Category Archives: A prose flourish

March 3, 2013 · 6:30 pm

A. E. Housman’s “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”–The Choice Between Allopathic and Homeopathic Medicine

There are times, not a few of them, when I have a great deal of difficulty in writing a post.  It’s not that I haven’t read scads of books that, with a little re-familiarization, I could comment upon.  It’s not even so much that it’s always a “dark and stormy” day.  And it’s not that I think that some people somewhere won’t be interested.  Sometimes, it’s just that I’m like Terence in A. E. Housman’s poem, “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff,” and am in a mental, moral, spiritual, or psychological slump, in a deep, dark hole, and can’t dig myself back out.  But today when I began to feel that way (and I haven’t been posting regularly as much as I ought lately), I decided to share with you just what I often do when I’m in a blue mood.  And this is the truth:  I turn to Housman’s poem.  It’s not that I necessarily take any part of the advice contained in it (and there are two different remedies propounded, one an allopathic or party-throwing solution, and the other a homeopathic or training-for-bad-days-ahead one).  [As you are no doubt aware, the original meaning of allopathy is a type of medication or treatment that runs counter to the illness, homeopathy is a type of medication or treatment that imitates or runs like to the illness.]  Even when I don’t take the advice, however, I get a lift from the rhythm and rhyme, and from the wit and insouciance and just plain poetry of Housman’s work.  Luckily, since it’s another poem that has a version whose original copyright has expired and which is published elsewhere on the Internet, I can share it here with you in its entirety.  It’s a little long, but my posts lately have been short, so as I analyze it (with your tolerance), I’ll take it apart and present the whole piece in order as it comes.

The poem begins with dialogue, presumably aimed at Terence by a friend or friends, after Terence has been gloomily poeticizing.  The friend even goes so far as to make fun of Terence (and this part always gives me a wry grin at some of my own sadder poetic offerings) by parodying his offerings in a made-up poem about a cow, adding a bucolic note to the proceedings:  “‘Terence, this is stupid stuff:/You eat your victuals fast enough;/There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,/To see the rate you drink your beer./But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,/It gives a chap the belly-ache./The cow, the old cow, she is dead;/It sleeps well, the horned head:/We poor lads, ’tis our turn now/To hear such tunes as killed the cow./Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme/Your friends to death before their time/Moping melancholy mad:/Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.'”  The friend is not of course automatically right, but one can hear the pragmatic, practical voice of a born optimist, and the voice itself gives hope because it suggests that there is an alternative to the way our as-yet-unheard-from Terence sees things.

Another voice speaks now, though not in quotation marks, a sort of intermediate voice between the first voice and Terence.  This voice has yet another suggestion:  there’s always alcohol!  And we’ve already heard that Terence likes beer, in the first stanza.  This voice is in a sense partly Terence, yet not entirely, because Terence’s real justification and response come in the last two stanzas.  But now for this stanza in the intermediate voice first:  “Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,/There’s brisker pipes than poetry./Say, for what were hop-yards meant,/Or why was Burton built on Trent?/Oh many a peer of England brews/Livelier liquor than the Muse,/And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s ways to man./Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink/For fellows whom it hurts to think:/Look into the pewter pot/To see the world as the world’s not./And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:/The mischief is that ’twill not last./Oh I have been to Ludlow fair/And left my necktie God knows where,/And carried half-way home, or near,/Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:/Then the world seemed none so bad,/And I myself a sterling lad;/And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,/Happy till I woke again./Then I saw the morning sky:/Heigho, the tale was all a lie;/The world, it was the old world yet,/I was I, my things were wet,/And nothing now remained to do/But begin the game anew.”  The last two lines and one or two in the middle refer of course to some of the main drawbacks of alcohol, which are that it always requires to be renewed to be efficacious, and can leave one “mucky.”  Its effect, when it is working, is allopathic; that is, it works in opposition to the “illness” of reality by causing one “to see the world as the world’s not.”

Terence, however, comes into his own and manages to justify his apparently gloomy poetic tendencies in the last two stanzas.  He answers (though again, the poet does not put the lines in dialogue form):  “Therefore, since the world has still/Much good, but much less good than ill,/And while the sun and moon endure/Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,/I’d face it as a wise man would,/And train for ill and not for good./’Tis true, the stuff I brew for sale/Is not so brisk a brew as ale:/Out  of a stem that scored the hand/I wrung it in a weary land./But take it:  if the smack is sour,/The better for the embittered hour;/It should do good to heart and head/When your soul is in my soul’s stead;/And I will friend you, if I may,/In the dark and cloudy day.”  Thus here the “medicine” recommended by Terence is homeopathic; that is, it is the same sort of treatment as what happens in reality, in which “luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure.”

Terence’s final “proof” of the real superiority of his “poetry” comes in the final stanza, and is itself wry and caustic, though still in an unusually good-humored way:  “There was a king reigned in the East:/There, when kings will sit to feast,/They get their fill before they think/With poisoned meat and poisoned drink./He gathered all that springs to birth/From the many-venomed earth;/First a little, thence to more,/He sampled all her killing store;/And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,/Sate the king when healths went round./They put arsenic in his meat/And stared aghast to watch him eat;/They poured strychnine in his cup/And shook to see him drink it up;/They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:/Them it was their poison hurt./–I tell the tale that I heard told./Mithridates, he died old.”  And it is of course the king Mithridates that this tale is of, which Housman, in Terence’s voice, is using here as a metaphor for “training for ill and not for good.”  The advice is seemingly pessimistic (i.e., always expect the worst), yet the proof of the argument is in the fact that by poisoning himself Mithridates was not attempting to die, but in fact to live a long and healthy life.  There is thus a friendly, even funny, paradox contained in this poem, which the progression from the original objection to Terence and his “work” to his final answer has made apparent.

My reaction to this poem is usually to feel quite sing-songy and happy for a while after I read it, not only due to a certain affection for some forms of old-fashioned rhyming verse, but also due to my admiration for the craftsmanship of it.  When we see something well-done, even on occasions when we require to be persuaded of the perspective contained therein or even if we don’t entirely agree with it, yet we appreciate the skill with which the writer or poet put it forward.  So, the next time you find yourself in a mood to kick a can at the world and say, “To hell with it all, I’m sick of it,” have a look at Housman’s poem:  he not only won’t lie to you about finding happiness, he’ll tell you what to do with whatever share of gloom comes your way.  In a way, the poem itself is a “dose” of the “poisonous” meat and drink Mithridates took, a dose of homeopathic medicine from the storehouse of Housman. [His collection of poems entitled A Shropshire Lad had the original title The Poems of Terence Hearsay, thus hinting that Terence is a persona of Housman himself, though he was actually from Worcestershire, and used Shropshire in his poems only because of certain associations he had with the area.]

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March 1, 2013 · 5:14 pm

Milan Kundera’s “Let the Old Dead Make Way for the Young Dead” and the Pulse of Humanity–“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin””

“Let the Old Dead Make Way for the Young Dead” is a story in which two people who have known each other in the Biblical sense once in the past meet up again “in a small Czech town,” and have to try to decide whether or not to make love again, fifteen years later.  They each have something operating as an impediment, a true enough picture of what I have called in my title “the pulse of humanity.”  Each is haunted by a sense of personal failure, the man because he is poor, has no Communist party status, has not done much in his life, and has had little or no success with attractive or alluring women, the woman because she is fifteen years older than he and has in the meantime been made to feel even older by a son who wants her to “act her age” (i.e., who is putting her determinedly in the past with his memories of his father).  In the more immediate sense, she has inadvertently allowed her husband’s grave lease to lapse and his corpse to be disposed of, which she knows her grown son will blame her for.  Not a promising scenario for a hot romance, is it?

And yet there is a sense of human desperation constant in the story, a sense of two people, each reaching out for something from the past with which to shore up the uncertain and unappealing future.  At first when they meet on the street, the man, who is now around thirty-five, doesn’t recognize the woman, who was thirty-five to his twenty when they made love the first time.  She is upset because the man at the cemetery refused to admit her claim about her husband’s right to the space and put it to her in concise terms that “the old dead ought to make room for the young dead.”  She is tired and footsore and depressed at no longer knowing anyone in town, so she accepts her former acquaintance’s invitation to come up to his bachelor apartment for coffee or tea.  This is her reasoning, for at first though she thinks of him as a former lover, there is no desire for him in her mind:  “She could wash her hands in his bathroom and then sit in his soft armchair (her legs ached), look around his room, and listen to the boiling water bubbling away behind the screen which separated the kitchen nook from the room.”  (This is stated indirectly from her point of view, but unless she is remembering his room from the past–and we are told he has only been living here seven years, so only the furnishings could be the same–she cannot know ahead of time exactly what she will find there.  She is in fact postulating the appearance of his room, fantasizing in a way, and she turns out to be fairly correct in her surmise.)

He in his turn is obsessed with his thinning hair and the future bald spot which he often spends time looking at in the mirror.  He has been married in the time they have been apart, was faithful, and has been divorced for seven years, and because he cannot afford to date accomplished women, and the town is deficient of eligible women in any case, he has largely been celibate, or has slept with immature women who seemed “stupid” to him.  When he asks her about her presence in the town, she tells him that she and her son come every year to her husband’s grave on All Soul’s Day, but she omits to reveal to him her unfortunate failure to hold onto the grave, as if it were a physical fault she were ashamed of; this is pertinent because the two of them are so otherwise obsessed with their physical appearances in relation to the possibility of again making love.  He notices her aging, and knows too that he will not continue to find her attractive, but at the same time “he saw the delicate movement of her hand with which she refused the offer of cognac [and] he realized that this charm, this magic, this grace, which had enraptured him, was still the same in her, though hidden beneath the mask of old age, and was in itself still attractive….”   He begins to tell her his pessimistic thoughts, only of course “he was silent about the bald spot that was beginning to appear (it was just like her silence about the canceled grave).  On the other hand, the vision of the bald spot was transubstantiated into quasi-philosophical maxims to the effect that time passes more quickly than man is able to live, and that life is terrible, because everything in it is necessarily doomed to extinction.  He voiced these and similar maxims, to which he awaited a sympathetic response….”  Instead, she tells him that it is “superficial” talk and that she doesn’t like to hear it.

Suddenly, however, he breaches the gap between them by reaching across and stroking her hand.  He begins to remember the first time they made love fifteen years before, when “she absolutely defied his imagination” not due to her deficits but to his own.  He also remembers that at the time she had whispered something to him which he had neglected to ask her about when he didn’t hear it correctly, and now there is no chance to recover it; as well, at the time she was the sexual aggressor, and now he is, and she is reluctant to be with him, is in fact very reluctant.  At the time he had been a callow youth, and had made love to her in the dark, and the time is now unrecoverable, because now she looks different, and he will never be able to see her again as she once was.  There is of course shallow thinking going on in both of them, but also honest thought, because he and she both know that he will feel the disgust all men feel at a physically imperfect woman (and though this seems like yet another narrow and unfair picture of both men and women alike when taken in the abstract, in the story it rings true, it is a true remark, because it is part of the truth of what these two characters have between them, part of the human reality they are grasping at willy-nilly which they both have need to fear will at some point elude them).

The pertinence of All Soul’s Day suddenly comes to the foreground when the narrative tells us that part of the reason she doesn’t want to give in to his lovemaking in the present-day situation is because she knows that her previous appearance fifteen years before has been a “memorial” to him, a memorial to beauty and sexuality.  He keeps telling her “don’t fight me” and “there’s no need to fight me” when he strokes her hand and tries to touch her, and she wars with the memory of her son’s attempts to age her so that he himself can become sexually more mature with the women in his own life, because he is unable to allow his mother to be an attractive woman to someone nearer her own age.  The significance of a memorial in this story thus becomes important because in the present tense, the woman finally allows the man to make love to her, and as we are told, “Evening was still a long way off.  This time the room was full of light.”  These lovely final lines make the point that as long as we have any bloom of life on us at all, death is still far enough away for love and life to intervene between us and the doom of time we all face, thus “evening” is “still a long way off.”  Finally, “this time the room was full of light” means not only that in a mature love affair we see our need for what it is and are no longer able to deceive ourselves about what we are doing, but also that our memorials to the past become of less moment and we are full of the “light” of the present, and able to show generosity and love in a complete and fulfilling way.  Thus, in terms of memorials, in this story “the old dead” (the memorials of the past) have made way for a present which, because the two lovers have no future together in a permanent sense, will shortly become “the young dead.”  Yet in showing the common “pulse of humanity,” this story is about hope, love, and eternal youth, and not about age and despair.

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February 27, 2013 · 5:45 pm

“Misery loves company”–or, the downside of suffering alone and apart….

This morning is an ugly, rainy, windy (and in some locations) snowy and slushy day.  We’re due for one, right?  I mean, in the area I’m writing from, we’ve had three days or so of sunshiny though chilly weather, when even if it wasn’t particularly nice to go outside, it was pleasant to look through the window at sunbeams dancing across old snow mounds, dirty though they were.  So, you’d think I’d face a seasonably rotten day with equanimity, wouldn’t you?  Only, it’s been almost a week now since I’ve posted, and I have been feeling worse and worse every day because I’ve been stalling and kibbutzing and trying to get around it somehow, anyhow, reading book after book and having little or nothing to contribute about any of them.  It’s as if the weather gods had said to me, “Okay, you don’t appreciate it and make use of it when we send you good weather, so here’s what you deserve for goofing off!  Something more in line with your frame of mind!”  The most I could pat myself on the back for was that I hadn’t brought anyone else’s mood down measurably, at least not as far as I knew.

I had placed a call to a friend the other day, and not finding him in had left a message that was short, informative, and as cheerful as I could make it under the circumstances of not having anything really good to share that would distinguish it.  I like to say happy things to my friends, as do we all, but sometimes we just don’t have the umph! or the good news to do so, and it’s a toss-up amongst whether or not we will be good friends and say what is really on our minds (sad parts and all, in true honesty), support their possible down moods, or whether we will go all sweetness-and-light and try to pretend that nothing is wrong.  You notice, of course, that it sometimes seems to be a choice between being honest and being supportive of someone else’s good mood, or at least that’s the way some people interpret it when they quote John Ray’s nostrum “Misery loves company.”  For, here’s the thing:  we don’t really bring anyone else’s mood down by telling them how lousy we’re feeling, at least not if they are true and good friends.  The fly-by-nights we can do without.  In actual fact, it makes someone feel needed and helpful to be able to reassure us that the good weather will come again, that we are not alone, that they too are feeling overcome by the weather, the neighbors, the political climate, the gods.  It’s just that we need to take turns, and touch base with each other too when we are both feeling lousy, not shutting ourselves off to suffer alone and apart when the impulse is to do so, but instead making contact with our part of the human community and letting it know what we’re going through.

Luckily, today I got a call back from my friend, and he was having a bad day today, as was I, and even though I would have much preferred to hear that his day was good, “misery loves company” was true in the sense that I was very, very glad to hear from my friend in spite of his down mood.  Because, after all, it was an honest tribute to my sharing what I could share, which was my certainty that this bad weather can’t last forever, that my friend’s sunny mood will once again return, and that his quips and witticisms will once again resurface to brighten the sad times I have when I’m alone and apart in my suffering.  And that’s why misery loves company–it doesn’t matter so much whether the company is able to be reassuring or is feeling low as well, though a lift is always nice; just the knowledge that two are commiserating instead of one standing alone is a real help, and after all, there are people all over this area who are experiencing the same sort of day as we are, and they too may encounter me and we may share sad soul sayings and perspectives, thus broadening the community of people fighting against a lousy day.  So if you are having a lousy day today, or bad weather, or bad luck, don’t crawl into a hole and lick your wounds:  share your troubles with a friend and give him or her the opportunity to brighten things up for you–by doing so, you may be making that person’s day brighter too!

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February 17, 2013 · 5:01 pm

A Poem and a Meditation on Being an Individual, and On What “Read[s] Human and Exact.”

In searching for poems to write about this morning (and I was definitely in the mood to write about good poetry, having recently finished a longish bout with prose in having published a fifth novel), I was reading through my own favorite poems in a treasured Norton anthology and came across a poem by Robert Graves which has always struck me as particularly talented.  Luckily, since it has been in at least one published version since 1938 and has already been published in full on the Internet at least once, I can share the whole poem with you here without transgressing copyright laws.  Here is the poem:

The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers

“Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,/Keep probability–some say–in view,/But my advice to story-tellers is:/Weigh out no gross of probabilities,/Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of/Known instances of virtue, crime or love./To forge a picture that will pass for true,/Do conscientiously what liars do–/Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid/The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade:/Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps/That may shake down into a world perhaps;/People this world, by chance created so,/With random persons whom you do not know–/The teashop sort, or travellers in a train/Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again;/Let the erratic course they steer surprise/Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes;/Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)/Motive and end and moral in the air;/Nice contradiction between fact and fact/Will make the whole read human and exact.”

This is excellent compositional advice for prose, and I think of it every time I remember my maternal grandmother, who used the expression “telling a story” to mean “lying.”  She would look at me gravely during a particular moment of my stellar mendacity and say, “Now honey, are you sure you aren’t telling a story?”  It would always make me grin ruefully and would thus give the game away, but the dialectal expression itself was so apt and funny that I couldn’t help myself.  There were even one or two occasions when I was telling the truth and she almost didn’t believe me because of my typical reaction when she made her query.

So, now, what does this poem have to do with “being an individual”?  Just this:  I have recently discovered, thanks to a friendly and frequent commenter writing in, that there are at least three other Victoria Bennetts with writing aspirations, some in poetry and some in prose, and my feeling is that the mild adventure I’ve gone through in coping with this does indeed “read human and exact” even better than if I’d come up with a glorious lie about it.  I am probably the oldest of the Victoria Bennetts currently writing (I was 55 on my last birthday), arguably at least one of the best or at least most conventionally educated, and have had experience writing both poetry and prose.  Most of what I’ve written or at least what has been published is available on this site, though there is more to come if I live long enough.  Having said that, it’s now time for my big adventure:

Today, in trying to revise my “About the Author” page to contain my middle name (my full name is Victoria Leigh Bennett), I inadvertently eliminated the whole page instead of just the PDF of information, and so lost all of the kind and wonderful comments that were also stored on the page, along with the notices of awards people have from time to time nominated me for and at least one movie which a fellow blogger, JM at thelivingnotebook, was kind enough to send me for this weekend.  The movie is one I had copied down the link for, and I plan to watch it this weekend, the only time the movie is available, so at least that wasn’t totally lost, but I would have liked to have retained the other material as well.  But people do write in to the “About the Author” column from time to time, so I hope and trust that I will hear from people again there before all is said and done.

No, the real adventure was contained in finding out just how many other Victoria Bennetts there are around.  It is a particularly euphonious and stately name–don’t worry, I’m not complimenting myself–after all, I didn’t name myself–very Latinate, and though I respond to various nicknames, I have learned also to answer to my full name, which for some reason as one ages gets used more and more.  Now, I was used to the idea that there were Victoria Bennetts in home decorating, Victoria Bennetts who ran office companies, and various assorted other and sundry Victoria Bennetts who either bore the name from birth or had married into it as regards the last name.  But what I was really shocked to find was that there were several other WRITING Victoria Bennetts around.  On the advice of my commenter who informed me of one of these in particular, I found that just on one website there was a Victoria Alexander Bennett, a Victoria Louise Bennett, and yet another Victoria Bennett who, like me, had chosen not to use a middle name.

This was sobering indeed.  That there were so many of us (and doubtless more to come!) was very discouraging.  But then I thought:  if it doesn’t discourage me that there are so many people writing in general every year, and that I am in competition with all of them, then why should it bother me that there are several other Victoria Bennetts, who moreover don’t even all write the same sorts of things, to judge by my research?  And I also thought that after all, writers are very determined and tenacious when it comes to tracking down authors whom they want to read.  As long as no writers are copying the ideas of other writers explicitly and misusing them, there’s plenty of room for us all, surely.

And as to Robert Graves and his delightful, whimsical, mischievous, and diabolical little poem?  I’ve got news for him and his devil–though they may know how to write fiction so as to “make the whole read human and exact,” when it comes to reality and finding one’s own individual space, it’s like the man said:  you can’t make this stuff up!

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February 8, 2013 · 9:26 pm

New novel up on this site–why not have a look?

Yes, I’ve finally finished novel #6 in the 8 part series I’m working on.  And I know that those of you who can count will find only 5 novels published on this site in toto, and will probably think that I’ve slipped a gear, or at least that I myself can’t count.  Take it from me, though, this is novel #6.  I was working on novel #5 at the same time as I worked on this one, and #5 lost out in interest to this one, because this one had a lot more to say for itself early on, and so got ahead in life.  #5 novel will be out as soon as I can manage it, and will also be slotted into the lineup, in its proper place, I hope having gotten a lot more interesting to me (and therefore one hopes to you too!).

In the meantime, you probably want to know something as to what novel #6 is about, its title, so on and so forth.  Well, it’s called Abyss of an Attendant Lord, and it’s a short novelette.  It’s also an academic satire, and those of you who know how much time during my life I have spent in academia may wonder (as of course you have a right to) just how much is fictional and how much is based on fact.  Let me say that I have done no deliberately unkind portrait-painting, though I have teased now and then, here and there.    I have relied on comic types for “the unkindest cut of all” sorts of remarks.  The action is such as could conceivably happen in any large university prone to committees and academic groups foregathering, though of course many an English major will say, “Just when and where did any English department manage to get so much clout for itself in these science-and-technology ridden days?”  Let me answer to that caveat that this part is a sort of pipedream, though of course I am far from wishing to cast aspersions on the science and technology folks as some of my characters do; in fact, “Big Bang Theory” is one of my favorite shows on television, though like Penny, I rarely understand much of the technological vocabulary.  What small amount of technological verbiage is in the novel is from the same pool of university dialect and jest as the writers of “Big Bang Theory” have borrowed from, too.  My basic reaction to any kind of debate is a sort of “Now, why can’t we all just get along?” sort of attitude, so peaceable am I in person.  But never mind that!  Let’s have a little fun with our differences.  I do hope that all my readers will be able to have a fun time with the book, as I had a great deal of fun in writing it.  And with respect to all those who may feel that they are singled out for attention, I can only answer, as did the main character in “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” on television a good thirty or forty years ago.  She asked for anyone in her audience who felt they had had fun poked at them to stand up, and lo and behold! a major portion of her audience stood up!  These are faults and foibles of all of us from time to time, and I include myself in that number, so I hope you will enjoy laughing at all of us.  And please, let me know how you felt!  From time to time, someone reads a novel or some of my poems on the site, but mostly people don’t seem to comment.  Comments of a polite variety, whether positive or not, are always welcome.  So, let me know what you think!

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January 27, 2013 · 6:26 pm

A short post on standing at the crossroads–for me, “despair and utter hopelessness”….

“Now is the winter of our discontent,” begins Shakespeare’s play Richard the Third, and indeed no better season could have been chosen to represent discontent and melancholy in general than winter, at least for those of us who live in the temperate zone.  When it’s cold and gloomy, the weather dominates our mood even if we are determined to remain cheerful, and when it’s warm and balmy, we may equally well feel sad and doomed because we know it is the result of disastrous global warming.  So it’s the perfect season in which to review a certain remark made by that genius of discontent, Woody Allen.

Allen once said, “More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads.  One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.  Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”  Of course, the humor comes  from the fact that this is a parody of morally uplifting sentiments which would oppose negative choices to more positive ones, which choices require that one imagine oneself at a crossroads without helpful markers to point the correct direction, but simply a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, requiring a guess.  And as well, in this case, the choices are both negative, to make the imagined situation even more extreme.

Taking Allen’s redaction of such old saws seriously for the moment, however, “total extinction” is the end of life, finito! all things over and done with, whereas despair and utter hopelessness, though perhaps the emotional equivalent, are not quite as bad.  Or is it the other way around?  Would it, Allen perforce asks us to imagine, be better to pass entirely out of existence rather than to live in despair and utter hopelessness?  A fine point, and one only someone who is at least pretending to a very somber world view would come up with.

The trick to this whole problematic choice is of course to choose despair and utter hopelessness, because it is as impossible to maintain these constantly as it is to maintain constantly the opposite, total cheerfulness.  Woody Allen’s maxim is the proof in itself that there is some residuum of this choice, and it is humor, even if a particularly wry and wan gallows humor.

After all, sooner or later, we will all face extinction to some degree anyway.  I say “to some degree” to allow for human philosophical quibbles about the afterlife, whether by that one means heaven or the after-the-fact gratification of persistent personal fame.  The poet William Butler Yeats even indicated that he believed that each person had the afterlife he or she had believed in before death:  if heaven, then a choir of angels for company, if nothing, then nothing.  So in this situation, why go the “extinction route” any sooner than necessary?  We’ll see that scenery soon enough.  No, for me it’s the route of “depair and utter hopelessness,” because I know that such conditions don’t persist constantly, and I will surely have my good days as well, even if I sound like Woody Allen in a “down” mood (and that is quite funny enough to be going on with!).

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January 25, 2013 · 6:53 pm

A rattling good tale in the old-fashioned manner and the modern moment–Joseph Conrad’s “The Warrior’s Soul”

There are fashions in modes of fiction, and sometimes even in the same author’s work, more than one fashion (or era style) can be observed.  Many stories outlive their own time, and continue to have an influence on new generations of readers.  This is especially true of some of the works of Joseph Conrad, whose novella The Heart of Darkness continues to be read, interpreted, and re-used for its modern-day applications and significances (as one might note by recalling that the movie “Apocalypse Now” was based loosely upon it).  Even his novels Lord Jim and The Secret Agent, though more dated than The Heart of Darkness, are still quite popular in classrooms and library circulation systems alike.  Yet, there is something more to this selection of fashions than just a come-again go-again style or styles to be considered; there is also the role played by the various elements of the story in relation to each other which helps establish and make popular the style.

Recently, I rescued from a free book bin a book of four short stories by Joseph Conrad called Tales of Hearsay, and each of the four stories is constructed as the telling of a tale, with three of them using the fictional device of a frame story in which the external narrator relates a story from the past.  In this sense, the story is not unlike The Heart of Darkness, which also uses a frame story.  Yet, the story I’m concerned with today is of an older time both in its setting and in most of its tone, and is a quite simple story for most of its length, with none of the complexity of Conrad’s famous novella.  It is the first story in this book, “The Warrior’s Soul,” and it has all the earmarks of a very old story style indeed, with a passionate young lover, a mysterious beautiful woman, a slightly older gallant soldier, a war, an intrigue, a significant promise, a deathly request–where shall I begin, and where else could it end than in a story of this kind?

The basic story is this:  Just before the time in history when Napoleon marched on Russia, a young Russian soldier attached to a diplomatic corps is in France, in Paris.  He is first inspired by and then falls madly in love with a beautiful society hostess whose drawing room he frequents, and who in a kindly, slightly more mature woman’s fashion, tolerates his adoration and is kind to him.  While there one evening, the young man is witness to some sort of political intrigue between her and a slightly older male French officer, and the upshot of this situation is that the two save him and his diplomatic corps from internment indefinitely in France during the coming war by warning him in time for him to flee.  He is able to pass the warning along to his superiors, and all escape safely back to Russia, after he has vowed to the officer that if ever he can help him even unto his life, he will.  Time elapses, and we are now at the scene of France’s defeat in Russia and Napoleon’s death-filled and starving retreat from Waterloo.  As an old Russian campaigner (the external narrator of the story) sits by the fire one evening in the freezing winter weather, the young soldier comes into the firelight leading a sore-encrusted, raggedy, starving French officer dressed in full regalia except for his nearly frozen feet, which are wrapped in sheepskins.  As it turns out, this officer is the once gallantly attired and regal-mannered older officer of the mysterious woman’s drawing room, who had been so kind to the young Russian soldier when he was staying in Paris, and who had allowed him to escape.  After making himself known to the young soldier, the French officer begs him to shoot him and put him out of his misery, and after a while of debating with himself, the young soldier does so, to be sternly rebuked by his fellow soldiers for shooting a prisoner, all of whom had before reproached him for being too soft and loverlike in his mannerisms, all except the old campaigner, who tells the tale to the end.  For, though the young soldier is able to retire later without overt disgrace, he must retreat to his country province “where a vague story of some dark deed clung to him for years.”

The simplicity with which the mutual sacrifice of the gallant French officer and the high-minded Russian soldier is enacted is part of the old-fashioned quality of the tale.  We are told at the end as a form of summation, “Yes.  He had [shot him].  And what was it?  One warrior’s soul paying its debt a hundred-fold to another warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death–the loss of all faith and courage.”  Even the rather trite and well-worn phrase “a fate worse than death” (though it may perhaps have received one of its first usages in Conrad’s tale) slips past the critical reader’s censor rather more easily if one is content to forego modern complexities of thought.  Yet, even in Conrad’s simple tale, at the end we read of the young soldier “He was stooping over the dead in a tenderly contemplative attitude.  And his young, ingenuous face with lowered eyelids, expressed no grief, no sternness, no horror–but was set in the repose of a profound, as if endless and endlessly silent meditation.”  That is true Conradian prose of the complex variety, but it occurs only at the very end of the story, so we may read past it in our first reading, and notice mainly the ease of expression in the portrait of the scene.

The picture of the woman involved too is part of the nimbus cast round the act of glory in battle which is the unspoken referent of both the warriors’ activities, in fact is of the essence of the glory itself.  As the old Russian campaigner relates, “She was of course not a woman in her first youth.  A widow may be….She had a salon, something very distinguished; a social centre in which she queened it with great splendour….Upon my word I don’t know whether her hair was dark or fair, her eyes brown or blue; what was her stature, her features, or her complexion.  His love soared above mere physical impressions.  He never described her to me in set terms; but he was ready to swear that in her presence everybody’s thoughts and feelings were bound to circle round her.  She was that sort of woman….She was the very joy and shudder of felicity and she brought only sadness and torment to the hearts of men.”  It is in fact against  the background of the salon that we are supposed to imagine, superimposed, the image of war to come, and then later, in the scene in the Russian snowy waste, the image of the woman and the salon superimposed over the scene by the fireside, as in the hallucinatory double image sometimes used in film-making.  For, it is the woman and the salon that both men are glancingly referring to in their moment of mutual “heroism” (or what Conrad has used to represent the replacement of a more standard act of heroism as it is usually portrayed, meaning ferocity in battle).  Their heroism lies in the determination of one not to be less than the man he has been because of being in a situation of extreme suffering that might cause him to perform less than heroic acts, and in the determination of the other to act up to the top of his bent and be worthy of the life (and the death-shot) that the other has entrusted to him.  They are brothers and equals in this sense, though one is years older and the other relatively untried.

It is only the hallmark of Conrad which in fact saves this tale from being a typical sentimental (and therefore pernicious) tale of heroism in warfare, for sentimentality about war is as loathsome to the genuine soldier as it is to the conscientious objector; and that is why I would like to return to that final section of the tale, which portrays the old campaigner and the young soldier over the French officer’s corpse.  For, they do not accede to his request immediately.  At first, the young soldier cannot bring himself to kill the French officer, who is then seized up with an “agony of cramp” as his limbs begin to defrost by the fire.  The young soldier says, “It is he, the man himself….Brilliant, accomplished, envied by men, loved by that woman–this horror–this miserable thing that cannot die.  Look at his eyes.  It’s terrible.”  The old man realizes what the young man means, because “We could do nothing for him.  This avenging winter of fate held both the fugitives and the pursuers in its iron grip.  Compassion was but a vain word before that unrelenting destiny.”  The French officer continues to beg, then calls the boy in anger a “milksop” to try to drive him to do the deed.  There is another pause.  At this point, the old man turns his back and then hears the young man’s gunshot.  He says, “I give you my word [I guessed it because] the report of Tomassov’s [the soldier’s] pistol was the most insignificant thing imaginable.  It was a mere feeble pop.  Of the orderlies holding our horses I don’t think one turned his head round.”  The gunshot is thus made into a small thing, which has an inverse great effect upon the future of the young soldier Tomassov.  Another key Conradian tactic comes into play, though, and that is one I did not mention when I previously quoted the passage about one warrior’s soul “paying its debt a hundred-fold to another’s warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death–the loss of all faith and courage.”  And that is that immediately following this sentence, Conrad continues, “You may look on it in that way.  I don’t know.  And perhaps poor Tomassov did not know himself.”  And then he goes on to paint the picture of the young soldier, his hat off in a gesture of respect, bent over the corpse.  There’s all the makings of a great melodramatic death scene, yet by giving the reader a choice, by saying “You may look on it in that way.  I don’t know,” Conrad has robbed the matter of its melodrama and produced not only a rattling good tale in the old-fashioned manner, but a triumph of modern tone at the very last minute.  It is at this moment that one suddenly remember the other Joseph Conrad, the author of The Heart of Darkness, and all the complexity which he was able to bestow on the topics of colonization and decadence in Africa.  For this story too is from the same pen, and in small measure at least bears the hallmark of that great work of Conradian modernism.  And is saved thereby.

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January 23, 2013 · 6:45 pm

Several approaches to writing a love scene–emotionally intense narrative, dialogue, sexually intense narrative, and a different possibility….

One of the most difficult kinds of scenes to write well in a novel or short story is the love scene.  Perhaps this is because of the great similarities most people experience in their own love lives which writers draw the models of scene and incident from.  The reader may in this instance say, “Yes, this is verisimilitudinal, but so what?  It doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know about love.”  In other cases, the reverse may be true:  the reader may say, to the author’s best efforts, “Yes, but I don’t know anyone this has ever happened to, and I don’t believe in it, and that’s that!”  We all judge some kinds of endeavors on our pulses to a certain extent, and this is especially true of the literary love scene.  We expect to be titillated, involved, enlightened, and validated, all at once, and while scenes which can do all of these things at once happen along only too infrequently, two or three out of the four qualities we look for are often what we settle for, or even one, if it’s strongly enough expressed.  The truly gifted writer tries for emotionally intense and/or sexually intense narrative, inspired dialogue, and sometimes finds a way to throw us a curve ball or two when it comes to our expectations about being validated in particular, especially as demanding readers; I’ll explain what I mean.

First as to emotionally intense narrative:  as James Thurber said, “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.”  There is a double entendre here in the sense that not only does Thurber refer to the drama of interpersonal relationships being expressed in fiction, or face it, sometimes even the melodrama, but also being Thurber (whose work once was accompanied by a cartoon with his wife morphing into his house, ready to swallow him up) with an emphasis on the word “through,” as in “finito!” or “over and done with.”  The implication is one of much sturm und drang for the reader to make his or her way through, and the enjoyment thereof depends to some extent on how much the ordinary reader enjoys seeing things worked out to their logical conclusion through many an ordeal.  Will the lovers end up together or apart? is the question, but as in many another case, the journey is the essence of the experience, the conclusion just not as important.   The reader may even breathe a sigh of relief after a sustained experience with this sort of narrative, or feel like giving himself or herself a pat on the back for sticking with it.  A really good writer of course ameliorates these feelings with the quality of his or her writing, but there’s no denying that the more intensity the experience has, the more demands it makes of the reader’s skills and tolerance.  Often with a fiction of this kind, bloggers following a readalong will write in with quibbles with the way the fiction ended up, lovers together or lovers apart, with less emphasis on the way they got there (which is really what often writers in this mode want to emphasize) than on how it ended up plot-wise.  The feeling seems to be “I put up with all that hooey, the least the writer could do is throw me a bone of a happy/melancholy ending!”

Another path a writer may take when writing a love scene is to focus heavily on the dialogue and let the winds blow where they may, assuming that the reader responsive to punctuation and conversational tags will get the gist of the tennis-match-like verbal drama just fine.  As Elizabeth Ashley said, “In a great romance, each person basically plays a part that the other really likes.”  The reader watches two characters doubly, not only as each is to and of himself or herself but as they are in combination, to each other when they are playing the roles of lovers.  In this case, it’s not the fictional participants who have to like the parts they are playing in relation to each other, it’s the reader, whether the reader hopes for weal or woe for them.  The reader must assent that yes, that character can actually be imagined stepping forth from his or her own interior cave of subjectivity to make that remark to the love interest in the given situation, and that the love interest would respond as cited.  Again here, it’s a question of verisimilitude, but possibly people in fiction say weirder things than they do in real life or than they are content to hold themselves accountable for, because on the basis of no statistics whatsoever but only on that of a certain experience of fiction, I’ve noticed that characters’ dialogue is often used to “up the ante”dramatically whether or not the characters actually ever do anything astounding or not.

There is again the sexually intense narrative, and it is this sort of narrative which hints that it lurks hidden behind the other two forms above, and for which we often read though we are most often disappointed of its appearance.  How many times have you been reading about two characters engaging in displacement activity described in an overwrought narrative, or jawing away at each other passionately about some topic which both have really invested with deeper significance than seems called for, however sincere they might feel they are being, however sincere for the moment you might even feel they are being–how many times have you wished they would just grab each other and exchange passionate embraces, and get it over with?  As Proverbs 7:17-18 says, “I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.  Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning.”  This sort of narrative, though rewarding, raises the ante in the sense that once the characters and the readers have been sated (and unless you like reading pornography, you will get sated fairly quickly with two or more characters who are always successful at their “grappling” the others to themselves), some misfortune has to befall them, to part them permanently or temporarily so that the writer can feel that he or she is carrying on the business of actually writing literature and not writing trash.

In most love scenes, there is probably a combination of the three kinds of writing listed above, or at least two of the three.  It strikes me, though, upon reading a thought sequence by a character in Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not… (the first volume in his tetralogy Parade’s End) that there is from this combination an emerging fourth kind of love scene, a love scene which encompasses not only the submerged or hidden sexual scene and the two others, the dominant emotionally intense narrative and passionate dialogue, but a kind of love scene which engulfs the whole being of the novel (perhaps now I am speaking thematically, however).  With indirection, we are given the character Valentine Wannop’s thoughts about her married (and physically Platonic) love Christopher Tietjens:  “….[I]n these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her.  It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it.  Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself.  The moon so draws the tides….The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her mind as her great love scene.  That had been two years ago; he had been going into the army.  Now he was going out again.  From that she knew what a love scene was.  It passed without any mention of the word ‘love’; it passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin.  Yet with every word they had said to each other they had confessed their love; in that way, when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of your lover beating upon your heart.”  This reflection upon an earlier scene is yet another kind of love scene, an emergent fourth, for the original scene she is reflecting upon contains a sort of emotionally intense narrative so ratcheted up as to incorporate sex as a feeling in the air, so strong it is, and the dialogue is its manner of conveyance (I know you think I’m cheating by not selecting a scene which includes actual sex, but Ford doesn’t write much of that in my experience of him–The Good Soldier and now this tetralogy–but prefers to give reflections of reflections and reflections upon reflections of what has happened behind closed doors).  This would be an example of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility” except that in this scene itself, Valentine is not tranquil, but is disturbed by her recollections, made to feel other feelings than those that would be most comfortable.  And this is a kind of love scene experienced by one person alone when recollecting the emotion of a scene in which both emotional and sexual intensity are present behind a totally socially unexceptional ordinary dialogue, an unexciting “English” sort of social dialogue, using the word “English” now as the writers of England have often in modernist literature used it, to mean socially unadventurous, though for true real-life adventurous conversation on an intellectual level, the English are often hard to beat.

I have peeked ahead in the tetralogy (this is a spoiler alert, so be warned, those of you who plan to read it); in my exasperation with the fact that Valentine and Christopher are still Platonic lovers by the end of the first volume, I find to my surprise that they are still together at the end of the book, though that’s all I know.  His wife Sylvia had cheated on him from the beginning even in the first volume, so with an ordinary reader’s sense of justice, I was hoping that he would ditch the bad bride and take up with the constant girlfriend.  Still reading in the interim, I’m not sure if there are other love scenes of a more traditional nature, but this sort of odd love scene, what I have called the “emergent fourth” in which a person alone recollects so intensely a past love scene that he or she encapsulates the whole thematic content of the novel–which is also about war–in its opposite (for love and war form a sort of opposition), this is the source of the fascination I feel with the four novels now, and which will, I feel, keep me reading until the end.  And for four connected novels, that’s filling a tall order.  I remind myself of something said in The Little Prince:  “The essence of things is in the unseen world,” or words to that effect.  Certainly, the unseen world has a real force and existence in Ford’s tetralogy.

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January 17, 2013 · 5:53 pm

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” –Anais Nin

There are many different kinds of friendships one makes in life, not the least of which is the kind made with the authors of our favorite books, though we may never meet them or exchange a word with them.  As Wentworth Dillon, the Earl of Roscommon said, “Choose an author as you choose a friend.”  One might equally well reverse the equation and say, “Choose a friend as you choose an author.”  Then, there’s the more remote, hail-fellow-well-met kind of human friendship and goodwill which Sam Walter Foss had in mind when he said “Let me live in my house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.”  And there’s a connection between these two ideas, if you’ll grant me the time to expound upon it.

Perhaps, however, the most significant idea which I want to put before you today is that from Anaïs Nin’s Diary, in which she says (as I quoted in the title of my post), “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”  Each friend we meet is thus an opportunity to extend ourselves further into the human equation (if I may use so dry and mathematical a figure for so “moist” and fulsome a reality).  Whether we are meeting a friend of the mind through a book or a friend of the heart in a café or private home, or whether our friend is the result of some combination of an intellectual and emotional friendship, we are witnessing and participating in the birth of a new world, and this new world causes us to grow and develop human characteristics that were perhaps formerly shut off from us, as we had never encountered the need or the use for them in ourselves or others.

In essence, we become a new person in relation to our new friend.  A new human quadrant or area, the area of the Venn diagram formed by the overlapping of the two circles (us and our friend) now exists in the world, and it is, one hopes, for the enriching of the overall human being, that being spoken of in the quote which above mentions being “a friend to man,” in the general category of humankind.  For, as the interior growth we experience causes us to be able to understand other people better, so it is that “tout comprendre, tout pardonner,” as the French say, or “to understand all is to forgive all.”  Though possibly forgiving “all” is a bit much to imagine, the sentence is generous and tolerant and conveys quite adequately the sense of latitude it’s meant to.  And it is through our understanding of our own dilemmas that we come to understand those of our fellows and vice versa.  That is, often in looking for the solution to a personal conundrum, we can find illumination in the situation of a friend and how he or she has handled something, just as surely as if we had received advice from them given from the heart.

Those of you, both friends and acquaintances, who have been following my column for some time and have been wondering just what this possibly preachy or in some other manner showy little disquisition on another aspect of friendship has to do with creative writing will now get your answer:  for it is one of the main ways we create characters, through the employment of our pictures of ourselves and others, that shows that we have a true connection with the human equation, as I previously called it, always assuming that we have created well and truly.  That is that we imagine:  we imagine beings, sometimes partially like ourselves, sometimes partially like our friends, to inhabit our worlds.  Even our villains must be drawn from this pool in order not to be just stock “flat” figures, but to have body and life.  We must be able to imagine their internal struggles too, just as we do those of the more positive characters.  So now, we have come full circle in our examination of this view of friendship, back to the point where I started, selecting books as we do friends:  for even our favorite authors supply us with models we can use for our characters, to be followed in a rough way, not slavishly, an idea I’m sure you will find a truism entirely, since so many famous writers have commented upon the influences on and sources of their works.  Make sure that you too select both your friends and your favorite writers by a revised sort of Golden Rule:  as you would want them to select you:  because they sincerely admire/respect/want to imitate well your being with their own.  My preachment is over, and for those of you who may be pondering what brought it on this time, it is the effect of reading about a serious quarrel between two fiction writers in a letter written by another (memoir) writer, and wondering how they all came to be friends in the first place.  And no, I won’t tell who it is, chances are you’ve not heard of them, and I’m feeling foolish now that I have!  But there may be a day when I have to create some rather silly villains, and I’m saving up a non-specific, very generalized, and non-libelous set of characters, and you can guess whom they’re based upon.

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January 15, 2013 · 5:26 pm

“There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today, my post takes off (at least, I hope  it will fly) from the topic of manners to a general discussion of the best ways of doing things.  Doing things, that is, so as to be not only understood but also loved and valued by those around us, and not only appreciated for our best qualities but also forgiven for our worst.  And it all starts with a little exemplum or fable told to my brother and myself by our mother when we were small.  Not that I am necessarily an example of the best way of doing things, though I often aspire in that direction, but that these things are usually best inculcated when people are young and just learning their first steps of behavior in social settings (and what are any of our settings but social settings, since we are social beings first and foremost, as we have been often told by social scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and the like?).  Here’s how the story goes:

There was once a very rich and fashionable hostess who loved to give extravagant dinner parties and afternoon teas alike.  Everyone who was anyone came to her parties, and had the time of their lives, even though the parties were somewhat formal and even occasionally a bit stuffy.  They discussed her behind her back with a great deal of indulgence for this formal, stuffy quality, loving it too because they loved her.

At a certain party, when a host of literary lights were in attendance, one guest in especial was watching our hostess and her arrangements, a society page writer who lived just on the edge of penury, but who was usually asked as a particular act of kindness toward the hostess’s cousin, who was a good friend of his.  In looking around the table, he noted who was there, what was served, and made mental notes of the sparkling conversation, planning his column carefully for the next day, and modestly determined to give the hostess as good a write-up as possible, in exchange for tolerating his humble presence at her party.

Everything went along just fine, until the very end of the main course, when the salad was served (European style, instead of before the meal, American style).  Aswim in a sea of positive emotions and not a little of wine, the writer looked down to discover that there was a huge fat worm in his salad!  What to do, what to do?  At the very next moment, while he was pondering his dilemma, he noticed that the hostess, with a carefully disguised expression of horror on her face, had noticed exactly the same thing, the worm in his salad.  Their glances crossed.  He hesitated only a second.  Heroically, he pronged a fork into exactly the bite of salad with the worm, placed it in his mouth, and chewed and swallowed.  He was rewarded the next minute by the hostess’s warm and glowing smile radiating down the table and bathing him in its effulgent glow.  It all seemed worth it, though the worm had tasted a little bittersweet.

He really had reason to think it was worth it, however, six months later, when the hostess passed away and left him as her only heir.  And he never told a soul what it was all about, though many people speculated that he had been an autumn romance of hers, or that she had left him money in exchange for his article about her dinner parties as a whole, which really wasn’t even a probable motive.

Now, one might feel that in the telling this story appealed too much to a child’s (nearly innate) “get-rich-quick-by-being-a-suck” tendency, except for the manner in which the story was told.  For my mother was quick to point out that it was only good manners not to tell, and that ordinarily no one could expect to be left potloads of money in exchange for merely obeying the dictates of good manners.  In vain I pointed out that the writer could merely have surreptitiously lifted the worm out onto the table or floor; yet I too was cognizant of his magnanimity in actually eating the worm and thus hiding it from all eyes.

And perhaps here’s the lesson (I always cozy up to a good moral):  when we find a fault, while pointing it out may be meritorious in the sense of keeping to exactitude, sometimes hiding a fault (in someone else) is far more honorable, and may have unexpected and not-to-be-calculated-upon benefits besides.  These benefits extend not only from others to us (in which case they appreciate us more because we hang fire and don’t criticize them for qualities or acts which perhaps they can’t help), but from us to us ourselves (in which case we learn to judge ourselves more generously as well, knowing that we held our fire).  As Shakespeare’s Portia from “The Merchant of Venice” has it, “The quality of mercy is not strained….”  And that’s my post for today.

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