Books Do Furnish A Room

Read, then, if you think you're hard enough

My eye recently caught George Steiner’s On Difficulty and other essays on the shelf recently, and I have had it out to remind myself of some of his ideas.  He is a wonderfully stimulating essayist and speaker but I have not picked up the Steiner at all readily, mainly because he is – in an irony he would both have appreciated and protested about – very “difficult”.

We often say that modern music, modern poetry, modern painting is “difficult”, and it’s not always easy to grasp what we mean.  Often, we may mean no more than that they make us think, rather than taking us on an automatic, semi-anaesthetised journey.  Nick Jenkins’ father famously objected to books which made him think, a precept from which his son, and his son’s creator, can have taken little comfort.  Sometimes, we mean that they touch on complex questions which have no clear answers, and are ambiguous or incomplete – or that we do not like facing certain morally or judicially ambiguous challenges.  Sometimes, we mean that we do not have the intellectual equipment to understand – that we are not clever enough, or more likely, that we do not speak the language well enough, or cannot understand all the author’s references – a common concern for the young reader, or for any modern reader, of books which demand a working knowledge of a certain (admittedly restricted) canon of western thought and literature, including most obviously the Bible, Shakespeare and the classical authors.

But some difficulty is temperamental: we find it difficult to accept that a poem or a painting operates abstractly, merely because we are used to them acting literally and descriptively.  We do not complain that music or architecture or textile design or a piece of ceramic is abstract, that there is no narrative or no representation of the world.  So why cannot a painting or a poem be like that too?

Steiner distinguishes several types of difficulty, some flowing from the world, some from the author, and some from the reader.  I was particularly interested in his suggestion that difficulty may arise because the writer is forging a new language, or forcing words to mean things they have not meant before.  I think this is frequent in modern authors, but if they are successful, it may become easier to later audiences.  Contrariwise, some concepts which are easy to one generation may be hard for another: can we really understand the chivalric code of love, for example, or the exaggerated sense of personal honour of the insult and the duel?

Eliot says somewhere that in the modern age, all poetry must be difficult.  This is clearly not true at one level -  easy poetry can still be written – but I think he meant that poetry ought to be tackling the hardest, most difficult questions, and that (as he thought) language and culture were being debased and near collapse: so the challenge is to capture ever more demanding ideas with language the writer finds increasingly inadequate.  He captured this, in his own writing, about his own writing, in East Coker:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

This is a long way from Steiner. But I do recommend the essays, especially On Difficulty itself, The Distribution of Discourse, and After the Book?  This last is particularly fascinating: written in 1972, it is worried not about the rise of digital media, as we would expect the same title to be now, but about a decline in the social and intellectual status of the book.  But he is always realistic:

... it is worth stressing that the book has been a significant phenomenon only in certain areas and cultures, and during a relatively short span of history.  Being bookmen, we tend to forget the extremely special locale and circumstances of our addiction.

Read Steiner: enjoy, be amazed, and wonder at his expertise and his insight.  But don’t expect it to be easy!

Your Inner Fish

I read Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish on the advice of a colleague who said it had, among other things, a wonderful description of why you hiccough - and it does!  But it is really much more than that, being a comprehensive, but very readable - account of the physical features and the genetic traits we owe to evolution.  And although he hangs his book on fish, his survey goes much wider than that.

The main idea of the book's title, though, is to follow the formation of the gill arches in fish, and through evolution, to see their effect in humans - the jaw and the ear, with all its delicate complexity.  But, for all evolution's ingenuity, it works with the tools it has - so we can trace genes back to fish and well before, and it is clear that our bodies are still shaped by the developmental origins of a fish's breathing mechanisms.  But this does not mean we are perfect - snoring and hiccoughs are two of the prices we pay for having fish faces, not our own!

This is an interesting read for a lot of reasons - an account of fossil hunting, interesting evolutionary history, and fascinating human biology.  Learn how we smell, how we balance - and why alcohol makes us forget that - and where our ears come from.  And learn some wonderful words - can you really believe (I assure you its true) that the muscle which moves the corner of our mouths down is called the depressor anguli oris, and that which furrows our brow is the corrugator supercilli!

Fadiman U

Anne Fadiman has written two lovely books of essays, Ex Libris (1998) and At Large And At Small (2007).  The first is basically about books, though books approached from slightly quirky angles; the second is more general – and, I think, slightly less successful.  But in the art of essay writing (which has been dying ever since it was invented, so much so that Fadiman wryly observes that the essay mourning the passing of the essay is an important and vigorous sub-genre!) she is clearly very accomplished, and extremely witty.

In Ex Libris, in Marrying Libraries for example, she deals with the trauma of merging her husband’s and her own libraries, a mere eleven years after they started living together.  Now that is something I can understand; certain books are old friends, and someone else’s copy is just not the same, and other people have such contrary views on classification.  They do merge their books, but it involves long and tortuous negotiations, concessions and reluctant agreements, and it actually begins to unravel in some respects soon afterwards.  And in another essay, Sir, You Must Never Do That To A Book, her brother is rebuked by a note left by the chambermaid in a hotel for leaving a book face down (a crime I acknowledge I very occasionally commit myself), and she uses this as a starting point for discussing how different people treat books.  Some treat their books as sacred objects and insist on cleanliness and purity, while others regard the physical book as nothing, using torn out pages for notes, some even tearing out parts of a book they had read while travelling in order to reduce weight.  I am a man of the middle ground myself, but passions run high.

In The Joy of Sesquipedelians she looks at the joys of precise but unloved and unused words – and finds no less than 22 that she didn’t know in a single book.  O, alright then, they are: monophysite, mephitic, calineries, diapason, grimoire, adapertile, retromingent, perllan, cupellation, adytum, sepoy, subadar, paludal, apozemical, camorra, ithyphallic, alcade, aspergill, agathodemon, kakodeman, goetic, opopanax.  One friend knew no less than nine of these, I managed 4 that I really knew, and another 3 that I’d have recognised in context.  And how I've managed all these years without retromingent - "urinating backwards", I really can't say!  This is only fun, but anyone following me in reading C P Snow will know his predilection for such words, hebephrenia being the most recent example I can recall - "the insanity of pubescence".  My personal favourites are heteroclite and myristicivorous - do have fun with those!

Overall, I’d recommend Ex Libris to any booklover, they’re a joy; the essays in At Large And At Small, however, are of more general interest (coffee, collecting, working at night) but sometimes lack the brilliant spark of the other essays.

The title of this post, incidentally, is the name her family gave to themselves when competing against the television in an American quiz show, the equivalent of the British University Challenge.  They almost always "won"!

Umbert o Eco : Sunday Salon

I have always loved the novels of Umberto Eco, starting with The Name of the Rose, and I have also enjoyed some of his critical writings. He is a writer of great intelligence, clarity and wit, though he can, on occasion, deal rather more fully with a subject than I think is entirely necessary!  So it was with great joy I found on my shelves the other day a tiny book by him called simply Misreadings, with – to make the point – his name set out on the cover in the form of this post’s title. 

I’ve had this, according to the inscription, since July 1997 and I have no memory of ever having opened it (though that may change as I read, I don’t know (it didn't)).  This is the great argument for owning a library, not just books; it allows discovery, re-discovery, review, reference, and serendipity.  This – rare among Eco’s work – is a slim volume, fewer than 200 pages and with at least sixteen separate essays, it is clearly full of intellectual chocolate truffles that I can try, one at a time, and then give way and gobble down by the boxful!

One of the chapters is a collection of publishers’ readers notes about classics we should all know and love.  I confess my erudition, less extensive than Eco’s, means I don’t get all the jokes – but some of them are little masterpieces, only a paragraph or a page long.  So Homer’s Odyssey is commended strongly as a “page turner, all right, unlike the author’s first book, which was too static, all concerned with unity of place and tediously overplotted”!  Kafka’s The Trial is a “Nice little book. A thriller with some Hitchcock touches” but needs strong editing to provide facts and get rid of the impression that the guy was writing under heavy censorship.  Readers also comment on the Bible, Don Quixote, A la recherche du temps perdu and others – all excellent value, though none of them are selected for publication!

The other chapters in the book are a whole range of inventive parodies and literary skits – the dying words of a disaffected angel, found on Mount Ararat; a live television broadcast of the landing of Columbus in America, complete with rival experts and technical glitches; a brilliant parody of Alain Robbe-Grillet called Esquisse d’un nouveau chat, which captures his style brilliantly, makes fun of it, and is a satisfying short story in itself.  Wonderful skill.

Finally, there are two slightly longer pieces, both from the point of view of great distances, in which literary critics and anthropologists interpret – and, more essentially, misinterpret, information from C20th Italy.  The first of these is a fine academic parody of misunderstanding, Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society, in which a Samoan expert considers the culture of the backward and remote peoples of Western Europe.  He describes football matches, night-clubs, and the regular round of commuting and escaping for the weekend in a horribly convincing but utterly laughable analysis of sexual repression and atavistic desire.  The second is from far in the future, when an academic paper interprets Italian poetry from a group of fragments which have survived a holocaust in the 1980s – but unfortunately, the fragments are all from the most banal and tedious pop songs – which he does not realise, investing them with all the significance and grandeur of high art, full of emotional and aesthetic sensibility.  It’s not as immediately accessible to me as if it were based on, say, London, but the Milanese locale does not  prevent Eco pulling off a wonderful pastiche of the clichés and  unevidenced assumptions of the narrow academic turned television populariser.

This is a wonderful book, amusing and erudite, and yet extremely easy to read.

Criticism at its best and worst

I recently put up, as my Friday poem, Aunt Jennifer's Tigers, by Adrienne Rich.  I think it's an interesting poem, with subdued strength, and paints a clever picture of Aunt Jennifer's fear of life contrasted with the solidity and conventionality of her surroundings.  While I didn't wholly agree with Glo's comments that  it was old-fashioned and "squashily sentimental", or with Cornflower's equating of Aunt Jennifer to Lady Slane in All Passion Spent, I see the force of both comments and they illuminate the poem for me.  You might want to be reminded of the poem:

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

So, in the light of the current debate about blogs putting serious professional reviewers out of business, I was interested to come across a piece of professional criticism of this poem from the Department of English Literature and Language at Brock University.  You can read it all here, but here are some choice extracts:

It is clearly a 'feminist' poem which is critical of the male world for terrifying and oppressing 'Aunt Jennifer' -- causing her to create an alternate world of freedom, one which she could not inhabit other than imaginatively or aesthetically. The desolating effects of patriarchy are assumed and exposed, in three quatrains... Rich has herself created an ideological structure which silences or excludes much of human experience. Children, hunger, war, disease, the struggles of the spirit, racial and religious injustice and oppression, are dissolved into the tragedy -- which it is on one level -- of an apparently upper-middle-class woman who could express her desire for freedom only in her art.

The struggles basic to existence are mystified in this poem, as are the conditions of a genuine freedom. The first stanza gives an idealized, romanticized picture which shows that the Aunt was trapped in something more than gender oppression: she was protected from almost everything we know of the real world. Her tragedy may seem of diminished proportions for those people lining up at the food bank, for those who find that when they go to see an apartment for rent the landlord smiles apologetically into their coloured faces and says that, unfortunately, he has just rented it, for those dying of diseases, and the list can go on. The poem in its opening statement locates us in Aunt Jennifer's bourgeois, privileged world, and as we assent to that line we assent to the assumptions which keep us from challenging it. "Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen." In how many households in the world can 'screens' with tigers prancing across them be asumed to be normal? What would the function of this screen be, how would it advance the survival of the family or the society? Presumably it is not for privacy. Drafts?

The poem locates Aunt Jennifer as an oppressor as well as a victim and, as a victim, a victim of different powers than the poem obviously suggests... in the prison of that understanding of the world which says that it is all right for this person to spend her time knitting while people suffer the terrors of violence and poverty in her very city: she is imprisoned more in these than in the gender and domestic relations which these ideologies help create and support. ...the tigers which symbolize the freedom of spirit which she dreams of but never achieved except in her dreams as rendered in her art, are themselves figures of her location as an oppressor, because they locate her in relation to India, and hence to imperialism and to cultural and economic exploitation.

If this is what we're missing through reading blogs, I can't say I'm too worried!  There are plenty of splendid professional critics out there who illuminate and expound, rather than painfully scratch their own sores, but as far as this stuff is concerned, I'll read Cornflower any day!  By the way, his question about the screen is otiose: the screen is a firescreen, to fill the fireplace when it is not being used, and would be common in middle and working class houses until the advent of central heating: my own humble grandmother had one, and so did millions of others, often embroidered by themselves!

Contre Contre Venise: Sunday Salon

I mentioned in my Sunday Salon post a couple of weeks ago that I had been reading Regis Debray’s Against Venice.  Finally, I have finished it, and  I wanted to return to it, partly because I did find it very spirited and provocative, and partly to touch on two other books with strong Venetian connections which I've enjoyed - a play by Goldoni, and a photographic update of Ruskin's Stones of Venice.  I will also say just a few words about the biggest book I have bought this year - Sylvie Guillem's Invitation!

Debray's book was published in 1995, and was recommended to me as a counter to the over adulation of Venice that can sometimes greet the new visitor to La Serenissima.  He sets out his stall at once, in the very first sentence of this slight volume:  Until you have laid the ghost of Venice within you – repressed every posture, leaning, pretension, temptation or daydream capable of being descibed as “Venetian” – you will never be on level terms with the internal enemy...

I don’t know what that means, and I instinctively react against it:    What, exactly, is Debray’s point?  I think it is that so many people are in thrall, that they can no longer question anything in Venice, and that Venice is no longer real, but a theatre - beautiful, ancient, but not alive, purely a show.  So for example, he says that: Venice cuts the figure of a carcass, an empty shell: not physically depopulated but spiritually dried out, dead to all magic ...[it is] a mirage from which the sacred has fled.

For him, Naples is much more alive, vulgar and exciting, and beautiful too - but as an afterthought; beauty is not the city's reason for existence.  I do not feel much sympathy for this view - I think I can love two cities, and will try to do so!  I enjoyed Venice, and will go back; I savoured its beauty and its decay; and I found pleasure in the quiet and carefree streets and canals away from the tourists honeypots.  But I was not seduced, I am not in thrall, I owe no fealty to the Bride of the Sea; as befits Voss himself, I remain my own man, critical and slightly distant from the myth that is Venice.

Briefly, to some other books, at least one of which I will post on separately:

• Carlo Goldoni's La Locandiera (My Hostess), a comedy set in an inn outside Venice, and performed there in 1725.  A delightful, lighthearted satire on morals and mores, and one of his plays would be well worth reading for anybody visiting Venice - and I would also recommend Jeanette Winterson's The Passion.  I will post again on Goldoni soon.
• Sarah Quill's Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited, a book of fine modern architectural photographs of venice, with extracts from Ruskin's matchless prose alongside, and some of his brilliant drawings as well.  Evocative, beautiful, informative: does it get any better than this? (Or any worse, Debray would say!).

• Finally, Sylvie Guillem's massive Invitation.  This isn't a coffee table book, it's a coffee table!  Lots of great, beautiful photographs pf this exquisite dancer, many of them in performance or rehearsal - but many at home or on holiday.  It's exuberant, self-indulgent, and over the top , but a joy for any of her admirers.  She's an extraordinary dancer, and an extraordinary woman - not at all beautiful, she can radiate beauty and grace, as well as burning emotion and sexuality, through her dance and her photographs.  Is this what the French mean by the phrase jolie laide?

Eco of greatness

I have been browsing Umberto Eco's on literature (the lower case letters are deliberate, as this is how it appears on the cover).  This is a collection of incidental writings, some very short, some longer, on a whole variety of subjects.  The common theme, he says in his introduction,is that "they are concerned with the problem of literature". This is not a formulation I find sympathetic - I do not think there is such a thing - but I have so enjoyed Eco's novels, particularly The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, and some of his critical writings, including the auto-reflective Reflections on "The Name of the Rose", that I pushed on regardless.

The essays are so different, both in quality, weight and content, that I shall read them over a long period, just noting one or two here if I feel moved.  The first is On Some Functions of Literature, which is a title to fall short of.  And although my respect for Eco is unbounded, I feel several of these essays do fall short, that they are unanchored, that they might have been wonderful essays or lectures in a particular context, but seem weaker standing naked in a book.  For example, I found this first essay interesting, but it didn't begin to live up to the title: indeed, he admits as much, ending with "... one of the principal functions of literature lies in ... lessons about fate and death.  Perhaps there are others, but for the moment none springs to mind" !

On Some Functions of Literature is more a discussion about how widely we can interpret a text; Eco (like every other reader) is interested in two things: how wide an interpretation is permissible or valuable - and how much of the detail in or implicit in the text is useful or relevant.  I have a fairly narrow view on the first, and rather a wide one on the second, and I think (though it is not easy to be sure) that I take the opposite view to Eco in both cases!  He gives us some wonderful examples - summed up in this paragraph:

"Literary works encourage freedom of interpretation, because they offer us a discourse that has many layers of reading and place before us the ambiguities of language and of real life.  But in order to play this game, which allows every generation to read literary works in a different way, we must be moved by a profound respect for the intention of the text."

So you can read Shakespeare as anti-colonial, or anti-Fascist, or analytically psychological - but you cannot say that Hamlet marries Ophelia.  So you can worry about some detail which the author makes the crux of the story - like the position of the letter rack in Poe's Purloined Letter, but you can't build theses on things which the author clearly regards as irrelevant - like the date on which d'Artagnan joins the other three musketeers.  Personally, I have always been fascinated by the minutiae of novels and stories - so I read with interest Sutherland's essays, such as who betrays Elizabeth Bennet?  How do the Cratchits cook Scrooge's turkey? What sex is Lady Bertram's pug?  Why are there no public toilets in Casterbridge? But I fear that Eco would regard this as all rather irrelevant!  But we share a horror of novels being rewritten so that Anna Karenina does not commit suicide - it might be fun, but it's not beautiful, it's not true, and it's not the text.  He quotes Victor Hugo tellingly:

"Was it possible for Napoleon to win at Waterloo?  We reply no.  Why?  Because of Wellington?  Because of Blucher?  No.  Because of God."

Doing a Giambologna

I have been reading James Fenton's essays, The Strength of Poetry, this week.  He was Oxford Professor of Poetry 1994-99, and the essays are based on his lectures during that period. They are full of interest, and I wish I had read them earlier - they've been on my shelf for over three years! Apart from the two I shall concentrate on, there are essays on Larkin, Marianne Moore, Auden and Shakespeare, among others.

In the first essay, "A Lesson from Michaelangelo", he talks about a young artist, the young Giambologna, getting a brutal lesson from Michaelangelo, who completely destroyed and remodelled a wax model - and then told him to go and learn the basics, when the young man was convinced that he had achieved something wonderful.  But the point is not that the master gave the yougster a lesson - but that the 'lesson' came out of envy not compassion, and that Giambologna rejected it angrily, finding his mature, independent self in the process - eventually becoming sculptor to the Medici.  What has this to do with poetry - well, nothing directly except that I suspect Fenton just likes this and other stories from Vasari's Lives of the Artists.  He goes on, though, to give examples of the same thing in literature - the most striking being Wordsworth stopping Coleridge from publishing Kubla Khan ("throw it into the fire, and never speak of it again"!) -  a reluctance overcome by Byron's praise.  (I'm sure you know Kubla Khan, but just in case, it's sublime - it was not written in an opium trance - and it starts like this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

... and you can find it here.

Another fine essay in this book is "Wilfred Owen's Juvenilia", which opened my mind to something I had never considered -that the war poems, marvellous as they are, are not the real Owen.  Before the war, he wrote in a very Wardour Street style:

Nay, light me no fire tonight,

Page Eglantine;

I have no desire tonight

To drink or dine.

It's horrible, and there can't be many people who would identify these lines as by the author of Anthem for Doomed Youth.   In May 1918 - Owen was killed later that year, a week before the armistice - his literary plans included blank verse plays on old Welsh themes, finishing a poem called "Perseus" (from the draft of which the quotation above is taken), and something called "Idylls in Prose".  Of course, it might not have turned out like that, but it hardly bears thinking about!