Books, Ltd., 1972

Now, however, it's back to the Napoleonic wars, and even further back in time - all the way to antiquity:

• Burrow, John. A History of Histories: Epics, chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. London: Allen Lane, 2007.
• Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Trans. Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007.
• Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War. Trans. Richard Crawley. 1874. Introduction by Victor Davis Hanson. 1996. New York: Free Press, 2008.
• Zamyoski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.
• Zamyoski, Adam. Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon & The Congress of Vienna. HarperPress. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.

Why? You may well ask. I've always been a bit of a fan of such books, but I hope I'm not just one of those war junkies who spend their time prying into the more gruesome details of ancient battles because it gives them some kind of perverted thrill.

I do remember the sheer shock of seeing the Menin Gate and those immense fields of immaculately tended white crosses on the former Western Front when I went there with my parents as a teenager.

I guess my excuse, then, has to be relevance. The more of these books I read, the more applicable they seem to everyday life - my own, where I get to watch bureaucratic decision-making processes on a daily basis - but everyone else's, too, as we all experience the dreary parochial soap-opera of New Zealand politics.

[The Honourable John Key
Prime Minister of NZ]

It was interesting the other day, in fact, listening to John Key's response to the news that unemployment was far, far higher than anyone had feared, giving the lie to all his optimistic statements around New Year. His comment was that the recession was very bad, the worst since the 1930s, so there was really nothing anyone could do. "It could be worse," he added with a toothy smile.

I guess an outsider might find it a bit odd to find the man in charge of the overall direction of the nation's finances saying, in effect, that there was nothing to be done and it was all in the lap of the gods. But it's not so surprising if you've recently had the experience of reading William Shirer's appalling, terrifying account of the breakdown of France in 1940 - the pusillanimous refusal to take responsibility for anything on the part of the generals; the active, gleeful desire on the part of so many politicians to grovel before a Dictator (preferably a senile one - like Petain - who would allow them to pull the strings); the instinctive preference of the middle classes for Hitler and his Germans over the opposition at home. It made perfect sense to them at the time, but the harvest was a bitter one.

Watching the way decisions actually get made in a big organisation inspired the following poem, in fact. How else it it really possible to understand why people sign up to a solution they know to be unworkable and wrong? It isn't cowardice, exactly - or even complacency. It's just that things tend to develop a momentum of their own, and it's very difficult for novel and creative ideas to be heard, even, in an atmosphere where wiseacre "realism" rules.

Luckily the consequences seldom entail the violent deaths of half a million men. Seeing Key's complacent, vacant face proclaiming his inability to think of anything to do to reduce unemployment in the slightest, though, made me it far easier for me to imagine him or his kind signing up to yet another pointless, bone-headed war. We've seen his sort before. They used to be called Chamberlain or Herbert Hoover (or G. W. Bush and his toady Blair, for that matter):

Last Conference before Passchendaele

(5th-7th January, 1917)


Everyone knew it wouldn’t work, but nobody
could think of a way not to go through
with it. Lloyd George knew
Douglas Haig was self-deluded,
believing every ‘intelligence report’
from crystal-gazing Colonel Charteris
– God (after all) was on his side.
Sir William Robertson (Chief
of the Imperial General Staff) knew
Haig was next door to an imbecile
but backed him – lacking better –
against any alternative. Haig knew
the Fifth Army Staff, Gough’s boys,
were capable of stuffing up
the most elegant and foolproof
plan. Everyone knew
it always rains in Flanders
in the Autumn. The result was
the ‘most indiscriminate slaughter
in the history of warfare.’
No-one could find
a good way to avoid it.

Without losing face, that is.

All in all, it's hard to feel that I've been entirely wasting my time with these books.

Crazy Like a Fox

[Nicholas A. Basbanes: A Gentle Madness (1995)]

-----Original Message-----

From: David Howard
Sent: Wednesday, 16 December 2009 8:32 p.m.
To: Jack Ross
Subject: booked


Dear Jack,

I have just visited your library catalogue. Of course, I love you - and part of what I love in you is your precision. But you are certifiable.

Please offer my sympathies to Bronwyn.

David

It's hard to deny the logic of David's remarks. The whole thing seems pretty crazy to me, too, some - even most - of the time. Hence ( I suppose) my choice of title for this bibliography blog: A Gentle Madness.

Interestingly, in the 1999 paperback reissue of his fascinating account of "Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books," Nicholas Basbanes mentions that at least one of his featured collectors, a retired psychoanalyst, had expressed a certain disquiet over his choice of title: "We take madness very seriously in my line of work." [xxv].

Is it mad to collect books; and then, once you have them neatly ranged in bookcases, to catalogue them by location and category? Surely not. Professional librarians would be in a lot of trouble if one were to resort to such facile diagnoses. Like most manias, it's clearly a matter of proportion.

So:

• When you find yourself going in to debt to buy new books, even though you don't have enough space to display the existing ones, I think you could be said to have edged over from Bibliophilia to Bibliomania. It is, I have to say, a terrifyingly easy step to take.


• When you no longer read the books you buy, for fear of damaging them, or because their contents no longer interest you as much as their bindings, fonts, paperstock and other physical traits, you've ceased to be a book-lover and have become a mere collector.


• When you're forced to buy multiple copies of the same book, or even of the different impressions of a particular edition of a book, you've become a bibliographer, not a reader.

I'd like to believe that I'm still a bibliophile rather than a bibliomaniac, a reader rather than a collector, and that I acquire them for use rather than for show. You may think otherwise when you check out the online catalogue, though.

I hasten to say that it's very much a work in progress. In the geographical section, mapping the locations of the various books, 7 out of 26 bookcases, containing an estimated 6,000-odd books, remain to be catalogued - which might be seen as overshadowing the 8,562 already listed.

The 30-odd classificatory categories, too, are by no means complete. I haven't yet had time to reconcile them all with one another, and the larger pages are already starting to groan at the seams.

Why am I even bothering? Well, first of all, it's nice to take out every book and take a good look at it (discovering little treasures which one had forgotten ever getting is a lot of fun, too). Secondly, it's useful and (ultimately, I hope) timesaving to know where everything is. Thirdly, it saves one the trouble of rewriting out the bibliographical details of a book more than once, when it's being repeated in a number of different contexts.

That last one sounds a little unconvincing, I suppose, but when your book collection shadows your professional interests as closely as mine does, it really does make sense to have a complete catalogue.

Strangely enough, even though my reasons for putting this slowly-evolving print catalogue up online were purely practical - it enables me to access it wherever I happen to be working - I've found that it seems to be attracting a certain amount of interest. The blog has no fewer than five followers already, though I can't think what satisfaction they obtain from watching it slowly grow.

Maybe they just like to look at the pictures. I have to say that finding appropriate images to attach to the various entries is the only really fun part of the whole monstrous drudgery. When it's all finished, though, how I shall gloat and preen myself! Perhaps I really will run mad ...

[Charles Wysocki: Max in the Stacks]

Carver by Name ...

[6 - Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (2009)]

The question is, can you over-edit? The exhibit, Beginners, the first draft of the book eventually published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), by Raymond Carver.

It was a largely academic question until the inclusion of both collections in Carver's Collected Stories in the magisterial Library of America series earlier this year. Most readers had never had the chance to compare the two before, and the discrepancy turns out to be pretty remarkable.

Carver's close friend and editor, Gordon Lish (who liked to refer to himself modestly as "Mr. Fiction"), cut the text of his draft by an estimated 55%. Most of the stories lost substantial amounts of text, some lost over half of it. In one case in particular, "A Small, Good Thing," over 75% of Carver's words hit the cutting-room floor.

And this was no subtle Ezra-Pound-carving-a-new-poem-out-of-Eliot's-Waste-Land-drafts business, either. This was Carver's second major book of stories, not his first - and a good many of the stories in it had already appeared, or were slated to appear, in major periodicals.

Nor was Carver exactly overjoyed when he finally got around to examining Lish's revisions in detail. He wrote him a letter - reprinted in full by the Library of America editors [pp. 992-96] - which is among the most anguished literary cris-de-coeur I've ever come across. He said:

I’ll tell you the truth, my very sanity is on the line here. I don't want to sound melodramatic here, but I've come back from the grave here to start writing stories once more ... Now, I'm afraid, mortally afraid, I feel it, that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that's how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.
...
I'm confused, tired, paranoid, and afraid, yes, of the consequences for me if the collection came out in its present form. So help me, please, yet again. Don't please, make this too hard for me, for I'm just likely to start coming unraveled knowing how I've displeased and disappointed you. God Almighty, Gordon. ...

But then he also said:

I see what it is that you’ve done, what you’ve pulled out of it, and I’m awed and astonished, startled even, with your insights.

In any case, Lish paid little attention. "My sense of it was that there was a letter and that I just went ahead," he said in an interview long afterwards. He knew he was right (as Anthony Trollope might have put it). So the book appeared as he wanted it to, not as Carver did. And the rest is history. It's worth noting that Carver never allowed Lish to do much more than correct accidentals in his subsequent books, though. Also that he insisted on reprinting something closer to the original text of "A Small, Good Thing" in his next collection, Cathedral (1983).

The hero-editor is, of course, a familiar figure in American letters. Carver even refers to the most famous example, Maxwell Perkins, editor to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, in his letter to Lish ("You are a wonder, a genius ... better than any of two of Max Perkins, etc. etc."). Hero-publishers certainly exist in the rest of the English-speaking world (Allen Lane, Victor Gollancz, Peter Owen), even hero publisher's readers (Edward Garnett, T. S. Eliot), but not so much editors. I think perhaps that the rest of us assume that writers can, by and large, write. They may need some guidance in the timing and direction of their work, and certainly in matters of marketing, but for the rest I think we like to feel that (with a few exceptions) they have at least some overall sense of what they're doing.

And that, by and large, seems to be the way the story is being written in the various reviews of Collected Stories (and its UK counterpart, Beginners, an edition of the first-draft stories on their own, with an introduction by Carver's wife and literary executor Tess Gallagher). "When Good Editors Go Bad" is the title of one of the most forthright of these pieces, but by extension it could cover most of the rest - poor simple alcoholic Ray was deceived by a wily New York editor into putting his name to a book he never wrote.

I have a rather higher opinion of Carver than that. In fact, I suppose my interest in this issue follows on naturally from my fascination with him. I wouldn't call myself an obsessive collector of his work, but purely for practical reasons I've been forced to acquire quite a number of books simply in order to read him in full. For so short-lived and late-blossoming a writer, he does seem to have left behind an unusually tangled literary legacy.

Here's a (partial) list of the books I've had to gather to date in order to make some sense of it all:

[2 - The Stories of Raymond Carver (1985)]

1. Carver, Raymond. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. 1985. Harvill. London: HarperCollins, 1994.


2. Carver, Raymond. The Stories of Raymond Carver: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; Cathedral. 1976, 1981 & 1983. London: Picador, 1985.


3. Carver, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From: The Selected Stories. 1988. London: The Harvill Press, 1993.


4. Carver, Raymond. All of Us: The Collected Poems. 1996. London: The Harvill Press, 1997.


5. Carver, Raymond. Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose. Ed. William L. Stull. Foreword by Tess Gallagher. 1996. London: The Harvill Press, 1997.


6. Carver, Raymond. Collected Stories. Ed. William L. Stull & Maureen P. Carroll. The Library of America, 195. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2009.

[3 - Raymond Carver: Where I'm Calling From (1988)]

The crucial exhibit here is no. 2: The Stories of Raymond Carver, a never-reprinted and now virtually-unobtainable British reprint of the full text of his first three major books of stories (with the exception of the small-press Furious Seasons). Since 1988, when Carver's selected stories (no. 3) appeared, most people have been reading that text instead, supplemented by the extra material included in no. 5, thus obscuring the nature and integrity of the actual collections which appeared during his lifetime.

William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, the editors of Carver's Collected Poems (no. 4), his Uncollected Fiction and Prose (no. 5), and now his Collected Stories (no. 6), have made the interesting decision not to repeat the small revisions (largely, they say, of accidentals and nomenclature) included in the 1988 Selected Stories. Instead, they reprint (for the most part) the major collections, though sometimes (especially in the case of Furious Seasons) with excisions to avoid repeating material included in the three main books.

So what? you say. Who is Raymond Carver that we should pay so much attention to the dates and circumstances of his work's appearance? Well, it does make a difference, I'm afraid. The evolution from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (1976), also edited by Gordon Lish, to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love [WWTAWWTAL, for short] is very marked, but it's largely obscured by the complete rearrangement of the material in Where I'm Calling From. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that it was the 1981 book that made him a star- not that the lustre didn't reflect backwards and forwards onto the rest of his work - and that it was the brutal, uncompromising terseness of the stories included in WWTAWWTAL that had the greatest effect on his contemporaries.

[Robert Altman, dir.: Short Cuts (1993)]

Take the 1993 Carver-based movie Short Cuts, for instance. The very title gives us a clue as to how Robert Altman, at least, interpreted Carver's stories. And his opinion was an influential one, given the subsequent appearance of a book reprinting the stories on which the film was based, together with an introduction by the director. Would that movie ever have been made if Carver had had his wish and published, instead of WWTAWWTAL, some lightly-edited version of the book Beginners? Permit me to doubt it.

That's not to say that Lish was justified in performing such radical surgery on Carver's book without the author's permission, but it is important to note just how desperately obscure, depressed and terminally alcoholic Carver looked at that moment. To put it mildly, he didn't seem in the best state to make meaningful decisions about his future. That's how Lish saw it, at any rate, and - until now - posterity has largely confirmed his judgement. The fact remains that the book did make a sensation, and that sensation was at least to some extent due to the stories' refusal to resolve and flesh themselves out in a conventional way.

Carver, to be sure, went on developing as a writer. He gave full rein to the more sympathetic, Chekhovian side of his art in Cathedral (1983), probably his best book, and the one which represents him most fully. But by then he'd cleaned up his act, was in a new relationship, a successful, internationally-feted author.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Lish's editing processes shouldn't be scrutinised carefully. Nor am I sorry that Stull and Carroll's meticulous new edition has given us the tools to do so. I just feel that this controversy should not be over-simplified. Beginners, I feel - and it can only be an opinion - would not have seized the attention of critics (and other writers) the way WWTAWWTAL did. It would not have given rise to "dirty realism" or "minimalism" or whatever you want to call the literary movement which Carver's work was said to have inspired.

This is, I believe, a debate which could (and perhaps should) run and run. How much cutting and editing is too much? How long is a piece of string? No single, universally-applicable answer is possible, hence the usefulness of test cases such as this. I'd hate to have Gordon Lish on my team, to tell the truth, but having your collected stories officially declared "classics", part of the permanent record of your national literature, within a scant twenty years of your death is no mean feat. Denying Lish his part in that triumph would be churlish - worse, it would involve falsifying the true nature of Carver's legacy.

The poet in Raymond Carver will continue to be read and loved, I'm sure - but the landscape of his stories remains as stark as the surface of the moon. They'll always be a hard pill to swallow. Lish was, I feel, correct in seeing a "peculiar bleakness" in them. His gift to posterity lies in helping us to see there was something there we needed - something, finally, we just couldn't do without.

[5 - Raymond Carver: Call if You Need Me (1997)]

Flying Blind next Thursday

[Floating Cinemas]

A panel presentation on the cultural and artistic impact of new media technologies.

Panel:
- Writer Jack Ross will draw on his web-based projects including the REM trilogy.
- Filmmaker Gabriel White will discuss the question of a "minor" cinema.
- Filmmaker David Blyth will discuss the internet and desire though his recent film Transfigured Nights.
- Film Archive curator Amelia Harris will examine the similar presence of amateurism in early cinema and contemporary media.

When: Thursday Dec 3
7.30 pm

Where: Auckland Film Archive
Level 1, 300 K Rd
Koha entry
complimentary beer!

*

[postscript: 4/12/09]

Well, the event went off very well, I thought.

You can read more about the details of my presentation here, and no doubt there'll be further follow-ups on the Floating Cinemas website and blog.

[Photograph by Mary Paul (4/9/09)]

Tactical Voting in Australian Masterchef

[Aussie Masterchef Finalists Poh, Chris & Julie]

Forget the Witi Ihimaera and Hone Harawira scandals, I have a far more weighty accusation to share with the New Zealand public. Yes, patient readers, I believe that our favourite reality show of the moment, Australian Masterchef, is rigged!

I first became aware of the gravity of the situation after almost coming to blows with a Julie-partisan (my mother) over dinner at my parent's house last night. I, a Chris true-believer, have elected to boycott the grand finale tomorrow in protest at the blatantly unfair judging that saw him packed off into beery oblivion ... Snout to Tail, Stout to Ale indeed!

Storm in a teacup (or a crockpot) you say? Too trivial for a weighty intellectual blogsite such as this? I don't think so.

What do we expect of a good reality show? Well, logical, consistent rules, for a start. Australian Masterchef got off to a shaky start by importing a system of voting-off-the-island from Survivor which seems to me completely unsuited to a skills-based programme such as this. Who cares who the other contestants want to get rid of? The point is who has the ability to go further. For the judges to step back from elimination decisions such as this as about as fatuous an arrangement as I can well imagine.

But, then, is it a skills-based programme? The first few "master-classes", where head judges Gary and George stroked their own egos by giving lessons in how to butter bread or how to boil water, left even the contestants baffled and unsure how to react. Was this some colossal piss-take? One could see them alternately scratching their heads and yawning until they learnt the correct response: fawning adulation. Julie was an early winner in this regard, along with the egregious, Uriah-Heep-like Sam.

[A Rogues Gallery: Masterchef judges
Gary Mehigan, Sarah Wilson, George Calombaris & Matt Preston]

As the seemingly interminable months of the competition wound on, chef after chef came up for elimination opposite the talentless Sam and self-doubting Julie only to receive their marching orders. It couldn't be ... that they were simply better TV than their opponents, could it? That would be a bit harsh. Let's just attribute it to their being more adroit and abject flatterers.

By the time of the Hong Kong challenge, even the judges seem to have woken up to the fact that they were looking at a final with all the good cooks (except Chris) already sent home. So what was their solution? Reverse the last set of eliminations and bring three failed contestants back. Brilliant! It meant that the entire Hong Kong excursion was a complete waste of time which accounted for no contestants, despite a whole week of stuffing around there. Fun and games, yes, but one could see that for Chris at least this was the final straw.

He'd put up with the transparently self-serving, insultingly elementary "master-classes;" had attempted to endure the transparent politicking of the so-called "kiddie mafia" (Sam, Josh & Kate); but he seems somehow to have retained a simple faith in the basic concept of a reality show, which is that you can actually send people home and hope they'll stay there.

By now the rules were so complex, so contradictory, so obviously invented on the fly, that the whole contest had come down to one question. Who's the most obvious candidate for "little Aussie battler" among those still left standing? The talented (though already-eliminated) Poh was just a bit too swollen-headed for the role. And just imagine the fuss from heartland Australia if an Asian won their inaugural "Masterchef" award! Chris might have seemed a good fit if it weren't for his refusal to blub and emote and self-destruct all over the screen. Who was left? Julie.

Last night Julie served up a leg of lamb, a piece of stuffed chicken and a dry piece of chocolate cake. She failed to garnish them with any of the sauce or vegetables she'd prepared to go with them through sheer incompetence and flap. Our guest judge, cook-book guru (and disastrous fashion-victim) Donna Hay, helpfully explained that this "didn't matter with rustic cooking." By this stage it was clear that three courses of vegemite sandwiches "cooked with love" (Julie's big theme) would have got her through with flying colours. 'Nuff said, as Stan Lee used to say.

I don't need to watch any further. I know Julie is going to win the competition overall. I don't believe she deserves to. She's about as much of a master-chef as my arse. For the love of Mike, didn't you guys want to find out who was the best cook among them? No you didn't is the brutal answer. You wanted to elicit a lot of sentimental tear-jerking slop from the contestants in order to build up your ratings. J'accuse. That's all I can say at this point: J'accuse.

You've robbed me of my simple faith in reality TV. No longer will I be able to sit glued night after night to the cook-offs and taste-tests. I mean, I expect this sort of thing of Americans: Las Vegas bookies conspiring in smoke-filled rooms, Martha Stewart and her pet brokers trading in dodgy stocks, but I wouldn't have believed it of our bluff, hearty neighbours to the North. You're your own worst enemies, that's the truth of it. You'll end up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs (or perhaps, in this case, the goose that fricassees them in boarfat) ... Shakespeare, as usual, said it best:

O now, for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars
That makes ambition virtue! O farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
Th' immortal Jove's dread clamors counterfeit,
Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone ...

(Othello 3.3.347-357).

Never mind, Chris, we still believe in you (though you won't catch me eating any pig's heads or pig's trotters outside a nightmare ...)

[Chris Badenoch]

Before the Storm

[Vor dem Sturm (1878)]

Vor dem Sturm
by Theodor Fontane
“The German War and Peace"
(apparently)
I picked it up in Edinburgh
& was immediately
beguiled

the heroine seemed real
Renate von Vitzewitz
stagey action
understated
like real life
her tragic early death
a psychic blow

[Theodor Fontane (1819-1898)]

The Pioneers
by James Fenimore Cooper
I had a plan to read them all
The Leatherstocking Novels
dutifully ploughed through
the first few
but this one

[The Pioneers (1823)]

The drifting snow
of its opening pages
the meeting on the road
the little town
in the Big Woods
It all seemed true
or if not true

[James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)]

infinitely desirable
but why?
Then John Meade Falkner,
The Nebuly Coat
not one of his
most celebrated works
(Moonfleet

The Lost Stradivarius)
but this one had
the atmosphere
of strange but vital friendships
formed in musty towns
deep conversations
a world one longed to enter

[The Nebuly Coat (1903)]

Three times it's happened
– 3 obscure books –
I've never dared reread them
Would it happen again?
Do I want it to?
I wonder
It was comforting, entrancing, mystical

like waking on your own

in the blue room

[John Meade Falkner (1858-1932)]

Hooked on Classics

Recently I was invited to a poetry gathering up north where I read out some of my versions from Sappho. Afterwards a rather indignant-looking elderly lady came up to me, introducing herself as a former Latin teacher:

“What you read – that was all right, that wasn’t too bad … but some of those poets are just filthy, complete degenerates. Catullus, for instance. In one of his poems he actually encourages another man to go to bed with his girlfriend! Three of them, all together! It’s depraved …”

I agreed that he was a bit of a one (actually I was secretly relieved that she wasn’t intent on criticising some of my more daring translation choices), whilst congratulating myself inwardly that I hadn’t chosen anything raunchy from Ovid or Anakreon or any of the less respectable Greek or Latin poets.

Eventually I managed to escape without committing myself to any too quotable opinions about the morals of the ancient world.

It got me thinking, though. What is it with the Classics? "Reams of ancient filth," as my father used to put it (apparently the editions of Latin authors they used at school had all the "adult" bits taken out and printed at the back in an appendix for scholarly reference; I think you can guess which parts of the book were most thumbed and dog-eared ...)

Anyway, the latest issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora includes some more of my reflections on the subject in the form of a review-essay of Ted Jenner's recent Titus Books collection Writers in Residence ...

Ted Jenner is perhaps unusual among modern writers in being a Greek scholar as well as a poet. Most other venturers into the field of classical translation nowadays (myself included) seem content with a Loeb dual-text and a lot of - possibly unmerited - self-confidence.

You don't really learn anything new that way, though. What's fascinating about Ted's work is the precision and finesse with which he reconstructs these fragments of the past, some of them literally combed out of the rubbish-dumps of Egypt (it's amazing how long papyrus can survive in a really dry climate).

Obviously I have a good deal more to say about that in my piece over at the nzepc. For the moment, however, here's a brief listing of Ted's publications to date (I've also included a few illustrations so you can appreciate what beautiful pieces of bookmaking many of them are):

• A Memorial Brass. Eastbourne, Wellington: Hawk Press, 1980.
• Dedications. Auckland: Omphalos Press, 1991.
• The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments. Auckland: Holloway Press, 1997.
• Sappho Triptych. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.
• Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.

You can hear more of Ted's own views in the online interview with Brett Cross and Scott Hamilton available here.

And if your curiosity extends even beyond that, why not have a look at the pages on Anne Carson and Michael Harlow which I'm gradually building up for our new Massey MA course Contemporary New Zealand Writers in an International Context?

Carson is herself a very considerable scholar (witness her fascinating 1999 book Economy of the Unlost, which daringly juxtaposes the poetry of Paul Celan with the surviving lyric fragments of Simonides of Ceos) ...

But that's more than enough self-advertising from me for the moment. Do check out the new (James K. Baxter-themed) issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora if you have a moment, though.